I actually have three subsets of the limedaring.com domain: the main limedaring.com, where I’ll post about my web design and development pursuits; limedaring.com/veggieblog/, which hasn’t been updated in forever but I developed it to talk about cooking and gardening (and to encourage me to practice writing); and limedaring.com/dreams/, where I’ll post about my pursuit of an even better life.
While the other two subsets have been rarely updated, I finally posted a fairly important article about my recent life changes and dreams to the dream blog; I encourage everyone to read and comment!
Caveat: the design at limedaring.com/dreams is not mine, just a wordpress theme. I’m working on updating it to something original!{ respond }
After much nonsense from Slideshare, here are the slides from Wednesday, May 27th’s presentation on beginning web standards and accessibility.
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Straight from Google, What You Need To Know
Head of the web spam team at Google
Why do you blog? (Cat pictures!)
Wordpress is a great choice — it takes care of 80-90% of SEO. Has the mechanics of SEO built in.
Plugins he uses personally: Akismet, Cookies for Comments, Enforce www pref (?), Feedburner FeedSmith, WP Super Cache.
Page Rank
The number and importance of links pointing to you. How does Google rank pages? You want to relevant and reputable.
Write often, write every day, and you’ll get better through practice.
Translate your posts into “english” what people would actually type: OMFG I think I have aids what the fuck should I do????
Use the Google keyword tool to determine what other terms you should optimize for.
Change the URL to a couple alt keywords to take advantage of both variations - for example, use both change and changing.
- Use categories that also have good keywords.
- Use dashes, THEN underscores, no spaces is worst.
- Density of keywords doesn’t really matter.
Katamari: Start small, and build up!
Google tools can help! Use Google Analytics, Google Website Analyzer
Avoid paid posts. Big Google no-no.
Security tip: Add /htaccess n /wp-admin to allow ONLY your home address to wp-admin (get from Matt Cutts blog) later.
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The State of the Web
Matt Mullenweg - Ma.tt, one of the cofounders of Wordpress. Started at 19 years old.
Really interested in typography, and used regular expressions for typography - change curly quotes, etc. Lead developer at B2 saw this and offered a patch - first time Matt M. submitted to an open source project. Lead developer at B2 disappeared, Matt got the inspiration to make his own CMS.
Combine the “elegance of Textpattern”, the “simplicity of Blogger”, the “hackability of B2”. And thus Wordpress was born.
Core Freedoms
b2: Wordpress. Freedom to modify the software, freedom to redistribute those changes, like b2.
Wordpress 1.2 introduced plugins. 1.5 introduced themes. “These two decisions are one of the most important ones in Wordpress history”. Wordpress is a platform - keeps the core, but is infinitely extensible.
It’s growing! Key stats have almost doubled within the last year. 31 millon new posts, 22 billion page views (from 8 billion).
Predictions
Long line of failed predictions. BUT coming out with 2.8. Design has been crowdsourced to Wordpress users. Someone has tattooed the logo on themself!
Crazyhorse: will be “super duper important”. Originally suffered from “Interface diarrhea”.
And, wow, tons of new stuff and I can’t type fast enough. Will bring links later!
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Even Faster Themes
Performance Guru at Google! Oh, those crazy Googlers. On the intarwebs for about 15 years. Wrote High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
, and just wrote Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers
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To make things faster, work on the front end stuff - CSS, HTML, etc.
Rules
- Make fewer HTTP requests
- …more that I missed.
He worked on ySlow. Great application for determining how fast your website runs. He also cofounded the Firebug working group.
Velocity - web conference? Could be very interesting to go to.
Making themes faster
Default theme, 22 requests, bad bad bad, on empty cache, and not much better on primed cache.
- CSS: combine stylesheets - don’t use @import because the browser can’t download in parallel.
- Scripts: combine scripts, move inline script to the bottom - don’t breakup parallel downloads.
- Sprites: Combine CSS background images into sprites.
- Gzip future expires
- …ran out of time to go over the rest!
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