Category Archives: WordPress tips

Drastically improved search for jdhodges.com (WordPress based blog)

While using the internal search feature on my blog recently, I realized how worthless it was. As an example, searching for ‘exede review‘ came up with a bunch of mildly relevant results but by far the most relevant search resultĀ was on the second page. Not good. šŸ™ Default WordPress search stinks The reason this happened is that by default WordPress sorts search results by date. So if you happen to have some recent posts that contain a keyword, they will

How to fix Customized Recent Comments duplicate comments

Customized Recent CommentsĀ is a great plugin for displaying recent comments on your WordPress blog. It has all the features I need and requires minimal install and setup. With most ‘recent comments’ plugins/widgets,Ā if you (the blog owner) respond to a bunch of comments at once,Ā you end up having your comments take up the entire recent comments listing šŸ™Ā Thankfully, one of my favorite features of the pluginĀ is its ability to exclude particular commentersĀ from being listed. šŸ™‚ However, the only issue I have

JPEG compression and JPEG quality in WordPress

While working on part of theĀ Branson’s Nantucket website I needed to find a way to reduce page load times. Of course there are many ways to do this but one thing that immediately stood out was JPEG file size. Some JPEGs were 400kb+ and there were a number of them to be loaded on one page. That may be fine for people with super-fast internet connections, but alas many people (myself included) sometime make due with relatively slow connections. What

Custom menus CSS in WordPress

While working on a project I needed to use a particular CSS class for a particular WordPress menu item, thankfully the following resources told me how. The first link was the most helpful, but all of them have some insights into menus on WordPress. šŸ™‚ How to Add a Custom Class to a WordPress Menu Item – SevenSparkhttp://sevenspark.com/tutorials/how-to-add-a-custom-class-to-a-wordpress-menu-itemThis is a question I get a lot related to UberMenu ā€“ WordPress Mega Menu Plugin, though itā€™s actually baked into WordPress Core.

Redirect a particular WordPress Page to another site URL?

Question. Does any one know how to redirect any WordPress Page to a particular other website? Pretty urgent, please help if you can. Thx Laurie Answer. Yes, there are some great plugins that can do exactly what you are requesting!Ā Here are my top three choices: #1 Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin Ā« WordPress Pluginshttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-pagepost-redirect-plugin/Redirect Pages/Posts to another page/post or external URL. Has edit box as well as global options. Specify the redirect Location and type. For PHP5+ Download Version 5.0.2 #2

Google Page Speed Service (speed up your website with Google)

I came across Google’sĀ Page Speed ServiceĀ today, here is the description of their service: Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.Ā  […] You canĀ run testsĀ to measure the speed up of your site in a few minutes. Page Speed Service is currently offered free

Good ‘about’ pages on tech sites

While working on adding rich snippet author info to jdhodges.com I needed to wanted to write an improved about page. So I checked out a variety of ‘about’ pages on tech sites to get some ideas on formatting/style etc. Here are a few that I thought were either particularly well done, or that had something unique about them: About Netbooklive.com – NetbookLive.comhttp://www.netbooklive.com/about/This is a website dedicated to mini laptops and portable computers you can easily carry around on your voyages.