Lately it seems everyone I know is interested in window blinds and shades. A good friend has established a site on bamboo blinds that I helped out with, mainly aesthetics, programming and SEO.

And then most recently my Mom has decided she loves Hunter Douglas blinds so much she wants to review them!  Many of her friends have purchased Hunter Douglas window treatments, so I guess it’s quite easy for her to get hands-on with these and talk to people who have them in their homes. And while she is about it she can grab some good pics as well!

So I helped out with the design of Bamboo Blinds as mentioned, my good friend Violeta has written all the reviews and information for the site – I designed the Joomla template, which incidentally will be released over on Joomlabear shortly under the title “Notebook Template”.

The site is built on the Joomla Content Management System and also usesd the K2 Extension which provides a lot of additional options for organizing and formatting Joomla content. One example is Tags, something Wordpress does out of the box but which Joomla is sadly lacking at this point.

K2 bridges this weakness and we can see an example of a K2 Tags page here: Bamboo Blinds for Sliding Glass Doors. The benefits of tagging are definitely worth the additional effort – Search Engines love them and users love them too – Tags provide a great way to organize and explore content.

The last thing I wanted to mention in today’s rambling post is my Mom’s site on Hunter Douglas Blinds. This is built with Wordpress and is just a skeleton currently, but I like to work this way when designing because it gives me some  text based content to work with, really useful to get a feel for how the site will behave with images, long pages, etc. I also like to get my Wordpress optimization sorted out first because it gives us a head-start in the search engines

I can spend weeks tweaking a layout until I’m happy with it – but it’s always good to remember search engines don’t look at all that fancy design stuff – they read the text and make an assessment of  what your site offers from this – so if the copy is on hand it’s very good to get this up immediately and then refine the layout as you go.

My next post will actually step you through my Wordpress setup and optimization process so you can see exactly what I do.

Until then.

Norman Sheppard has a good tip today that shows you what to do if Dreamweaver suddenly stops working. It’s a Dreamweaver bug.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions – and has always puzzled me. Working away in Dreamweaver and suddenly it dies – It won’t open again except for a few seconds when my workspace flashes before me and then vanishes.

My resolution was this  – I deduced that it was the site directory that I was currently working in that had caused issues (Yes didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out).

1. So I renamed the directory
2. then created a new directory
3. Dreamweaver then opened
4. and I downloaded all my files again off the live server….

Now I know what really happened – as Norman explains what causes Dreamweaver to stop working is when a file in your site is exactly 8,192 bytes, or a multiple of this number. The fix is to find the file and just add a few characters to it, using notepad for example – then Dreamweaver will open again.

Read the full story at the link above. Interesting

I’ve found that using dofollow for all links in Wordpress comments is generally not good because it attracts unmanageable amounts of spam – basically spammers use bots (scripts, automated programs) to surf the web looking for dofollow blogs. When they find them they come and personally leave spammy comments hoping that the author will approve them. Yes spammers automate spam commenting too – but these are easier to pick up because they are generally less relevant to the content.

What has bugged me about this is that if I reply in my own blog comments then any URL is also nofollowed. Thsi bothers me because I quite often link out to other sites in response to users questions and I don’t want these links to be nofollowed – I’m writing teh comment, I’m placing teh link, so why shouldn’t be considered by Google to be a dofollow editorial link?

The solution to this problem is an excellent little wordpress plugin http://www.everfluxx.com/follow-my-links/

This provides dofollow links for the authors posts. Just what I wanted.

I just wanted to thank Vladimir Prelovac for his Wordpress Ping List.
I have just added it to this blog and a couple of others – It’s a much more comprehensive list than the one I was using previously.The list should be entered into Writing Settings > Update Services in your Wordpress admin.
When you post a new blog entry these services will be notified of your blog post increasing online exposure.

The list:

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping