The Tlog - a technology blog » Blogging software

More updates: Ubuntu, WordPress

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:17:45 +0000

Just updated this server to Ubuntu 8.04 (why do they always have these odd version numbers?). As always, it was incredibly difficult: I had to type this entire command:

do-release-upgrade

and even remember to press Enter afterwards! This Linux stuff is really too tough for us mere users…

Also, WordPress 2.5.1 on this blog and a couple others. Incidentally, if you’ve just upgraded to 2.5.1 and suddenly your RSS feed is empty, you were probably hit by this bug. That link includes info for fixing it, too (basically, you have to replace two files with newer development versions).

WordPress 2.2 upgrade

Pedro Timóteo — Thu, 17 May 2007 11:44:39 +0000

WordPress 2.2 is out, and all my blogs are already running it.

Since most of my blogs are using a customized version of K2, I also had to disable the new WP widgets so that the current version of K2 works. Hopefully, future versions of K2 won’t need this.

EDIT: more about the new features of WP 2.2.

More about tidying up HTML

Pedro Timóteo — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 17:01:52 +0000

If you’re curious about the last post…

I accept that making some HTML code validate in validator.w3.org shouldn’t be the be all, end all of the problem. A piece of code can validate and yet be… horrible. On the other hand, a piece of code may not validate because of a minor problem, and yet be better than 99% of what you see out there.

Still, that applies mainly to your code. What if you’re aggregating other people’s code? What if they’re using bad HTML, which their blogging systems (mostly Blogger or WordPress) automatically converts to a feed, which is then converted back to (simplified) HTML by a Planet? And what if you want all of that to validate?

Well, tidy works very well; it fixes the worst problems, mainly, badly nested code, and unclosed tags. But… well, if you’re being pedantic (like the W3 validator is), then there are still problems.

They’re mostly one of the following: 1) img tags without an “alt” attribute, and 2) proprietary attributes.

tidy, by default, doesn’t deal with those (since its point is for you to correct your code, and those problems should really be fixed in the code itself). But you can make it do so.

How? Well, here’s the command line I’m using for Planet Atheism:

/usr/local/bin/tidy -wrap 79 -m -i -utf8 --alt-text "" --drop-proprietary-attributes 1 -asxhtml filename

It should be obvious what each parameter does. The “ alt-text "" ” part adds some empty alt text to any img tag that hasn’t got one. The “--drop-proprietary-attributes 1” part removes those weird attributes inside other tags, which make the W3 validator choke. I don’t want them anyway, since a Planet site is supposed to display a basic version of a post — not a Flash-y, YouTube-d, animated one.

The result is: complete W3 validation, and readable code. From many other blogs, by many different authors. Automatically. What more could anyone want?

The Tlog has moved!

Pedro Timóteo — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 15:03:27 +0000

If you read this blog through the feed, you may not even notice it, but it has just moved to another server, and it got a new domain to boot.

Instead of tlog.dehumanizer.com, this blog is now at www.thetlog.net. Like in my previous move, old URLs are redirected to the correct new ones, except for the front page, which shows a message telling people about the move for 5 seconds, and then redirects.

If it’s not too much work, I’d ask you dear readers to please change your bookmarks, and any links you may have on your own blogs or sites.

By the way, this blog is now also using page titles without the blog name. The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s a good idea.

And now for the OpenBSD 4.0 upgrade, in a few days. Sigh. A blogger/sysadmin’s job is never done…

Optimizing page titles in blogs

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:14:26 +0000

If you’ve read the Blogging Tips series, you’re surely aware of a part of it called The Importance of Titles. Titles (meaning what ends up between the tags) are one of the most important, and most ignored, parts of SEO, these days. Not only do search engines use them to rank pages, but they’re also what actually appears in search results, and a bad title is much less likely to be clicked on… even if the content is exactly what the user wants.

In case of blogs, the blogging software, typically, inserts the blog’s name and post title automatically, which is a start. But can it be improved? That’s what I wanted (and still want) to investigate.

By default, WordPress uses the common Blog title – Post title format. Which, as any “serious” blogger should know, is a pretty bad idea. People are interested in the post, not in the blog, at least at first. The blog’s name will be the same for every single one of your posts, and if it appears first, people will probably ignore that entry in the search results.

Again, nobody searches for blogs. They search for posts.

Which, of course, suggests that reversing the order is a good idea… and it certainly is. Themes like K2 do it automatically (though that one inserts an “at” between post title and blog name, which I don’t like — though it’s easy to change, of course), and there are also plugins like Optimal Title to do it.

But is this the best we can do? It’s what I’ve been doing until now, but… can we go a little further? What about removing the blog’s name from individual posts (not from the front page, of course)?

Not only should this be better in terms of SEO, but it should make search results more appealing. After all, hopefully, the post’s title should be — and be just — what the user is looking for.

I’m trying it now on Way of the Mind, where I seem to be doing most of my experiments these days. Of course, it will take a few weeks for Google and others to re-index every page and show them with the reduced title, but hopefully the results will be good.

I’m pretty optimistic about this one, so it will probably happen to my other blogs soon.

WordPress 2.0.5 is out

Pedro Timóteo — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:29:46 +0000

As usual, get it from the usual place, and follow the instructions if you’re upgrading from a previous version. I’ve just upgraded 11 blogs in about a minute (most of which was spent backing up the databases and the files, in case Something Bad ™ happened).

List of changes here.

Apparently, there’s a new problem when running on a server with FastCGI installed: it may give a 500 error in some cases. If that’s your situation, there’s a workaround.