Blog Refinements

October 23, 2007 @ 15:00 | In Blog, Internet, Personal | | del.icio.us digg devbump rss

I have just spent the weekend upgrading my network infrastructure and finalizing some changes in the blog. Having learned a lot from reading other blogs and expecting this to be helpful for people visiting this site this is the list of the main changes.

  • Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3: This have been a surprisingly smooth upgrade. I only had minor problems with UTF-8 conversion (I had to disable the line define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8') from the configuration file). It seems that with this new Wordpress version, categories are going to be deprecated in favor of Tag Clouds. I have yet to convert my post database to tags
  • Feed Icons: I am using now what is supposed to be the standard for RSS icons
  • Email subscription: Thanks to FeedBurner now you can subscribe to this blog via email. If you are not using a Feed Reader, please use this method instead of bookmarking
  • W3C Validation: Now, the XHTML and CSS of this blog are fully validated by the W3C tests. I use a simple text editor to modify the HTML and CSS, so there were lots of errors. After a lot of minor changes (like eliminating warnings in C++), the blog passes all the tests becoming a more standard blog and, supposedly, more friendly to bots navigating through my rumblings
  • Amazon book links: I do not like putting ad in my blog (and you probably won’t ever see any), but now book links pass though my Amazon account (I receive a small percentage if you buy using that link). It is a non-intrusive modification so I expect you don’t care about it
  • Wordpress plugins updated: I have updated and added new Wordpress plugins. This is the list of plugins I am using:
    • Askimet to combat the spam. 95% of the comments I receive are spam
    • All in One SEO Pack. Meta information, that invisible information that only bots can read, is important. This plugin gives you control over the generated metadata
    • Counterize for tracking internal visitor stats
    • FeedBurner FeedSmith to get feed usage stats. FeedBurner have been bought by Google and now all the pro services are free
    • Subscribe To Comments. This is a very interesting plugin that is increasing the number of comments in the blog. It allows email subscription to posts where you contribute
    • Ultimate Google Analytics to collect info for the Google Service Analytics
    • WP-PostViews for getting visit stats for each post
    • WP-UserOnline. An online users counter

Comments are welcome, thanks for reading.




  1. Jesus,

    As usual, things are looking good with your site. :) One thing I’ve started to do with links that I include in the text — is set them to open in a new window. This can be done by including target=”blank_” after the href link field. It helps keep people from directly navigating away from your site and getting caught up somewhere else and forgetting to come back.



    Comment by BrianL
    October 23, 2007 @ 16:16 #

  2. Thanks for the comment Brian. Interesting what you say about the links. I definitely will try it. :)



    Comment by ent
    October 24, 2007 @ 19:14 #


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