Just found this.

Technically, it's correct: you don't need a robots.txt for good SEO.

However, it's not that simple. Part of the problems I was having on my sites was that the search engine bots weren't just crawling my site, they were freaking pounding it into a fine powder. Oh sure, if you've got a big enough server, you can afford to let them run all over you–but I'm doing this crap on a budget.

If you're on a budget hosting service, or to put it another way, if you're using the cheapest hosting you feel you can get away with–you have to make sure you're not throwing away bandwidth or CPU cycles.

Look at your access logs. Are you getting hammered every couple of seconds by Googlebot? Or the Yahoo bot? Or any bot for that matter?

If you have a robots.txt, are the bots reading it and heeding it?

It's one thing if you've got flat HTML pages for your site, but even with wp-cache running, WordPress can bog down if a bot is allowed to run rampant. And if your site is slow or can't be crawled properly because the bots have bogged it down, then yeah, that can affect your SEO.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Okay, next up: the link quicktag. On Needcoffee, we have internal links and external links. Internal links are just plain old links. External links open in a new window. I know that irritates a few people, but I have no idea why. You close the window and you're where you came from. Seems like a no brainer to me.

Anyway. Same deal as before:

1. Go to /wp-includes/js/

2. Edit quicktags.js

3. Look for this code:

edButtons[edButtons.length] =
new edButton('ed_link'
,'link'
,''
,''
,'a'
); // special case

(more…)

Okay, so here's some fun. At Needcoffee, we pretty much draw from a single directory for images. But if you do the IMG quicktag by itself, all you get is it asking you for the full URL. That's no fun. How can you hardcode the img directory in there?

Simple.

1. Go to wp-includes/js/

2. Edit your quicktags.js

3. Look for this code (I've killed some tabs just to keep it from being too wide for the theme):

function edInsertImage(myField) {
	var myValue = prompt(quicktagsL10n.enterImageURL, 'http://');
	if (myValue) {
		myValue = '<img src="'
		+ myValue
		+ '" alt="' + prompt(quicktagsL10n.enterImageDescription, '')
		+ '" />';
		edInsertContent(myField, myValue);
	}
}

(more…)

Seriously, think about it: WordPress 2.3. 2+3 = 5. Law of Fives.

I just saw realized this when I ran the Ultimate Tag Warrior converter:

Import Complete!

Now wasn’t that easy?

Remember how AUM had cocaine added to it simply to allow for the Law of Fives?

Yeah. Law of Fives.

Hail Discordia.

Okay, folks. Seems to have worked…so far.

And because this is the first thing I wanted to be able to do: let's talk tags.

The UTW importer seems to work very well–although, come on, guys: UTW was a good plugin. Do you really have to refer to it as a "nasty habit"? Kinda tacky.

Anyway, it zapped my 500-some odd tags fairly quickly. There were four very odd errors where it appears tags didn't make the leap–some sort of database error–but I didn't take down the error. If I see it again, I will.

But here's the part that's a little wonky–and a little unnerving. There's nothing in the WordPress admin area to let you tinker with tags. They're just sort of there. I understand there's some plugins to help the tag admin thing, but as long as it works, I don't care.

I had to strip the UTW code out of my theme because it was causing errors (and of course, reactivating the UTW plugin caused a fatal error which WordPress mercifully put the kibosh on before it could do any damage). So how to get the tags back in?

Well, this post is a good start, and the followup's not bad, but what if you just want to say something witty and then list your tags in a comma-separated list? It's not obvious.

< ?php the_tags('Taggification: ', ', ' , ''); ?>

That's how I do the tags on this theme. And as for context of where it goes?

<div class="storycontent">
< ?php the_content(__('(more...)')); ?>
</div>
<br />< ?php the_tags('Taggification: ', ', ' , ''); ?>
<p>Filed under: < ?php the_category(' and') ?>
<br />Comments: < ?php comments_popup_link(__('None'), __('1 Comment'), __('% Comments')); ?></p>

Tinker with it till you get it to look like what you want.

I'm going to be changing themes anyway. This one just looks like a giant nasty kluge.

If you see anything weird, that's probably why. Yes, this blog is the guinea pig. I'll let you know how it goes.

I keep seeing this bumper sticker.

I doubt its accuracy. For one thing, you would hope He would have done something about the traffic.