Category: Blogs

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How to Show an Excerpt in WordPress Versus the Full Blog Post

Some blogs like to just show an excerpt of the post and then a link at the bottom of the blog post to view or read more. So how are they doing that? It’s easy!

First write your full blog post in the WordPress control panel or migrate from Word if that is what you do. At the place where you want you post to break, just put your cursor there. Then click the HTML tab at the top right of your blog post panel, just above the font control and hyperlink insertion menu.

Then where your cursor is located just paste in this code:

<!–more–>

When you go back to the Visual tab, to view your post, you will now see a dotted line where your post is to break. When you publish your blog WordPress will automatically add a link to read more and then take the reader to the exact section of the post on the new page.

Cool huh? A neat trick to use the excerpt function.

Okay now why don’t I use this on my own blog? Well I have found that typically the reader will not click in to read more on most blogs, they will simply read the next post and not click in unless they are REALLY interested in what you have written. So I do not use this feature on my own blog as I want to encourage readers to review my full content with minimal action on their part.

Why would a blog want to use this feature? Some blogs have so much content on the home page that to “look” less intimidating they will use the excerpt format. Sometimes to have a less cluttered look, and sometimes so they can get more content on the home page.

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WordPress 2.7 Code Named Coltrane

Loving WordPress 2.7!
Loving WordPress 2.7!

I’ve heard from a few interested parties asking for more information about WordPress 2.7 and is it worth the upgrade. I have to say wholeheartedly YES it is worth the upgrade!

WordPress is free, but the time and effort to install it is not. The first time I installed it, it took under 2 hours. So, why is it worth the under around two hour time investment?

  1. Once you upgrade to WordPress 2.7 you will never need to do a manual upgrade again. WordPress will upgrade the application itself. That alone is well worth the trouble.
  2. With WordPress 2.7 your plugins can be upgraded automatically with one click. Wow, that’s another good reason to make the installation worth the trouble.
  3. The site navigation, has moved from the top to the left and offers drop down options. No more poking around trying to find where to update settings for a plugin.
  4. Improved image upload. For me this is one of the biggest new features. My Flash based upload function stopped working when I upgraded to Flash Player 10. Installing WordPress 2.7 fixed this plus gave me some nice new options for images such as adding a caption and very simply image upload interface. I know that my blog writers will now easily be able to add a photo to a blog when they want from the 2.7 platform unlike some earlier versions of WordPress that really need someone who understands source code to go in to to view source and remove broken code that keeps an image from showing up.

All in all, I think that WordPress 2.7 is an excellent upgrade even to version 2.6.1 or 2.6.2. Once you’ve installed it, I think that you’ll agree it is well worth the several hours it takes to install it.

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Upgrading to WordPress 2.7

Screen shot of WordPress 2.7
Screen shot of WordPress 2.7

I just upgraded my blog from WordPress 2.6.1 to WordPress 2.7. Whew it was hairy and took 1.6 hours to do, but I have successfully upgraded my blog platform.

You the user can most likely see no difference, but in the control panel, the differences are huge. For me the reason that I wanted to upgrade was (1) so many clients are asking me should they upgrade? and (2) Flash Player 10 has broken my ability to easily add photos to my blog and I wanted to see if upgrading would help to get me back in business.

Well I am here to say that yes for images I am back in business, thank goodness. Darn that Flash Player 10 for making it so hard for me with WordPress.

So do I like the interface of WordPress 2.7? Well, it is very different than 2.6 that is for sure.

So far for me all my plugins have worked and my settings have carried over. Do I recommend doing the upgrade? If you have the time and money, I would recommend it. One of the improvements I see is the ability to block specific users from commenting, I have one guy who spams me all the time, and the ability to from now on auto upgrade WordPress as new versions come out. I liked WordPress version 2.6 but I think that I will like version 2.7 better.

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Visibility for New Blogs and Websites – When Do You Appear?

One of the biggest issues for new websites and blogs is “when do I appear online for searches using my domain name, my business name, or my keyword phrases”.

My answers are based on years of experience of watching, helping, advising, and doing. Here are a few answers to a few of these questions that new website and blog owners really want answered.

First, there is simply no way to know for sure when your new website or blog will appear in the all important Google search index. One thing that I do know for sure is that until you have several popular websites or blogs pointing to your site, you will not appear in the search index. This is where doing articles for syndication, posting comments on forums and blogs that do not install “nofollow” in their tags, and doing a press release will help Google to discover your new website or new blog. No one can force Google to do anything and that is particularly important when it comes to being included in their search index.

Additionally I have seen some brand new websites fall into the Google Sandbox and not appear for up to six months in the search index for hot property terms – real estate sometimes falls into this category. The Sandbox topic is a controversial one, but I have actually tracked it and seen www.Homes-Database.com be impacted by it when we initially launched the website. Another website we are watching carefully is a new Quick Launch prefab web template site that we launched last week for www.MoussaMoaadel.com for Moussa Moaadel Realtors. I am not sure that Google will delay indexing this site as they did with www.Homes-Database.com, but I do know that it has not yet appeared in the Google index even under its domain name but has appeared rapidly in the MSN Live index.

Another site that we are watching carefully is www.AmericanBoom.com. We are blogging for the site at www.AmericanBoom.con/blog and it is troubling as to why the main website and even blog still do not appear in the Google Search index. As we identify additional answers for that particular blog and website, we’ll keep you posted, but for now know that visibility for a new site is crucial.

So what can you personally do to help the search engines find you? Well, there are some things that you should for sure consider doing while you are waiting for the search indexes to grab your new site.

1. Make sure to do a Google sitemap in .xml and load it into the Google Webmaster control panel.

2. Make sure to verify your site in the Google Webmaster control panel. If you don’t verify you do not get the benefit of the diagnostic tools that Google provides to help you understand any issues. If when you verify you get an error message, work quickly to correct it. One site that we recently tried to verify generated a 500 internal server error. If the Google Webmaster control panel has an error validating your site, the Google robot will most likely run into other issues.

3. Do not work over your server to defeat searches using www. or just http://. If you feel that you absolutely must control how a spider indexes your site, add it into the Google Webmaster control panel. Do not set this up at the server level. One issue that we have uncovered for one client is that they site is visible for http://newdomainname.com but not at www.newdomainname.com. It appears that the programmer has altered some server setting which has caused issues for Google visibility. To check to see if your site is visible for these queries, go to www.Google.com and enter this as your search: site:www.mydomainname.com and then later site:http://mydomainname.com – note the no www and http:// additions.

4. Lastly do not have your home page of your website done in all images or Flash. You are setting yourself up for major visibility issues when you design a new website or blog in this manner. Search engine spiders review text, they cannot read images or Flash. If you do not have the web visibility that you think that you should, then the very first place to look is your home page. The home page of your website is crucial to your website’s visibility. It carries more weight with search engines than any other page on your website. For that matter if your site is dynamic in nature, you still should have a home page residing in the root directory. We recently evaluated a site where no home page existed. How can a search engine robot index the site if the page that the search engine considers the most important does not even exist on the server in the root directory?

From experience I have found that not all programmers and not all web designers understand the nuances of search engines. If your website is not showing now’s the time to check out these simple things to find out why and to realistically identify what you can do to correct them, and to identiry if they are correctable.