Archive for October, 2009

Template Modification

Oct 27

Posted by eavab in PHP Template Design Class | No Comments

So I’ve started modifying a template for my WordPress site.

Pretty straight forward, WordPress breaks down where elements have their html generated into individual files. For example, the header of your pages is generated in header.php.

Styling is controlled in a CSS file called style.css and depending on your base theme, the id tags are pretty easy to figure out. This is even easier if you use FireBug as that will tell you what each element’s id tags and hierarchy are exactly.

So far I have just had time to change some font styles for the header and body and start work on a banner image. The banner image will be inserted this week.

Theme I am using is the ArcLite Theme by http://digitalnature.ro/

You can see the base theme at my site here http://eavab.com

Project Site – SEO

Oct 19

Posted by eavab in PHP Template Design Class | 2 Comments

So for my site here are the following actions being taken to make it SEO friendly:

Search friendly links are in place for the content
Page Titles are Search friendly so far and will be designed to be for future pages
Site is registered with my Google Webmaster Tools Account

In the future, when I am writing/modifying my themes, I will be making a pass to ensure that all my headers and tag code are appropriate since I will be accessing a lot of that code anyways for styling.

Time to play the content catchup game on my site tonight. Once content has been uploaded, I will generate and post an XML sitemap for the site. The one issue with this is that it will become outdated every so often due to dynamic content in the blog portion. But, I might be able to find a WordPress plugin to keep it up to date.

SEO Links

Oct 19

Posted by eavab in Technology Articles | No Comments

So a couple weeks ago, I got hit up to take a free introduction Webinar that this dude was doing. It gave an overview of a course he is doing and he gave out 10 tools and did a quick overview on how to use them.

So I figured I would share these tools with you guys. A few of them you probably have used in the past:

1. Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
2. Google Website Content Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
3. Google Wonder Wheel (http://www.google.com/)
1. To get to this one, do a search and then hit “show options” on the toolbar.
2. Third Group, Second Option
4. KeywordSpy (http://www.keywordspy.com/)
5. SEOBook’s FireFox Rank Checker (http://tools.seobook.com/)
6. XML Sitemap Generator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/)
7. Google Web Master Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools)
8. Keyword Density (http://www.keyworddensity.com/)
9. Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
10. Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)

Also just a heads-up. I was doing some SEO stuff for the company I work for and noticed Bing has released the first of their webmaster tools. Worth checking out, nothing to fancy but they have the basics for the Bing search engine.

4 (when it works for your site), 1, 2, 7, 10 and 6 I use often.

ActionScript 3 and the new AS3 Chromeless YouTube Player

Oct 18

Posted by eavab in Technology Articles | 1 Comment

So first off, I am working with this brand new technology (10/14/09) and it “works” quite well. A few issues I have run into so far is my calls to pull a video by id were getting a security sandbox error. I did some more research and found information regarding external sites that you use in flash and approving them for loading external content.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/system/Security.html#allowDomain%28%29

This answers a LOT of questions about why some of my content was not loading properly from external sources.

Once I figure out more about how the player is stored in my swf file and what I can control about it I will post again. At that point my Flash class’s Mid Term project will be looking pretty snazzy.

Information regarding the new AS3 Chromeless YouTube Player:

http://apiblog.youtube.com/2009/10/actionscript-3-youtube-chromeless.html
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/flash_api_reference.html#setPlaybackQuality

Tags: Flash