I finally upgraded this blog to version 2.5.1, from 2.1.2. So there was a database upgrade, introduction of draggable widgets, and a few other things.

I also changed hosts, moving from a Canadian company to an Aussie host. Rather than get the new host to copy from the old one, I did it myself, unloading the database, copying the code, and reloading the database, and changing the domain delegation. Amazingly it worked first time. I let the host change settle in for a few days, before doing the WP upgrade.

I didn’t widgetise my template. To do that, I probably would have had to override too many sidebar headings, or learn how to use SIFR, so I avoided the fuss. Although we did widgetise the old template used for the blog at work, the other week.

The main reason to widgetise, IMHO, is to easily take advantage of new widgets. Duh. It just avoids having to add specific new code for things like the tag cloud, search box, calendar, and the piece e resistance, the text box. I like the fact that you can have an admin-driven text box added to your sidebar. It’s useful for making announcements, or other generic text.

My template, which is really really old, was a bit butchered. It was my first piece of PHP modification, and it still doesn’t have a link back to the home page if you click on the logo. And I can’t remember what font I used in the sidebar, so the Tag heading doesn’t match the others. But that doesn’t really matter.

The other cool bit, is refreshing the plugins. Lots of useful plugins have been created since I first wrote it, in particular, wp-cache, xml-sitemaps, sociable, and all-in-one-seo. I ditched the four separate seo plugins I had been using, and replaced them with all-in-one-seo, although it did mean losing the tags I had created with the old plugin. Tough.

At work we (I) am creating tutorials for updating WordPress, for use by clients that we build WordPress blogs for. Although so far, the tutorials are a bit blurry. Stay tuned for an announcement on when they are ready.

cheers

I wonder if the Google Calendar will display inside a post?

Ugly as all get out. Google has a form to et you specify basic colouring, but obviously not enough.

There is an alternative layout too:

Although you could have actually tabbed between the two formats.

A second software package is from Trumba.

That probably won’t fit on the page. And the free version has the Trumba advertising link at the bottom.

The next step in the SEOizing of my blog was to allow people to add the posts to the various social bookmark and tagging sites.

I started by searching for Del.icio.us plug-ins, and actually installed Arne’s version, but it didn’t really do what I wanted.

Then I found David Breyers beautiful code, which I added directly to my index.php of my theme, uploaded the images to the wp-content file, and bingo, cute little icons to make it easy for people to add the post to their favourites. Warning: if you do cut and paste the code from the page, be careful what format the quotes take: I had to manually change curly quotes into straight quotes to make it all work properly. Some strange setting on my PC again.

I’ve just installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in for WordPress after hours of checking out blogs and WordPress instructions on the best ways of handling Technorati tags. There are a lot of plug-ins on the WordPress Codex for Technorati, and the hard part is always working out which is best.

One reason was that it was recommended by Business Blog Consulting as one of their top WordPress plug-ins.

Another cross-fingers-and-hope-that-it-works thingummy for the sake of SEO.

Update: A day after installing the plug-in, and updating the options in my WordPress admin to display “Filed under Tags:”, I did a search in Technorati to see if I was picked up. I was worried that I didn’t seem to be displaying a link back to Technorati, but couldn’t find anything obvious in recent support questions. Searching in Technorati using a search for “seo” with the pull-down “in tags” actually found me!

So this was a pretty basic install: download the zip, upload to plug-ins directory, activate the plug-in, update the settings, add tags when posting or updating posts, and bobs-your-uncle.

Big thanks to Chris in New Zealand.

Yet another update: Instead of the default formatting of tags, I decided I wanted them at the top of the post, using my chosen CSS. After a little investigation, it required editing my theme’s index.php to manually add the tag display code UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost, wrapped in a div and updated the CSS file, as per the UltimateTagWarrior help. ÂÂ