Also, as the title reads, I’m partnering with Infomedia so that from time to time, projects will actually be handled by the entire production team, and not just myself. This is a win/win. Not only will you get continued great results from Tammy Hart Designs, but we can offer so much more as a team that I ever could alone.

I want to take this opportunity to also give a big thank you to all of those I’ve worked with and learned from over the years, and of course, thanks to my clients who have placed their trust in me and challenged me to learn more and become better and better at what I do.

I can still say, and hope to always have the ability to say, “I love my job.”

No More Big, Bad Wolf (Spam, that is)

Handling spam starts with protecting the ability to comment. To do this, navigate to” Settings > Discussion” and check the box next to “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail”. Checking the box next to “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” might be tempting, but you could block a lot of potential discussion because most people aren’t going to want to go through an entire registration process just to leave a comment on your blog.

Simply requiring them to fill out their username and password, does put up a bit of a wall, but it’s a wall made of straw. To put up a second wall made of sticks, you need to use that plugin that comes by default with every install called Akismet. It’s simple, but it does work. If you are using it already, you should also make sure that you keep it updated.

There’s a plugin for that

Akismet (a-kiz-mit) is a plugin built and maintained by Automattic, the same people who give us WordPress. In order to use it, you have to register for an API key. If you have an account at WordPress.com, you already have an API key. It’s found at the top of your profile page. If not, then the Akismet website provides a simple form to register your email for a key. Once you are ready with your API key, just click to activate it from your plugins page in the back-end of WordPress. It will prompt you to insert the key to complete activation.

My last spam blocking tip will finally put a brick wall up. It’s a plugin called WP-SpamFree, and I’ve used it with perfect results for the last several years. The only time a spam comment gets through is if it’s manually typed in as any other human would type in a comment. To get this plugin, go to “Plugins > Add New” from your WordPress admin panel. In the search box, type in the name, WP-SpamFree. It should be at the top of the results where you can install it instantly. There are a lot of settings and options to play with, but the default settings are enough to keep you protected.

I upgraded my blog successfully to WordPress 3.0. Then later that same day, my host decided it would be a great time to move us all to a new server. Now I am running into a lot of problems that I can’t seem to find fixes for. And since I didn’t do an extensive test after upgrading WordPress, I can’t figure out where a lot of these problems are coming from.

I do think some of them may be originating out of my use of Flutter. I had already planned on discontinuing my use of this plugin with the advent of post_thumbnails and custom content types, but this is going to be a pretty long task to carry out considering how integrated it is with my current theme. So that leads to the announcement that I am officially beginning a major overhaul of TammyHartDesigns.com, complete with a new design and even a new color to the palette!

Stay tuned for updates, and please wear your hard hat while navigating the current site, as it seems to have been hit by a tornado.

It’s WordCamp time again! This time I’m speaking at the very first WordCamp ever to be held in Arkansas. The organizers have done an excellent job at securing venues and restaurant plans in Fayetteville for this weekend, as well as raising sponsors to help fund the event. The speaker lineup is also not too shabby, if I do say so myself. A few friends of mine are speaking there, and I can’t wait to make new ones!

I will be speaking again on the same topic I gave in Atlanta and in Miami. This time I’ve revamped it a bit for two reasons: 1) I have a full 90 minutes to cover, and 2) I have been able to hone on the most important areas of the discussion, and weed out some of the fluff. I have also redesigned my slides to take advantage of all of the real estate on each slide, using better typography, and following a few tips I read about in Rockable Press‘ latest book, Rockstar Presentations.

Freelancing with WordPress

Here is the outline for my presentation.

