My Three WordPress + Coda Tips

1. Install WordPress Syntax mode for Panic Coda

As a WordPress developer, I use lots of WordPress functions. This will allow you to auto-complete WordPress functions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include function parameter hints, but that’s what tip #3 is for.

2. Replace your WordPress Syntax mode colors

I didn’t like the color set it came with, so I exported my colors:

1. Go to Preferences > Colors
2. Select the color set you like in the “Language” window (I exported PHP-HTML)
3. Click the “Export” tab
4. Edit the .seestyle file in a text editor
5. Find and replace PHP-HTML with PHP-HTML-WP
6. Save the file
7. In Coda, click the Import button and select the .seestyle file
8. Voila: your colors are now what you’re used to.

3. Configure a WordPress Codex book in Coda

Coda comes built-in with six reference “books”; web-based documentation pages for HTML, Javascript, PHP, and CSS.

There was an awesome shortcut in Coda I didn’t know about: Command + Double-click on a function name to open a Coda Book describing that function.

How to configure a WordPress book

1. Press Command-6 (or go to View > Mode > Books)
2. Click the + button in the bottom-left of the window
3. Use the following settings:
   • Book Title: WordPress
   • Book URL: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/
   • Cover Image: Optional. DRÄ Studio has an article with tons of more book options and a nice WordPress cover image to use.
   • Use for Mode: PHP-HTML or PHP-HTML-WP, depending on whether you installed the Syntax Mode in Step 1
   • Search URL: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/*
4. Click OK

Now, when you have auto-completed functions and you forget what parameters the function takes, you can Command+Double-click the function name and be taken directly to the WordPress Codex page relating to it!

No related posts.

reveal.js

Related posts:

1. Disable Styles and Javascript in Safari with Keyboard Shortcuts – How To

Today, for the first time, I was actually taken aback by the amount of visual crap on Google results.

Related posts:

1. SEO Randomizer: Save the Value of Your SEO'd Links
2. New Google search results — OneBox is upgraded
3. SEO It! Bookmarklet – Improves Search Results in iPhone & Safari

IDX+ is a project I’ve been working on for months. It was born came out of necessity: a client told me “there is no perfect solution for WordPress real estate websites.” After looking into it, I realized he was right.

IDX+ is the solution to your real estate website’s problems.

The current previous state of WordPress real estate plugins

Realtors who want great SEO, complete IDX results, and customization have been in a tough spot: you either had to:

• list listings individually;
• have all the IDX results on a subdomain;
• or pay tens of thousands of dollars to develop a leased website, then pay through the teeth for minor changes to wording or for features like related properties.

Subdomains divide website value, and adding listings individually is often against MLS regulations and isn’t feasible for a large brokerage. Paying tens of

As a result, real estate agents and brokers had to have two websites: one site to get traffic, and the other site to convert the lead.

The best available real estate plugin is great…

The best WordPress plugin for getting site traffic is the dsIDXpress plugin by Diverse Solutions. It offers fully indexable IDX content, great URL re-writing, Google Maps integration, lead forms, and more.

Diverse Solutions got it mostly right–for getting indexed by search engines. dsIDXpress is an SEO powerhouse, but it’s not a one-stop-shop.

…but not perfect.

Your site can get tons of traffic with dsIDXpress — and now there’s a way to convert the traffic into leads.

dsIDXpress downsides:

• No user registration
• No saved searches / favorite listings
• Lots of user dead-ends (for example: once listings expire, they’re gone, leaving 404 error pages)
• Not customizable

IDX+ = the best WordPress IDX solution.

IDX+ builds on top of dsIDXpress to create an amazing platform

dsIDXpress is the foundation for IDX+ and is required to use the plugin. IDX+ plus dsIDXpress makes an amazing package.

IDX+ adds tons of features, including:

• Beautiful user registration – either forced or optional
• User/lead data – including every listing a user views, all searches performed, saved favorites, saved searches, last login, number of logins, and more.
• Favorite Listings & Saved Searches
• Totally customizable SEO title tags for listings or search results
• SEO-friendly redirects for expired listings (redirect to the listing’s city or ZIP with a message to the user)
• Hundreds of customizations – either “install and forget it,” or tweak the settings.
• Related Properties – even choose the search radius and +/- price spreads!
• Related Articles - You’ve blogged a ton; start reaping the benefits.
• Completely template-based: customize the HTML, PHP, CSS to your heart’s delight!
• Developer-friendly: WordPress actions and filters abound.

