I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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The new member registration form at the Blue Cross of California website has what I consider to be several major bugs.

• A user’s username must contain a number and a letter. Because this is not exactly a ‘net “standard”, they need to do a better job of bringing this to your attention.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, not including a number in your username — any values selected in drop-down combo boxes are reset to their defaults. This means that you have to re-select your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” before submitting the form again. If you don’t re-select these fields, the submission fails.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, if you didn’t include a number in your username and then re-submitted the form without re-selecting your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” — the two password fields (which you entered twice to avoid typos) are cleared as a security precaution. You must enter these values again.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, if you didn’t include a number in your username and the re-submitted the form without re-selecting your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” and then re-submitted the form without re-entering your password twice — you really have a strong desire to punch your monitor.

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An excellent tutorial from G: AdSense Optimization Demo

A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”

First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.

Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.

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Great stuff from Ernie: Mister Wong, the Offensive Social Bookmarking Portal

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a great linen shirt at Old Navy. It’s so great, in fact, that today I thought I’d go to the website and grab a couple more of them. Alas, I cannot. Their website is broken. This is a multi-million dollar company and they’re currently not able to sell anything online because of a database error. Bummer for them.

MTV completely redesigned their site. They switched from all-Flash to (gasp!) all-HTML. Brilliant.

A few weeks ago I saw an image on Chris Pearson’s Pearsonified that I just loved. He had taken a photo of something — I can’t remember what it was — and made it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid. “What a great idea!” I thought. Surely I can figure out how to do that in Photoshop. And I did. So now I’ll share.

How to Create a Polaroid Using Photoshop in 10 Simple Steps

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How to Hack MySQL Paging Functionality into Microsoft SQL Server

Web developers using PHP and MySQL have a crucial piece of functionality that classic ASP developers working with Microsoft SQL Server don’t. It’s pagination. Using MySQL’s LIMIT and OFFSET commands you can very easily add pagination to recordsets that you want to display on web pages. If you’ve spent any amount of time searching for a way to do this with ASP and SQL Server, you know that the code is pretty hard to find. You’re lucky if you find it at all. The few tutorials on the ‘net tend to be overly complicated and pretty bad hacks, usually involving convoluted and resource-intensive subqueries on top of subqueries. This solution is certainly not the best, and it, too, is a resource hog, but it’s the only one I’ve got, so I’m sharing.
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I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.

The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.

The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.

The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.

Happy WordPress modding!

Currently in Austin, TX for SXSW. I’m on the 15th floor of the Hampton Inn and the view from my window at 2am is gorgeous. This is a great city — a lot like Gainesville, FL. The conference is just extraordinary. I have been taking notes like mad and will hopefully someday post many of them.

Whoa. I don’t know how I haven’t seen this yet. Google lets you target specific sections of your page as more or less relevant to AdSense. This should be required reading for all bloggers and — hell — should be part of the default WP install …

What is section targeting and how do I implement it?

For quite some time now I’ve been wanting to be able to create “new!” and “updated!” type images for use at work and here on my site. I wanted something like you’d expect to see on a box of Tide or cereal, y’know? The splash-graphic. The “new and improved!” image.
I finally found the answer. If you want to make nifty 3D(-ish) “badges” like this one, look no further than the excellent tutorials at Bartelme Design: Part 1 and Part 2.

Just a bunch of random thoughts I’ve been meaning to post …

• It took me for-freaking-ever to recognize that it’s Matt Dillon doing the voiceover on the Pontiac Torrent commercials. It took me five minutes to find and download Struggle, by Ringside — the music from the commercial. I snagged a couple of their other songs, too. Pretty good stuff. I thought (incorrectly) that it was something by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, a band I found on the Mr. & Mrs. Smith soundtrack. (Note: If you’re looking to grab the song on the soundtrack via iTunes, they trick you! The song is listed as Mondo Boongo and you have to buy the entire soundtrack if you want to get it. But! If you look, you can find the song on iTunes under it’s actual title, Mondo Bongo. Sneaky iTunes people.)
• I got a black Motorola RAZR (with Cingular) a few weeks before Christmas. With the sole exception of Motorola’s moronic address book — which has been retarded ever since they started making cell phones; why the hell does the same person show up multiple times if I add more than one phone number for the entry?! — this is hands-down the best cell phone I’ve ever had. I’ve had Verizon and Sprint since I moved to LA, and I think that Cingular has the best service here. The reception is even better than it was with my previous Cingular phone (a Nokia) and you just cannot beat the form factor. Slick.
• Quite Frankly, with Stephen A. Smith, on ESPN, is a darn good show. I don’t always agree with him, but I like his delivery. TiVo it. Update: I’ve changed my mind. He bugs.
• If you’re a web developer and you want to add slick graphs and charts to a site, you really can’t do much better than Fusion, from InfoSoftGlobal. It’s good stuff. Easy to build, Flash-animated, XML-driven, works with ASP or PHP. Check ‘em out.
• I’m going to do my damn level best to run the twenty-first L.A. Marathon this year. I’ve been chugging along with a friend since early December and am knocking out 5, 8, and 10-mi runs pretty regularly now.
• Rumor Has It is an excellent movie. Is it Oscar-worthy? No. But it’s very fun and very original and well worth your $10.
• Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Amazon) is one of the top twenty best books I’ve ever read. A good friend of mine sent it to me as a Christmas present from my Amazon wishlist. I tore through it in two nights and was floored. It’s making its way through my office now. I highly recommend it. (And thanks, Bob!)

CapitalOne’s website is just terrible. About every third time I click the “LogIn” button on the front page it simply redirects me to the front page. Even on my work connection the entire site loads like it’s running on a 1992 486 box. There are ridiculous pop-ups thrown at me every time I attempt to download a statement. The layout is cluttered with AdSense-esque ads and 63 small-print disclaimers on every page. This is a company that must have money falling out of their pockets — why can’t they have a fast, slick web site? Even Washington Mutual — my local bank — has an infinitely better system.