the blog of david dean » wordpress http://www.davidbdean.com currently not blogging much at all Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:30:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Category Cloud http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/13/category-cloud/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/13/category-cloud/#comments Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:32:10 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/07/13/category-cloud/ UPDATE: I have changed to the Category Cloud plugin as the weighted categories plug in discussed here hasn’t been updated for the latest version of Wordpress.

I have added a category cloud to this blog so you can get some idea of what it looks like. In case you are looking at this post from a reader or somewhere you cannot see the sidebar, it looks like this:

So, at this current moment my blog is about biometrics, humour, comics and security. Good mix, I think.

By the way, the plugin I used to get this happening is weighted categories. Instructions are available there, but if you can’t get his CSS to work make sure you put id="categories" on whatever is containing your list. In my case the code is

<ul id="categories">
<!-- insert weighted categories code here -->
</ul>

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/13/category-cloud/feed/ 1 Nofollow free zone http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/05/nofollow-free-zone/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/05/nofollow-free-zone/#comments Wed, 05 Jul 2006 01:40:28 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/07/05/nofollow-free-zone/ Since I seem to get a huge amount of comment spam anyway (which Akismet handles without bothering me for the most part), I have decided that I would use the dofollow wordpress plugin to turn off nofollow on the comments that I actually let through to this blog. You know, if there were any.

I’m fairly confident that nofollow has had zero effect on comment and trackback spam, but it probably has had an effect on commenting patterns. More here. It seems to me if you can post a useful comment on someones blog, a little bit of link-love back isn’t much to ask.

So, if anyone ever comments on my blog, you can have some of my mighty PR4 linking-ability right back. Unless it’s spam. Which won’t get through.

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/05/nofollow-free-zone/feed/ 0 Redirecting a blogspot blog to Wordpress http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:41:29 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/ UPDATE: An alternative method that moves more of the smarts to wordpress is available here from Tom Sherman of underscorebleach.net.

In case you haven’t noticed this blog used to be at cebidae.blogspot.com, but I decided to move it to my own server so I had more control over what I could do, now, and in the future.

Importing the old blog’s entries was a trivial task as it is build into the wordpress software these days. The main difficulty I was having is how to get people arriving at the old site to come over here.

The main advice appears to be that you should leave your blogspot site there, but redesign so it is clear that you have moved to a new site. I wasn’t really happy about this, because people are lazy, so I wanted to automatically redirect them to the new site.

There are basically three types of pages you want to redirect from your blogspot address to wherever it is you are going:

  1. The main page (/)
  2. Archive pages (/2004_12_01_cebidae_archive.html)
  3. Item pages
    (/2004/10/gadget-price-searching-use-staticice.html)

I wanted to redirect these three types of pages to the same pages on this site. I managed to get the main page and the item pages working but not the archive pages. Seeing as how most external links either point to the main page or a particular item page, the archive pages are unlikely to be landed on too often, so I chose to just redirect them to the new main page here. If anyone can help me redirect the archive pages correctly, that’d be great.

Redirecting the main page (and the archive page)

To set up a redirect to “http://www.cebidae.com” you need to use the following tags between the <head> and </head> in your blogger template

<MainOrArchivePage>
<META http-equiv="refresh"
content="3;URL=http://www.cebidae.com">
</MainOrArchivePage>

MainOrArchivePage makes sure this only happens on the main or archive pages and the meta tag tells whoever lands here to redirect to http://www.cebidae.com in 3 seconds.

Redirecting the item pages

Obviously if you are going to redirect your visitors to a new site, you need to know the url that they should be going to. This was easy with the main pages, but a bit harder with the item pages. I decided that the best option was to use the built in search on this site to search for entries matching the title of the old entry. To do this you need to insert the following tags after </MainOrArchivePage> but still within the <head> and </head> tags:

<ItemPage>
<Blogger>
<META http-equiv="refresh"
content="3;URL=http://www.cebidae.com/index.php?s=<$BlogItemTitle$>">
</Blogger>
</ItemPage>

ItemPage makes sure this only happens on item pages, and this time the redirection is to a search on the new site for the title of the item on the old. the Blogger tags are required or blogger won’t evaluate <$BlogItemTitle$>.

I also put a small body section in my template that has a link to the new site in case their browser doesn’t support redirection:

<body>
<br/><br/>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<p>This page has moved. You can find the new page
<a href="http://www.cebidae.com" >here</a>.
You should be redirected in 3 seconds.</p>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
<p>This page has moved. You can find the new page
<a href="http://www.cebidae.com/index.php?s=<$BlogItemTitle$>" >here</a>.
You should be redirected in 3 seconds.</p>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
</body>

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/feed/ 4