• How to Sell WordPress
  • What does the client need?
  • What Would WordPress Do?
• What has WordPress Done?
• Design & Functionality
  • Ask Questions
  • Start with a List
  • Get Examples
• Getting the Content
  • Get Started off Right
  • Use the Right Tools
• Be the Boss
  • Basic Rules to Remember
• Support & Resources
  • WordPress is Easy!
  • Resources

wpMethod

I have been planning and building a new project ever since I finished my presentation at WordCamp Miami. I had been asking myself for quite some time, what could I blog about that could break away from my professional blog here, and stand on it’s own as unique content? When the topic of using WordPress to build sites for clients had succeeded in drawing a crowd twice at two different conferences, I knew I had found the right subject.

wpMethod.com will be launching tomorrow. It is a blog that meshes the two topic of WordPress and freelancing. The content is only in the baby stages right now, but I hope to gain involvement from the community and other authors, as well as drive most of it myself, of course. We will be offering the following:

• Resources
• Tutorials
• Plugin and Theme Reviews
• Case Studies
• Business Tools and Advice
• eBooks

Although I’m launching this week, we will be having a live grand opening show on Thursday, June 3rd, at 7:00pm central time. Come hear me talk more about the website and it’s features, and also ask questions about anything pertaining to the website or our topic.

So that’s the agenda for the coming weeks. If you’re going to be at WordCamp Fayetteville this week, be sure to say hi!

Permalink Settings

Permalink is a combination of the words “permanent link“, similar to how blog is a combination of “web log”. A permalink simply means the URL to a page or post on your website/blog.

There has been a lot of disucssion about the proper structure for permalinks, especially since the advent of “Pretty Permalinks”, and a lot of people have their opinion on what the best structure is. This is my best advice when it comes to permalinks, and it’s a combination of advice from an SEO expert friend, and my experience with WordPress.

Default Permalinks

I’m not going to rehash all of the details about permalinks that you can find over at the WordPress codex, but let’s start by looking at the default permalinks which look something like this:

• Post Permalink: example.com/?p=123
• Page Permalink: example.com/?page_id=123
• Category Permalink: example.com/?cat=123
• Tag Permalink: example.com/?tag=tag-name
• Archive Permalink: example.com/?m=201005 or example.com/?m=2010

These seem simple enough, but as you can see, this is what is generally defined as an “ugly permalink”.

Suggested Permalink Structure

There are a lot of different ways you can edit the way this looks, but the one that makes the most sense to users and to search engines is for the URL to make a path directly to the resulting page, the only interruption being a categorization for posts. These resulting permalinks will look like this:

• Post Permalink: example.com/cat-name/post-name
• Page Permalink: example.com/page-name
• Category Permalink: example.com/cat-name
• Tag Permalink: example.com/tag-name
• Archive Permalink: example.com/2010/05 or example.com/2010

To set your structures to this, use this as your custom structure: /%category%/%postname%/ and then leave the tag and category bases blank.

Remember that words that come after your URL are going to look like directories, even though they aren’t really. For instance, you might look at the path to an image that looks like this: example.com/mydesign/images/logo.jpg. On your server, there is a public root directory after which there is a directory called “mydesign”, and then inside that there is a directory called “images”. In graphical user interfaces, these are generally represented as folders within folders. So if you have a permalink like this: example.com/category/cat-name, a search engine and even some users, are going to assume you have a directory on your server called “category” and then another called “cat-name”.

That being said, when you use my suggestion for your permalinks, and you have a post called “Hello World” in the category named “General” your permalink will be this: example.com/general/hello-world, and your category’s permalink will be “example.com/general”. This is good since when a search engine gets to the /general/ part of your permalink, it’s going to index that pseudo directory as well. Thanks to your permalink structure, that will result in a page with topics in that category, rather than a 404 error page, which isn’t a good thing for a search engine to find.

Don’t Skip This: Remove Category and Tag Base

By now, you’re probably noticing that your categories look like this: example.com/category/cat-name. By default, WordPress will insert a default category base of “category” and tag base of “tag”, but since the directories “category” and “tag” don’t exist we want to remove these. This is pretty simple to do with this plugin: WP No Category Base.

Search Permalinks

It is noteworthy that no matter what your permalink structure is, your search permalink will always be the same: example.com/?s=searchterm

I’m working a short week this week. Friday morning, we’ll drop the girls off at school, and then my husband will be dropping me off at the airport. That’s right, I’m flying out to San Francisco! I am so excited, I can barely contain myself.

