http://theblogeasy.com Just another WordPress weblog Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:10:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Everyone knows about hyperlinks – the highlighted text and images that we can click on to take us from one page to the next on the web. In the case of a text link, there is a simple piece of HTML code behind the link. For example, consider this link ... http://theblogeasy.com/2010/01/21/paid-links-and-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/ I recently discovered that the Google crawler was throwing a redirect error on certain pages in our YLF bbPress forum (bbPress 1.0.2 at time of writing). These URLs had one thing in common - the were encoded to handle special characters. Here is an example: http://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/your-favourite-80%E2%80%99s-music-bands The "%E2" in this URL is ... http://theblogeasy.com/2009/12/26/bbpress-and-encoded-urls-with-uppercase-hex/ Even as a technical person who has spent most of their career programming or managing programmers, I was pretty confused when I first dipped my toes into web development. I really wished I had a simple primer that put things like the web server, web applications, the role of the ... http://theblogeasy.com/2009/11/15/primer-web-servers-web-apps-databases-and-hosting/ I recently experimented with single sign-on for an existing Wordpress blog (2.7.1) and BBPress forum (0.9.4). The two sites were already visually integrated, but behind the scenes everything, including user logins, was separate. With some help from BobbyH (webmaster at Weddingbee.com) and a lot of digging into the BBPress forums, ... http://theblogeasy.com/2009/05/10/single-sign-on-for-a-wordpress-blog-and-bbpress-forum/ Today I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 on this blog.  I followed the abbreviated instructions and everything ran smoothly. YLF will stick with an older version of the platform until we do a major update sometime in 2009, but it is great to install 2.7 on theBlogEasy to see the awesome progress ... http://theblogeasy.com/2008/12/14/wordpress-upgraded-from-25-to-27-with-no-fuss/ Like most systems that require password authentication, Wordpress will help you out if you forget your password. Clicking the "lost your password" link at the login page will take you through a sequence of steps that ultimately sends a new password to the email address associated with your Wordpress account. But ... http://theblogeasy.com/2008/09/23/reset-your-admin-password-in-the-wordpress-database/ A lot of the traffic to YLF comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com. This is easily the highest volume source of new readers right now. So it is important how YLF "ranks" for keywords that relate to YLF subject matter. For example, when someone goes to Google ... http://theblogeasy.com/2008/08/26/find-out-how-you-rank-in-googles-search-results/ During July our traffic from Google, which had been growing steadily since we launched YLF in 2005, suddenly dropped more than 50%. To combat this I installed the All in One SEO Pack plugin, removed meta descriptions altogether, and resubmitted the sitemap. Well, something worked. Our traffic returned to pre-plunge levels ... http://theblogeasy.com/2008/08/25/google-takes-us-back-into-the-fold/ One part of setting up the YLF forum development server did not run very smoothly: replicating the database. I wanted to get a full version of the current YLF forum with all 20,272 posts by 1214 users. There is no backup or import/export functionality currently built in to bbPress (or ... http://theblogeasy.com/2008/08/17/replicate-your-bbpress-forum-locally-for-development/ This is filed under the heading "I don't know why the solution works, but it does, and that's good enough for me". The YLF forum is currently based on bbPress 0.8.3 (great forum system, more on that in future posts). I was setting up a development server to test some new ... http://theblogeasy.com/2008/08/17/database-errors-with-a-local-install-of-bbpress-083/