For some mysterious reason the Google PageRank™ of this website dropped to zero about a year and a half ago.

I really have no idea why. It didn’t coincide with any major design changes and I didn’t do anything black hat here (or even white hat) that would have caused that.

Every few months I think to ask some friends and other websites if they see me reporting anything other than PageRank™ 0, and inevitably I find that nothing has changed. (Do you see this site as having any PR at all? Let me know!)

What is even more strange is that my traffic has not been affected, as far as I can tell. The majority of my visitors come from Google’s search engine results pages, and most of the time when I post a new topic I can find my site ranking somewhere in the first few.

Emails to Google and requests for re-inclusion have gone unanswered, so if anyone out there on the worldwide information superhighway has any ideas, do tell.

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, search engines, websites

Five great development blogs to which you should subscribe:

• DevTips (subscribe)
• ProBlogDesign (subscribe)
• David Walsh Blog (subscribe)
• NETTUTS (subscribe)
• Raymond Selda (subscribe)

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogs, css, feeds, fridayfive, PHP, RSS, web design, wordpress

If you’re editing a WordPress theme template file by adding a call to a plugin’s function, you need to be careful. In six months or a year you’re going to deactivate or delete that plugin, and you’re going to get a big ugly fatal PHP error on your blog. You can avoid it, though, by adding a single if statement.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Safe Function Calls ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: code, PHP, plugins, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

Right now I’ve got just under 3,400 posts here on this site. That makes it sort of a pain when I’m browsing through them in the back-end because by default the WordPress engine is set to display lists of posts fifteen at a time. I frequently have twenty or more drafts and / or scheduled posts, so when I attempt to find something I first have to click several times to find my latest posts. I knew that the number “15″ had to be coded into the engine somewhere and I wondered if there was any way to change it.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Admin Lists ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: plugins, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

If you look at the top of this page you’ll see that there is a short quip displayed in my header. Every time you visit any page, it changes. I have about fifteen little quotes in my database and they’re set to display randomly with each refresh of the page. I wrote a plugin which makes it easy to add to this functionality to your WordPress site.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Pithy Quotes Plugin ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: plugins, quotations, themes, thesis, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

Today I’m going to explain how to make your WordPress blog display a special note based on a tag associated with a post. This tip is uniquely written for users of Chris Pearson’s awesome Thesis Theme, but if you are crafty enough with WordPress, you’ll be able to use it regardless of the theme you’re using.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Thesis Theme Tag Text ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: code, hacks, PHP, Programming, themes, thesis, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

• General Stuff
  • Kenny Powers on Twitter — way more fun than the CDC on Twitter
  • Crimes committed by Ferris Bueller during his Day off.
  • Great quote from WWTDD?: “Honest to God, I’d throw myself down the stairs with a light bulb in my mouth to see Megan Fox naked.”
  • The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins Within Nevada
  • Happy 20th birthday, Gameboy! (Tetris was the only Gameboy game I ever had.)
• Techie Stuff
  • Campfire is like instant messaging, but designed exclusively for groups.
  • Eight great Thesis design tips to make your blog better.
  • The Basics of Merging and Branching with Subversion
  • Want to talk to a complete stranger online? Try omegle!

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dailydavid

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Lots of people use Delicious to store bookmarks online, and as a blog publisher you should want your readers to be tagging your posts there. Luckily for you, it’s ridiculously simple to give your blog’s visitors a quick “Add this to Delicious” link.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Delicious Links ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: wordpress, wordpresswednesday

I am not a fan of Facebook. I hardly ever visit the place and am usually just annoyed by all the little “applications” that people send me constantly. But … it is a terrific way to get traffic to your site. People on Facebook tend to be the type that just click everything they see.

Add the following link to your single.php WordPress template and you’ll provide a simple way for your blog visitors to post your blog entry to their Facebook profile:

Share this on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<?php the_permalink() ?>">Facebook</a>.

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: backlinks, SEO, social network, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

I published a few articles back in early 2005 and late 2006 explaining how you can edit your WordPress quicktags.js JavaScript file to add new buttons to your Edit Post menu. At the time this was the simplest way I knew to change the WordPress interface. Since then, however, every time a new version of WordPress has been released, I’ve been forced to make all the changes again because quicktags.js is one of the internal files that you’re not technically supposed to be editing.

