I have spent the last few weeks about making jappler.com more of a resource. I have spent a lot of time over the years posting about UNIX commands, web development HOWTOs, etc and would like to make that content easier to find. You will notice that I have already changed the navigation items and plan to re-design how I present content on this web site. I hope, that sometime in May, I will have a web site that will be much more resourceful to everyone. I will also document how I used WordPress to do it.

I have been going back and forth for awhile about whether to cache or not to cache, and I decided to finally try it with this site. I have heard many good things about the WP-Cache plugin and got it installed today. If you notice a difference in load times over the course of the next few days/weeks, please let me know.

I have successfully upgraded all my personal/business web sites to WordPress 2.1. I ended up doing clean installs on all my sites (it had been awhile) and only ran into one problem with the plugin PodPress. If you are using WordPress, make sure you check out the new version!

When I recently updated my browser, Firefox, to the latest release and noticed that some of my extensions also needed to be updated. I do not use many extensions, but I absolutely love and rely on the Web Developer Extension. I had not gone through all the drop down menus in awhile within the Web Developer Toolbar, so today I thought I would just look around a bit more…and I am glad I did because I found another awesome tool for web development: the ruler. (This feature was added in a previous version, it is just new to me.) If you like a certain web site or want to take measurements of a particular page element, you can measure it quickly and easily by clicking on the “Miscellanous” menu and then by choosing “Display Ruler”. You can then either enter in dimensions, or expand the ruler yourself to measure something. This is wonderful!

After a few days of not posting here, I am back. Every time the new year approaches, I begin to re-assess what I want to do for the year like most people. Last year I wanted to establish myself and my consulting business, get involved in some big projects, and learn more about WordPress. Looking back now, I ended up working on a few big projects, the most visible (as soon as it launches) is Ookles. I had the opportunity to work with some outstanding talent and I learned quite a bit about CSS, Google Maps, project management, contracts, and the art of communication. I also had a great year with my consulting company. I have helped a number of people build their personal and company web sites, and I learned quite a bit by working behind graphic designers for the first time. Thanks to Alex King, I also built quite a few custom WordPress CMS web sites, blogs, and etc which pushed me to learn more about WordPress, AJAX, and PHP. In the next coming year, I hope to improve my time management (so I can spend … [more]

I am always looking for new ways to optimize and improve jappler.com and this past weekend I installed and configured a new wordpress plugin: ultimate tag warrior. Not only does it take care of my tagging needs with each post, but it also allows me to create a tag cloud (see the home page), and it automatically adds keywords within my meta tags. If you are new to WordPress or need any of the functionality listed, check it out!

I had been struggling with the the next/previous links on my WordPress blog now for several months. Nothing excites me about mod_rewrite and permalinks in general. I know both are very powerful, but with power comes frustration.

My problem: All my permalinks were working correctly except for the next page/previous page links. WordPress was trying to use the URL: http://www.jappler.com/blog/page/1/ which was not working.

My setup: I am using WordPress as a CMS so my site is all in WordPress. My WordPress and blog address are the same: http://www.jappler.com (anything else produced an internal server error). I am using a custom permalink structure: /blog/archive/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.php All blog posts go into the “general” category by default.

My solution: I finally did some research and figured out two things:

I do not need to use the Static Front Page Plugin
The answer to this issue is not only easy, it is documented.

So, to fix the setup, do not worry about the Blog URI and WordPress URI, they both should be the same (assuming your WP files are in the root of your web site folder).

Using a WordPress page as the … [more]