I’ll be staying with my friend Adria Richards, whom I only met three months ago at WordCamp Atlanta. We hit it off as pretty good friends, and in fact, I am also working on a redesign project for her. (Stay tuned for that, ’cause it’s gonna be purty.) She just moved to San Fran a couple of weeks ago, so we are also going to take Sunday to see a few sites around town as well.

THE WordCamp

WordCamp San Francisco is the original WordCamp. Last year, they had over 700 attendees, and already have over 500 signed up for this year’s camp. Saturday will be an all day geek fest with the awesome speakers lineup they have. With an after party at the Automattic Lounge that night, coffee at 8 am on Sunday with “Women of WordPress” will sure be fun to drag in to. Then all day Sunday is a developer’s unconference. I’ll be missing this as it seems like a bit too much brainwork for me, and also, that’s my time to hang out with Adria before flying out early Monday morning. If you’re attending , and would still like to hang out with the coders, then Monday and Tuesday, they are having a code sprint. This is because…

WordPress 3.0

Sadly, WordPress 3.0 will not be releasing on May 1st as originally planned. There’s been talk that the first release candidate will go out then, but nothing definite that I know of. This throws a wrench in a few schedules for me, but hey, these guys are working for free, and putting a lot of blood sweat and tears into it. They deserve a medal, and a trophy, and a key to the city, and any other kind of honor we can give them.

So those are my plans, who’s going with me!?

From WordPress.com

WordPress is no doubt one of the most flexible content management softwares available on the web, specifically in the small collection of free ones. But with that flexibility can come a bit of a learning curve, and for some, especially those who are just getting started with publishing online, it’s just daunting enough for them to quit, pay someone else to do it, or choose another platform. But I am a strong believer in the ease of WordPress, and once you get the hang of it I know you will be too.

It’s gonna live forever

Jane Wells, the lead user experience designer for WordPress and Automattic, told us recently at a WordCamp that she was once asked, “Will WordPress ever put out a simple version without so many bells and whistles?” Her answer was no, of course, explaining that the bells and whistles are what makes WordPress, and there really wouldn’t be a point in making a simpler version. In my experience, the vanilla install of WordPress is pretty simple, but as I’ve stated, some don’t agree, and that’s fine, I can cope with that, but I would still love to see as much of the web powered by WordPress as it can handle, simply because it is so future proof.

By future proof, I mean that no matter how small, or how simple you start your website and/or blog, you can expand that content to be as feature rich and custom designed as you can imagine it. One of the greatest tools of just about any publishing platform, is the ability to store your content in the database, and change how it looks on the outside with just a couple of clicks.

Back in the day, before I used WordPress to build websites (that’s like 4 years ago), I built them all by scratch, meaning there was an html page for every single piece of content in the website. It really got interesting when I realized I could use .php at the end of my filenames and then use an include to, you got it, include a single header, footer, and sidebar page. What an awesome idea! Just one page can control the entire navigation of the website, and I don’t have to update that URL in 50 thousand different places. Then finally, a client came to me, asking if I could do the same kind of thing, but by using WordPress. Being the “I can do anything that I have time to learn how to do” type of person that I am, I said yes.

With WordPress, you can start small and dream big. The content you write now, can live on through as many design changes and feature additions as you want to, and can even go other places.

Beam me up, WordPress

So maybe you’re one that has already started in something simpler to use, like Gary Vaynerchuk’s suggested use of Tumblr in his book, Crush It. Tumblr, and a few others, have a very intuitive and fast way of sharing whatever type of content that you want. This makes it really easy to get started, but what if you decide later you want to take the plunge and expand the functionality of your content beyond what Tumblr, Posterous, or even WordPress.com allows you to do. Have no fear, most of these platforms have ways to import all of your content into WordPress, and I’ll list some references for those at the end of this article.

WordPress also makes it really easy to transfer content from one install to the other. Oftentimes, I will suggest a new user to start with a free WordPress.com account and begin writing there. This lets them get a feeling for WordPress, start populating their content, and even start getting some traffic and discussion going on. Then when they feel comfortable enough, transferring that content into a fully customizable self-hosted WordPress site, takes just a few minutes, and is pretty much caveat-less.