There are hundreds of features for one flat price – the beta version of the plugin is $599. All purchases of the beta will have free upgrades and support for one year.

Buy the plugin today – beta pricing of $599

Learn more on IDXPlus.net

Related posts:

1. WordPress Real Estate Plugin: Stay Tuned…
2. Building a Real Estate Website in WordPress – Part 1
3. Creating a Real Estate Website in WordPress — Part 2

I have put the BoulderSEO.com domain up for auction: with the upcoming release of the top-secret WordPress real estate plugin, I have chosen to sell this prime property.

The BoulderSEO.com auction will be ending in 18 hours, so if you’re into Colorado, Denver, Loveland, or Boulder SEO (you get the idea!), check out this auction.

You will instantly rank well with this great domain.

Currently priced at only $660 – it’s a great deal! With literally no work done on the site since April, 2009, I still get 1-2 leads/month from this site. This domain will pay for itself in a month.

Go to the auction.

Related posts:

1. SEODenver.com is new home of Denver Web Design & SEO Blog
2. Denver Performance-Based SEO plans

WordPress + Real Estate + User Data + SEO

In the past, I’ve written posts about how to optimize your WordPress real estate website for SEO and I’ve created a Trulia plugin for WordPress.

This WordPress real estate plugin changes the game of what you can do with your WordPress website — and for how much money. No longer do you need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an indexed IDX solution.

Next week I will release a beta version, so stay tuned for the formal announcement.

Related posts:

1. Introducing IDX+, WordPress Real Estate & IDX Done Right
2. Building a Real Estate Website in WordPress – Part 1
3. Creating a Real Estate Website in WordPress — Part 2

RAMP allows you to make all the changes you need in your staging environment, then selectively push these changes to your production site. You can set up a new section of your site, upload some images to fill out a nice carousel for it, and add a link to it on your home page. Once this content has been reviewed and approved, you can go to your RAMP page, select these content changes, and push them to your production site.

via Easy Content Deployment for WordPress: RAMP.

This would be really handy for larger WordPress sites.

No related posts.

Some of the downsides of using link shorteners are:

1. Google Analytics doesn’t always capture the original referrer (and I have no clue how they do the rest of the time!).
2. When generating links using the bookmarklet (or in this case, also the Yourls installation), there’s no easy way to add campaign, source, medium, content, and term tags for Google Analytics to track.
3. Yourls doesn’t allow query strings on URLs by default, making overriding existing campaign tags difficult/impossible. For example: http://katz.si/t?utm_source=2300

I’m not the only one who wanted these things, so I’ve created a plugin that adds Google Analytics tracking to Yourls. It’s very cool.

Google Analytics Yourls plugin

Download Google Analytics for YOURLS from Github

The plugin features include:

Define default tracking tags
You can define a set of default tags that are added to any link that gets shortened.

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_name
• utm_term
• utm_content

Override existing tags - you can choose to have your tags replace tags in the long URL that’s being shortened…or not.

Tagging options added directly to the URL form – the best feature in my opinion, you now have an interface to easily add tracking right from the link shortener.

Add query strings to the shortened URL to override or add any tracking tags. This feature has support for abbreviations, too.

If you want to see this in action, check out the links below.

• http://katz.si/t?src=tw expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_source=twitter
• http://katz.si/t?med=em expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_medium=email
• http://katz.si/t?med=blog&src=seodenver&cam=2300 expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_medium=blog&utm_source=seodenver&utm_campaign=2300

Plugin Installation

To install, follow these steps:

1. Download the file (updated to correct Github link)
2. Upload the google-analytics folder into your users > plugins directory
3. Go to your YOURLS plugins page
4. Hover over Google Analytics, click “Activate”
5. Configure the plugin settings by clicking the Google Analytics link in the menu

Related posts:

1. YOURLS URL Shortener
2. Export Bit.ly Link Data as CSV
3. Show Content Only Plugin – A Perfect Keyword Research Companion

• Good statistics that are visible only to administrators
• Edit the long URLs after generating shortened links

…but not one service has both features:

• http://sn.im has editable URLs, a bookmarklet, but no stats. Oh, and they kept on deleting my links.
• http://bit.ly has great stats, name recognition, but the links aren’t editable and the stats are public.
• http://goo.gl is the fastest service (so they claim), they have good stats (maybe the best, since they include OS & browser information), but they don’t have editable links or private stats.

