Learning WordPress

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Slip & Fall Ad

Since I run a number of hotel-related websites, I often receive catalogs and direct mail pieces targeted at hotel owners. One brochure I recently received had a legal angle that made me laugh, so I thought I’d post it here:

Slip and Fall Ad

It’s for a sidewalk leveling/construction company, arguing that uneven sidewalks are a slip and fall accident lawsuit waiting to happen. I love how professional the drawing is (sarcasm). Anyway, I thought this was worth a quick laugh, particularly since I work with law firms like the Boston slip fall lawyers of Feinberg & Alban + the Fort Lauderdale injury lawyers of Fazio Disalvo during my “9-5″ job. They represent slip fall victims… the ones dreaming of “the big payoff”.

Written by jclayc on June 7th, 2009 with no comments.
Read more articles on General SEO Discussion and Learning WordPress.

I’m No Designer

I’m no designer, that’s something I’ll tell you from the start. That’s why I love WordPress; it lets me pick and choose between free and paid templates I can toggle on and off in just a click. In that vein, what do you think of the new “lush” theme? See the credits in the footer, but I think it’s clean and orderly – straight to the point. Surprisingly, the code is clean, a testament to the power of CSS2.

Written by jclayc on October 7th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General SEO Discussion and Learning WordPress.

Building WAP Enabled Legal Websites

I’m pleased to announce CaseDetails.com is now WAP enabled! What’s that mean? Visitors who access the “normal” www.casedetails.com URL via cell phone, Windows CE device, BlackBerry, etc. will be redirected to an XHTML compliant version of the site where past and present posts are available for review.

WAP enabled legal websites

Now that I’ve got this up and running here, perhaps I can pass along how easy it was so you can get your WAP enabled legal website going as well. (This temporarily bypasses the soon-to-be-addressed issue of why you should have a WAP enabled website for your firm.) This advice is for WordPress users only at this point.

In short, upload wp-wap to your site. Then add a few lines to your .htaccess file to detect and redirect mobile devices:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} (x-)*(application|text)/(x-)*(vnd[-.])*(wap[-.]|wml)+
RewriteRule ^(index.php)*$ wp-wap.php [L]

That’s it! I’ll update this space in the near future with instructions for non-WordPress users.

[tags]wap enabled,legal websites,mobile devices[/tags]

Written by jclayc on September 25th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General SEO Discussion and Learning WordPress and Legal Websites and SEO for Law Firms.

Windows Live Writer – Worth a Try?

There’s a new tool on the block aimed at the booming blogger market – Windows Live Writer (Beta) 1.0. In summary, it’s a desktop application that allows WYSIWYG authoring of posts by programs like WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type and more. In an interesting twist, the program also has a SDK (software developer kit) so modules can be developed for extended functionalities. (For some reason, I get a chuckle out of their homepage statement “We can’t wait to see all the things people cook up with the SDK!”)

So is it worth a try? My immediate opinion is that the workspace looks very similar to Microsoft Word, without so many buttons. Matter of fact, the workspace looks kind of sparse, but with the basics covered. In contrast to w.bloggar, I don’t see any table options. We’ll have to see what I discover as I explore a bit more.

To cover all the bases, there are also the features available for general blog management like “updating weblog style”, trackbacks and other settings. One unique feature is the ability to insert Windows Live Maps. Something I just have to try:

Insertion of the map appears to be successful. With the ability to reference “bird’s eye” views through Microsoft Virtual Earth, the maps look nice, but the accuracy is questionable.

In a sceptical streak, I do hope the program doesn’t fudge up the code like other Microsoft applications tend to do. Time to post this and see!

Thanks to Andy at The lost outpost for the heads up on this program.

[tags]Windows Live Writer[/tags]

Written by jclayc on September 24th, 2006 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Coding Topics and General SEO Discussion and Learning WordPress.

w.bloggar Review

One of my few complaints about WordPress as a blog publishing platform is that the “visual rich editor” isn’t very powerful for formatting and manipulating text and/or HTML. While you can turn off this visual editor, I recently read a WordPress book where w.bloggar was recommended as a (free) option. w.bloggar 4.0, a desktop application used to edit blogs powered by WordPress, Blogger, MovableType and more than 10 other publishing platforms, offers a GUI environment for creating and editing blog posts. Free being one of my favorite things, I decided to give it a try. Matter of fact, this post is my first using that system!

w.bloggar Review

The current install version is 4.0. Setup is very straight forward. Just download the zip or exe, run the installer and start the program. It will prompt you for whether you want a new or have an existing blog, guide you through finding the xmlrpc.php file. (This is kind of “universal translator” code interface the default WordPress install puts in your root blog folder, allowing any program to be designed to pass information to and from a blog that’s live and online.) Enter your username and password and you’re in!

FORMATTING OPTIONS – Upon initial setup, you’re presented with a basic editor interface. There are clearly-marked places to enter your post’s Title and body copy. Of course, w.bloggar provides buttons to apply boldface, italicized, ~~strikethrough~~ and underlined text formatting to your text, as well as buttons for bulleting, linking and aligning. Except for the underline option, this is pretty well the same as WordPress. At first glance, I’m not really impressed. I do like that the program says it will output XHTML compliant code, but using traditional HTML attributes like targets, I’m not sure it’s truly 100% compliant. I also do like that nearly every option is tied to a keyboard shortcut (macro). For example, to underline text, you just press [CTRL]+U. These shortcuts are limited within WordPress.

It does appear there are more font face and size options readily available but (honestly) CSS should be used to set most of these things. On second thought, and CSS-purism aside, this is likely to be a very powerful feature for most users considering most non-technical users wouldn’t be the ones editing the CSS themselves.

So w.bloggar formatting? Eh, it’s ok. I have a feeling a quick search of WordPress plugins would turn up something with similar capabilities, though. Continuing the exploration…

HTML OPTIONS – Now we’re talking. Non breaking spaces, H1, H2, H3, hex colors, comments and more are readily available. Moreover, there’s a table button. Since
i) I, personally, am looking into changing the way I code tables from straight HTML to CSS; and ii) the native WordPress interface doesn’t have much to offer in the way of insertion/creation of tables, I’m interested to see how this feature works out.

TOOLS – This is where a few more features are offered, both basic and advanced. Options to publish to multiple blogs, adjust templates and upload files are placed along side of simple functions like blog properties and spell check. Good features, but I’m interested to see how subsequent versions of w.bloggar will expand the more “advanced” options.

In conclusion, I’m still 50/50 on the product. If I find a few plugins that emulate w.bloggar’s “unique” properties (like tables), it may make the program less useful. Time will tell.

Related Resources:

[tags]w.bloggar,wordpress,visual rich editor[/tags]

Written by jclayc on September 23rd, 2006 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Learning WordPress.

Blogging Basics – Letting People Know About Your Legal Blog

One of the first things I wanted to learn in WordPress is how to let people know that this site exists and update those sources with information about the articles here. What’s great is that WordPress provides one way to automatically do this whenever you blog: within the administration control panel, go to Options, then “Writing”. Down at the bottom, you’ll see an input box where you can enter “[tag]Update Services[/tag]“. These are sites that are automatically notified (or “[tag]pinged[/tag]“) when you write an article.

In a new blog installation, there’s usually one entry already there: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. I’ve gathered a few more. They are:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com/

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/