So to sum up, I will always suggest to anyone that wants to publish their content on the web, that a custom-built WordPress site is a great solution, but even this brand loyalty addict know that it’s not always the best starting point for everyone. Budget, technical skills, or even doubt about your topic, should never keep you from getting started with blogging or building a site for your business.  Here’s a list of other platforms, and articles on how to import your content from them into WordPress:

Other platforms, and articles on how to import your content from them into WordPress

One more thing to mention is that many of these platforms also import into WordPress.com as well. If there’s anything missing from my list, and you know of a great how-to article for importing it into WordPress, please leave a comment about it!

• Tumblr / How to Import Tumblr to WordPress
• Posterous / How to Import Posterous to WordPress
• Blogger / How to Import Blogger to WordPress
• Blogware / How to import Blogware to WordPress
• DotClear / How to import DotClear to WordPress
• LiveJournal / How to Import LiveJournal to WordPress
• Movable Type and TypePad / How to Import Movable Type or TypePad to WordPress
• TextPattern / How to Import TextPattern to WordPress
• WordPress.com / How to Import WordPress to WordPress
• How to Import a Static HTML site to WordPress
• Joomla / How to Import Joomla to WordPress
• Drupal / How to Import Drupal to WordPress
• Expression Engine / How to Import Expression Engine to WordPress

Recently, I was working on a client site and they wanted to make sure that users could log in with their Facebook account to leave comments on the blog. We started out with Disqus, and it was a breeze to get going. Then we noticed that the site would periodically timeout. We contacted Rackspace, and tried several different fixes, and finally I decided to deactivate Disqus. Now, I’m no expert in this area, but to me, if I turn off a plugin, and the problem goes away, then there’s an error somewhere in the pipeline. Unfortunately, neither Rackspace, Disqus, or I could figure out why this was happening. It would have been nice to have gotten down to the bottom of the issue, but we really just needed to get things moving along so we could get closer to launch. So we decided to try IntenseDebate.

So far, we haven’t had the timeout issue at all, but we did just so happen to choose them in the middle of them experiencing a strange error that wasn’t letting users change their settings. We contacted them and they let us know they were already on it. We also asked them about how well the comments would sync to our WordPress database. Their email response was more than satisfactory, and I felt like sharing it:

This has been corrected. It was related to a recent code and feature update that we just released: a new moderator role. Please feel free to check it out at http://wp.me/plsX6-GX.

Every single comment submitted via IntenseDebate is automatically synced to your database and WordPress comments.

ID runs parallel to your WP comments so if one of your readers has JavaScript disabled in their browser then they’ll still see all of the comments (since we sync back to WP) and be able to leave their own. Any comment posted in WP is automatically imported into ID (including all of your old comments) so they won’t miss a beat.

We’ve also got a really cool feature called SyncRepair which runs in the background to clear-up any discrepancies between the number of comments in ID vs. WP (just in case sync is interrupted). All of this makes our “Graceful Fail” system possible – if there’s a load delay then ID will revert to your default WP comments so your site doesn’t get hosed. Any comments left in WP during that time will be imported into ID.

IntenseDebate is an Automattic invention so our plugin is built and maintained by WordPress core developers.

Sorry for the trouble. Please let me know if I can help with anything else.

Thanks for your patience,
Michael

This isn’t to say that Disqus has lost the debate, and their support team was there to try to help us in our peculiar situation, but in this case, we were very happy to have found a good solution for us that came with the support we needed as well. And as Michael pointed out, IntenseDebate is an Automattic plugin, and that’s an extra brownie point from me.

I know there are many folks that take sides with either plugin, but this is my first time to ever deal with either, so I would love to hear your opinion on them both.

Below is a slideshow that I got to share at this months AMP (Alabama Media Professionals) meeting. I want to thank them for having me; it is always a pleasure to share the gift of knowledge and educate others on the benefits of blogging.