Other smaller offerings may have had both features, but they also seem unreliable. I wanted control of my links.

Self-hosted Link Shortening with YOURLS

YOURLS has a really nice admin page, including good stats.

Enter YOURLS; a self-hosted link shortening service that is created by two amazing WordPress plugin developers: Lester Chan and Ozh Richard.

They created YOURLS in a WordPress-like fashion, with developer goodies such as hooks (actions and filters) and plugin capabilities, so you can easily modify how the application works.

You can set up YOURLS however you want, including making it a public service, public stats, etc. or making it private.  I set up a YOURLS installation on my new katz.si domain, which was a snap, except for one minor snag caused by HostGator’s security rules.

You do need to be able to set up a database and edit one configuration file, but other than that, super-simple.

They also have a WordPress plugin that links your WP installation with YOURLS, aut0-generates links, and works like a charm.

Don’t Track Logged-In Users in YOURLS

Once it was installed, I became a link-generating fool. I was clicking the links to see how well the redirections work (they work well!), but the test clicks were logged — this pissed me off with bit.ly and other URL shorteners: don’t offer a way to not track logged in users! I have long thought that this is ridiculous.

To make it so that YOURLS doesn’t track logged-in users, it’s a simple two-line update. Find the following lines in yourls-go.php:

// Update click count in main table
$update_clicks = yourls_update_clicks( $keyword );
// Update detailed log for stats
$log_redirect = yourls_log_redirect( $keyword );

and update them to be:

if(yourls_is_valid_user() !== true) { // Begin: Don't log logged-in users
// Update click count in main table
$update_clicks = yourls_update_clicks( $keyword );
// Update detailed log for stats
$log_redirect = yourls_log_redirect( $keyword );
} // End: Don't log logged-in users


Do yourself a favor and check out YOURLS

In all, my experience was rewarding: it was very easy to set up the YOURLS installation, once up I have a very configurable and fun URL shortener. I get to build links to a domain I control, which is nice for SEO.

Related posts:

1. Yourls Google Analytics Link Tagging
2. How to Add www. – or Remove www. – From Your URL
3. Export Bit.ly Link Data as CSV

The +1 Button uses an advanced sprite technique to simulate an animated gif. The animation occurs when hovering over search results with +1 enabled, and the shine moves across the button. (The image to the right is an animated gif I made…)

The +1 Button is not an animated gif, however. It’s a sprite image that moves a background image across the “window” of the button using Javascript. The code, if you care, goes something like this:

onmouseover="window.gbar&&gbar.pw&&gbar.pw.hvr(this,google.time())"

The sprite image Google uses for the +1 button is below:

Pretty neat, huh?

Yeah, the +1 Button animation is pretty neat…
…now turn it off!

Oh goodness gracious, the animation is annoying. After hovering over one search result, it’s obvious how awful the animation is and I want to claw my eyes out with a rusty nail. I wanted to find a way to disable the animation.

Note: To use the code below, you must have a user stylesheet with the code shown added to the file. Here are links that will help you set it an user stylesheet: Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera. Set that up, and then proceed below!

Disable the +1 Button Animation

.esws { background-position: -400px 0px!important; } /* Disables animation of the +1 button */

Hide the +1 Button

.esw { display:none!important; } /* Hides the +1 Button completely */

Improve the +1 Button

I want to use the +1 Button, so I’ve left it enabled. What I’ve done, however, is make the image lighter so it stands out less when you hover over a listing. When you hover over the button, it increases the brightness to 100%. It’s the best of both worlds:

/* Disabled the animation, makes the +1 button lighter yet full brightness on hover */
.esws, .eswh { background-position: -300px 0px!important; }
.eswh:hover { background-position: -400px 0px!important; }

I hope this helps people who love the +1 Button but hate the animation.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Sprite Image is a Thing of Beauty
2. How to prevent your Google background image from fading in slowly.
3. Introducing: the SEO Stylesheet for Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE