I have been using WordPress for about 2 years now. All this time, I left it to WordPress default settings to get my latest blog post updated with the major blog directories and blog search engines.

However, I didn’t realize that every time I save a published blog post, a ping is sent to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and this may cause ping spam or sping. So I installed the Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger to ensure that it will only ping once when I published my post and will not ping again when I edit and save the post.

So far, I found http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ very effective. In additional, I added http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to make sure that Google pinger server is updated with my latest post.

Here’s the step-by-step guide to verify that you have http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in place and also add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

WordPress 2.5 and above

1. At the Dashboard, click settings then select Writing
2. Scroll down to find the section Update Services, you should see http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in the box
3. Add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to the line below http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
4. Click Save Changes

Caution: Don’t use blogflux ping server, it is not working.

For my new readers, here’s how the old layout look like.

In fact, I prefer the previous layout. However, it was just too challenging to build a theme/template from scratch. I tried and spent more than a month to learn how to build customized WordPress template. So far, I have not succeeded and I have to resort to other’s template, such as this cavemonkey.com’s Clean and Mean theme.

I’ve made a couple of small changes, such as the header graphics and the sidebar items. Also, I installed several plugins…

WordPress Plugin – Ultimate Tag Warrior

One reason why I selected this “Clean and Mean” theme was the built-in support for several popular plugins e.g. Brian’s Latest Comments, Ultimate Tag Warrior and etc.

It was easy to install the plugins – just upload the files to the WordPress plugins directory and then activate.

But, configuring the Ultimate Tag Warrior is quite complicate process. Here’s a how-to guide which I found quite useful:

http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/UltimateTagWarrior

And if you selected to use “url rewriting for local tag urls” then you will have to add the following to your .htaccess.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?tag=$1&feed=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)/$ /index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/$ /index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)$ /index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)$ /index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

You’ll not see Ultimate Tag Warrior on the homepage, instead the tag cloud is displayed near the top right corner of the sidebar on the single post pages.

The first thing I’m going to do in the new year is to migrate to WordPress. I will probably migrate my web hosting server too. And will delete other none blog pages. Yes, I have many pages in this website.

Over the next few days, maybe weeks, I will need to come up with a new design suitable for me to customize with my limited knowledge of WordPress template commands. I could have use it as is. But, I am the SEO expert, right? So I need to tweak the template so that it is as search engine friendly as possible.

I have done some work on Shi Hengcheong’s Blog and learned how to have individualized title tag, description and keywords meta tags. However, with this blog I may need to do a bit more. As you can see this blog is more complicated. The layout of the main page is different from the post item pages and archive pages.

Anyway, I’ll have to figure it out. Wish me luck!

Happy New Year!

Also, WordPress is more powerful. There are many plugins available to extend the functionalities. I could also save some time whenever I tweak the template because there is no need to regenerate all the pages and upload to my server again and again.

However, the move is not easy. I have been losing sleep for the past 2 nights trying to customize WordPress theme or template for TIMMGuru.com. I want to use the existing design and layout. And it was not easy to convert the template. The WordPress theme is far more complicated than Blogger’s template. I have to search the documentation and learn the right commands and tags. I find the Conditional Tags necessary to customize the sidebar. As you can see, the display of this sidebar is different on the main page, individual post page and archive page. So I’ll need to do some progaming logic to control what appears on which page.

The basic type of pages for WordPress are the

• Main Index Page (MainPage in Blogger.com)
• Single Page (ItemPage in Blogger.com)
• Category Page
• Archive Page
• Search Page
• and others

You can control what to appear in each of these pages! Now, flexibility comes with complexity!

Why Google didn’t like this blog As Much As Yahoo Does?

I suspect that I’ve added a thing in this blog that Google didn’t like. That is the Archive List.

You see. I’ve grouped my posts into monthly archive and each archive had short link text such as July 2004, August 2004, … October 2006 and November 2006. A list of more than 25 items with nearly identical anchored links. To the eyes of the search engine, these could be “optimized” keywords for doorway pages.

I’ve deleted the archive listing and created a PHP script to generate my own archive page instead.

So you should be very careful when using Blogger.com to publish your blog. Avoid using the archive feature.

Now, I have one more reason to migrate to WordPress.