I ran into a bit of a mind game yesterday while working on another site. In Wordpress options, under reading, you can set how many post per page you’d like to see. The site I was working on I wanted only one post on the front page. So I change the option to 1 and check my pages, realizing I have 2 problems. Problem 1 there are still 4 post on the front page, problem 2 there is only 1 post per page on the archive pages. What the Heck??

So I wanted 1 post on the front page and many (at least 5) post on the archive pages, how do I fix this? After doing some digging into the templates code I was using I find this at the top of the index.php

< ?php query_posts('showposts=4'); ?>

Sweet, this explains my 4 post on the front page, but it also fixes my problem, I can now set the number of post manually to 1 and set the option site wide to 5 or more, which will fix my archive and sitemap pages.

I just tested it and it works across many other templates, which means it’s part of wordpress and not something the designer of the template created.

If adding it to your site remember to add to your index.php or main.php right above…

< ?php if (have_posts()) : ?> < ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

The AMD & Microsoft Tech Tour is coming to Atlanta and I’m going, should be a completely nerdy time

Is it coming to your city?

here is a screen shot of the upcoming cities

Today on SEO & Marketing Review I talked about how the search engines see your site and how to test it. So I decided to test it on tek-works and I wasn’t happy with the results.
If you read the post, you’ll see my personal opinion is that when Google looks at your post that it should right away see info pertaining to that post. This way Google or even other search engines know exactly what topic you’re talking about and can put you in the search for that topic or category. Well Tek-Works doesn’t fit into that, even though I like this template for wordpress, I’m going to change it. Using the tool below, you can see that the search engine spiders see all the info on the left sidebars before they get to my post, which means if I’m talking about a plugin, Google see’s the title / header about the plugin and then sees links older post and mybloglog before anything about the plugin. This can’t be helping with my keyword rankings.

Watch for a new template soon..

test your post pages with this tool..

One of the things i’ve been working on lately is how to cut down on the spam comments that I get on my blogs. Most everyone uses Akismet, and if you’re not, activate it, now! But there are still a few spam comments that get through. I’ve looked into some of the other plugins that work with Akismet, and the problem is, i’ve just recently had a bad experience with these types of spam blockers. Some of them check you IP against known spammers IP’s, problem is, My IP was a know Spammers from 2002 and it’s still on the list. Yes, you can jump through hoops and get your name taken off the list but it’s a pain, so I didn’t want to go that route.
I started thinking about the spam comments, usually they are added to a post that is over a month old, this way the spammer is hoping that you won’t notice it or you won’t get your email about a new comment. James Mckay must have had this same thought, he released a wordpress plugin called Comment Timeout, in the plugin options you can choose to sut off comments that are a number of days old. So I’ve turned off all comments that are older than 14 days old. Along with many other options to work hand in hand with Akismet, I think that many of my spamed days are over.

Can you do it? Can you live without your computer for 24 hours?

It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

Let them know if you can deal with it, on Shutdown day

Talk about a company happy they sold! MyBlogLog was the fad that lasted 2 months, in that time Yahoo bought them and then people started finding the security holes, the privacy issues (everyone knows where you’ve been) and the hacks (make yourself look like another user).
While MBL was a fun toy and a great marketing tool, last night I started going through some of the users that visit my sites, because I noticed even though my visit numbers are the same, MBL doesn’t change that often. Last night out of the 30 sites I visited only 2 were actually using the widget to show who’s visited their site. Since their pics still show up, this means they are still carrying the cookie around and showing up on others widgets, but most have pulled the widget off their site. For myself, I will probably do the same thing in the near future, not because I think it’s a bad tool but it’s a TOOL.. If you notice at times there are either hot pics of women or signs of make money now, these aren’t the people visiting your site to read it and interested in what you’re saying, they just want you to visit their site. Ok, visit my site, I’ll visit yours but not if you’re trying to deceive me.
I wonder what the numbers that are still using it are and if yahoo is mad they bought it (probably not, because yahoo is using all the stats that they are keeping from the widget, like what ads are clicked on your site and where visitors are coming from)
It was fun to daily see who hit your site, but there will be a new kid in town soon (if not already).

Flog Maker is a plugin that creates a entire flash blog on your site, it pulls in all the existing data from your blog and ports it to the new blog. It’s still in beta and nneds a few more tweaks, including engish

I’ve added it for a short time so visitors can check it out Tek-Works Flash Blog (takes a while to load)

I’m working on a few WordPress How to’s, These will be mini videos showing my screen as I do each task. I’m going to do easy tutorials from installing a plugin to harder one, like installing your own Wordpress. My question to you is, what whould you like to see? is there something you’ve been wanting to know on wordpress or blogging software? something else technical? Let me know, post your comments below.

If you’re like me and love your plugins, you either search all over for them or head to wp-plugins.net and search for them. Well finally wordpress.org has got on the ball and added a plugins page to their site, instead of just linking to others.
WordPress Plugins Page has listed the most popular, newest and recently updated plugins. Wordpress.org will even host the plugin for you, where I can see developers wanting to keep the file on their server, if your site goes down, users will still be able to use the tool you’ve developed. Also since the page also list the dev homepage and plugins homepage, this will allow the traffic many want and also a place for support.
Time to find that next “must have” plugin!