Configuring WordPress to have a thumbnail with article excerpt

We have recently begun to post RSS feed information on client websites. One of the issues we were having was the ability to include thumbnails next to the displays of the article excerpts. After many hours of looking through the WordPress code and the RSS2HTML utility, I found that WordPress needs a plug-in in order to make this happen correctly.

I downloaded, installed, and tested the Thumbnail for Excerpts – by Radu Capan… this plugin was exactly what we were looking for. Now there is a thumbnail next to the excerpts and all is well. This plug-in also has the capability to be configured.

You can download the plug-in at: http://www.cnet.ro/wordpress/thumbnailforexcerpts/

What Search Engines See

nowing what search engines see when crawling your site and associated web pages is important to web designers and SEO analyzing. There are several tools out on the Internet that will help you review your coding and check the appropriate mark-up, but what does your page look like when all of this browser related information is removed? Stripping theses elements down to the bare minimum of text is what needs to be done in order to analyze key words and data that are important to writing your text so that it is optimized for organic search results.

The following tool is an excellent resource to help you with this task:

http://www.wmtips.com/tools/keyword-density-analyzer/

You are able to enter any URL and the tool will strip out all HTML/CSS/Javascript and provide you with the actual text that you can review to determine if a change to your data needs to be made.
With the report that this utility generates, you can then see the keyword phrases that are within the text, the percentage of the keyword density, and the Word Statistics that will tell you where the words or phrases appear within the tags.

7 Useful CSS Tools

“CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is still one of the most popular modes of designing a working website, yet, for many designers it can be at times a lengthy and tedious job. Thus, many web designers have [taken] to using CSS tools in order to quicken the process up as well as have more control over design elements…” This article by Marie Coles on September 4, 2010 outlines 7 Useful CSS tools. Read the article.

Scheduling Cron Jobs on Linux

Occasional we may need to setup some scheduled jobs for clients (or DNSTC websites). I found this website that explains the CRON utility pretty good and gives some great examples on how to modify and manage CRON jobs.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-add-jobs-to-cron-under-linux-or-unix-oses/

Getting the Word our Using Word

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Have you ever been in a situation where you want to get something out to everyone, you have to type up a draft... copy/paste it to e-mail, Facebook, send it to your webmaster, post it to Twitter, before you know it, the phone rings and you forget where you were with your announcement.

How would you like to sit at your desktop using MS Word and simply open up a new document, type in some information, click a button… and that new information will go to; your website, your FaceBook Page, and your Twitter account all at the same time?

We can make it happen, contact us today for details; btw… this is exactly how this post was made.

Add a day, a week, 2 weeks, a month or multiple days to any date

Use the following to add time to the current date.

$date = date("Y-m-d");// current date
$date = strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date)) . " +1 day");
$date = strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date)) . " +1 week");
$date = strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date)) . " +2 week");
$date = strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date)) . " +1 month");
$date = strtotime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date)) . " +30 days");

Removing the Continue Reading From the RSS feed in the TwentyTen Theme

When I started playing with the RSS feeds, I noticed that the feed would truncate and then add a link at the end that said Continue Reading with an arrow. I tried for a few hours to remove this since it was not fitting in with what I was trying to accomplish in the layouts. It turns out that this is actually added by the theme itself to the RSS feed.

For the purpose of using a blog for RSS news feeds, I have been just using the default TwentyTen Theme. You can actually go into the theme and remove that annoying Continue Reading if you want.

Here is how:

1. Edit the file: [wordpress directory]/wp-content/themes/twentyten/functions.php
   
2. Do a search for "Continue Reading" (Normally around line 241)
   
3. Comment out the link within the function that starts with return…
   
4. Save the file
   

Removed!