The Blog of Adam Patten

Well I finally upgraded my WordPress install to the latest version. I had attempted to do this about a month ago, but got sidetracked for some reason. The overall process was painless, it took me under 30 minutes to backup my database, upload the new files and update all of my plugins. The one thing I realized is that if you hard coded any of your plugins to your theme, you should use function_exists in the event you disable them or upgrade the plugin and the function no longer exists.

Plugins I use

Since I just upgraded them all I figure I might as well let you know which plugins I use on this blog.

• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Popularity Contest
• ShareThis

Theme

Now I just need to create a custom theme for this site. The current theme I have was meant to be temporary, but I’ve slacked big time and it is any but. I finally understand em based layouts because of the great article on A List Apart by Richard Rutter, so hopefully I’ll get it done sometime in 2008.

Popularity: 80% [?]

Today I noticed a nice feature of having a URL structure for your site based on the date (adampatten.com/2007/06/08/). When I’m looking for something on a particular site I typically use Google’s site search, its usually better than most built in searches and it I don’t have to hunt around on the site for the search form. Well today I wanted to find something on Matt Mullenweg’s site, but he has been blogging for so long that it returned lots of results and I wanted results from recent posts so I just narrowed my search using his URL structure. So not only does the URL date structure allow users to instantly know when the post was made by the URL, go directly to an archive for the day, month, or year based on the URL, it also allows users easy ways to search your site using external search engines. Too bad I lacked this knowledge when I created the URL structure for this site. But I went ahead and corrected this mistake and updated the URL structure for this site. Since there aren’t any inbound links and virtual no PR I’m not really worried about the SEO/usability issues. So learn from my mistake and use those dates in your URL structure.

Popularity: 93% [?]

I’m really curious as to how Yahoo! decides when to include a website in their search results. I have had this website up and running since early February and submitted it 3 times (about a month apart) to be included in Yahoo!’s search results, yet until this week I have been omitted from Yahoo!’s results. Granted there isn’t much content on this site and I don’t post very often, but I don’t understand why Yahoo! decided to shun my site. Google had me listed within the first week and MSN had me up within a reasonable amount of time. I can only guess the referring links from Joey and Jon (looks like Jon removed the link, but Google Analytics tells me there was one at one point) are what made Yahoo! finally deem me worthy to grace their results. Seems to me that if a site owner submits their site and there is a decent amount unique content there they shouldn’t need to have referring links to be listed. If I had any readers on this blog, this is the point where I would pose them with the question “Any ideas on why Yahoo! takes so long to include a site in it’s listings?” So let those comments roll in!

Popularity: 73% [?]

While I’m working creating my own theme for this site I wanted to find something other than the standard theme that comes installed by default.  I did a quick search for a minimalist theme and found Simpla among some others. Hopefully I will have enough time this week to get started and personalize this site with my own custom theme.

Popularity: 55% [?]

After a year of building websites for other people I finally decided it was time to build my own. So here is AdamPatten.com in all its glory. I’m not sure of the exact direction of this site, however I’m hoping to avoid becoming one of the many unchanging, boring websites on the web. I’m using WordPress as my main tool to achieve this. WordPress is a great tool since it is extremely easy to use and set up so the barrier of entry is almost non-existent. However it is extremely flexible and powerful and I hope to learn how develop useful plugins like Share This and Popularity Contest by Alex King. Most posts will be about solutions to problems I come across during the workday at Einstein Industries and anything else I find useful in the realm of website creation. Thanks for reading and I hope to provide you with content you find interesting and useful in the near future.

Popularity: 44% [?]