I (finally) spent a couple of hours a few weeks ago and built a WordPress PlugIn to handle this for me. I also went through the required steps — including researching enough about SubVersion to get the job done — to publish my plugin to the WordPress PlugIns database. That means that now you, too, can add this functionality to your blog.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Amazon QuickTags Plugin ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Amazon, css, plugins, quicktags, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

Once you’ve been blogging for a few years, you’re going to realize that your archives page is huge. For the casual one-post-each-week blogger, it might be okay to display the titles or even excerpts of posts on your archives page. But what about you and your twenty-posts-per-day blogging habit? It won’t be long before your archives page looks ridiculous. What’s an addict to do?

Enter Alistair Lattimore’s Kottke Style Archives.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Displaying Huge Archives ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: archives, blogging, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

The team at ProBlogDesign has posted an excellent tutorial explaining How to Create Your Own Twitter Widget. The instructions are very detailed and by following them you’ll learn quite a lot about how widgets work.

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: tutorials, twitter, web design, widgets, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

Looking for work in the Los Angeles area? My company, Brandissimo!, Inc., is hiring! Read on for the details …

Continue reading Web-Community Manager Job Opportunity ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Brandissimo, employment, jobs, Los Angeles, work

If you scroll to the bottom of this page, you’ll see that in my footer I display how long I’ve been publishing this site. It’s pretty simple to do this; all you really need is the DateDiff plugin and PHP’s default date() function.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: How to Display the Age of Your Site ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, plugins, tips, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

Here’s a handy list of all the WordPress plugins I’m currently using to publish this site.

Continue reading WordPress Wednesday: Current Plugins ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: plugins, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

There are dozens of awesome features in the WordPress CMS, but one of my favorites is the ability to schedule a post for future publication. You can write a birthday wish to someone months in advance so you don’t have to worry about forgetting. You can plan to have an anniversary note appear on your blog when your site hits a milestone. Or you can schedule a weekly feature, like this one, without having to remember to do it every week.

In the Publish box on the post-editing page, just click the Edit link next to “Publish immediately”. Then enter the date you want your post to appear and click “OK”. (The “Publish” button will change to “Schedule”.) Now your entry will wait patiently to appear — hidden from spiders and the eyes of your visitors — until the date you chose. How cool is that?

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, CMS, tips, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

LaunchPad is a killer WordPress “domain parking” theme. It’s the perfect way to let visitors know that something cool is “coming soon” when you’ve registered a domain name but haven’t yet had a chance to actually build anything. This high-impact, minimalist layout (example) comes pre-configured with two RSS subscription options — via email or feed reader — so you can keep potential visitors informed about your launch plans. What a great idea!

© David Vincent Gagne, 2009. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: domain names, themes, tips, URLs, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

I am astounded by how bad the J.Crew website is. The .jsp filenames indicate that the site is Java. It is tragically slow and the senseless implementation of AJAX makes it near impossible to use. It’s almost 2009! How can there be so many horrible shopping cart systems on the ‘net? And for such a large company … it’s embarrassing.

© David Vincent Gagne, 2008. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Java, rants, shopping, web design

Pro-Tip: Tell your website to treat CSS files as if they’re PHP files to make life easier.

There are only two simple things you need to do to enable this!

Continue reading Parsing PHP in CSS ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2008. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: code, css, HTML, PHP, tips, web design

I’m seriously considering purchasing Chris Pearson‘s Thesis theme. For some reason I have started hating the look and feel of my own site. I want to change everything about it. It’s looked pretty much the same for almost 4 years now …

Update 2008-08-21: I did it. I bit the bullet and am now running Thesis. What do you think?

© David Vincent Gagne, 2008. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: themes, web design, wordpress, WP

© David Vincent Gagne, 2008. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: internet, surveys, web design

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.

Continue reading WordPress Tags ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2008. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogtech, code, hacks, tags, web design, wordpress, wordpresswednesday

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.

Continue reading Blue Cross of California Member Registration ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2007. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: customer service, insurance, rants, usability, web design

An excellent tutorial from G: AdSense Optimization Demo

© David Vincent Gagne, 2007. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AdSense, advertising, blogging, Google, SEO

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.

Continue reading A Rant about Keywords and URLs ...

© David Vincent Gagne, 2007. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, keywords, rants, scams, search engine optimization, SEO, URLs, web design, web marketing