Custom Meta/Title Tags

There are many WordPress Meta Tag plug-ins out there which all can pretty much do the job. But I personally like to use the one created by G-loaded. This particular Meta Tag plug-in adds Meta Tags to your Wordpress Front Page, Single Posts, Static Pages and Archived pages. It is compatible for the following versions: v1.5.2 – v2.3.2. For title tags I use the following code so that the title for the home page uses my blog’s description and individual pages/posts gets to put their own title before the blog’s title. The title code can be updated or changed in a file called header.php.

Feeds/RSS

By default, WordPress will truncate content within a feed. I personally feel that offering full content to the readers are more beneficial because many readers uses a desktop feed reader which doesn’t show the truncated content. So if the posts aren’t cut short, it will allow my readers to get a complete concept for each given post. Additionally I have seem a substantial increase in the number of subscribers when I switched from a partial feed to a complete feed. You may use a plug-in such as CompleteRSS which is a great way to offer full feeds.

With CompleteRSS you can say goodbye to invalid RSS and partial entries — your feeds show your entire article no matter what, bringing you the traffic you deserve, and no longer use the very-much abused ‘content:encoded’ tags that cause many feed readers such a headache.

If you’re using FeedBurner in WordPress you should probably also use FeedBurner FeedSmith; A plugin that will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/ or http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can keep track every possible subscriber.

Custom Site Search

Site search is usually a feature that’s turned on in Wordpress by default but if it’s not make sure you take care of it. Site search allows for users to visit more pages during their stay on your site by simply ’searching’ for whatever they are interested in. WordPress also allows for custom search pages so that you can give visitors a better search experience on your blog. For custom search page options check out: http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Search_Page. Lastly don’t forget to track the Site Search with something like Google Analytics. You can read this small analytics tutorial regarding site search setup.

HTML Tables
HTML codes often gets pretty messed up in WordPress (or Blogger for that matter). There have been number of occasions where I tried to copy and paste an HTML table from a different site into one my blog and ended up losing the complete table formatting. My suggestion is to find some sort of FCK Editor Plugin to replace the default editor OR to use the “copy from word” option located in the default editor.

The trick is simple:Check the user ids of the commenter to see if it’s the user id of the blog owner. Pretty smart, huh?! [Thanks to Matt cutts]

Steps Involved to Highlight Author Comments

1. Changing the theme to add an “authcomment” style – You will need to edit the style.css and near the bottom add the following lines:

.authcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

2. Editing the comments.php file to add a little code – Go to your comments.php and find a line that should look like this:

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment…</li>

Change that code according to the following example:

<li class=”<?php
/* Only use the authcomment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = “authcomment”;
echo $oddcomment;
?>” id=”comment…</li>

That’s all! Now you should have a distinctive color for your own comments! Remember, you can always change the colour by simply changing the colour codes in your .css file.

By the way, if you have actually followed the advice in my recent Wordpress Security post, you wouldn’t have to read about this update on my blog. Instead, you should have already received subscribed materials from the WordPress security/developers’ feed (Atom feed link). Its very easy to subscribe for any feed in Google Reader. I highly recommend subscribing to that feed so that you’re less likely to be caught by surprise when there’s a security issue with WordPress.

1. Make sure you have secured your /wp-admin/ directory. What Matt Cutts suggests is to lock down /wp-admin/ so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. Matt on the example used an .htaccess file, which he placed directly at /wp-admin/.htaccess . Below is an example of how the .htaccess file should look like:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Access Control”
AuthType Basic
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 64.233.169.99
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 69.147.114.210
allow from 199.239.136.200
# IP while in Kentucky; delete when back
allow from 128.163.2.27

This file says that the IP address 64.233.169.99 (and the other IP addresses that are in the whitelist) are allowed to access /wp-admin/, but all other IP addresses are denied access to that directory.

2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file. Otherwise you may leak information on which plug-ins you are running on your blog. If someone wanted to hack your blog, they might be able to do it by figuring out all the out-of-date plug-ins your blog runs and they may try to exploit that.

3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog at http://wordpress.org/development/feed/ . When WordPress patches a security hole or releases a new version, they announce it on that blog. If you see a security patch released, you need to upgrade or apply the patch.

Bonus tip: In the header.php file for your theme, you might want to check for a line like

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> < !-– leave this for stats please --></meta>

I’d just go ahead and delete that line or at least the bloginfo(’version’). If you’re running an older version of WordPress, anyone can view source to see what attacks might work against your blog.