Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

New Themes: Revolution and the Morning After

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The choice of a theme for a website using WordPress used to be: blog style theme or pay a lot of money to have your website designed professionally. But now, there is a lot of interest from publishers to use WordPress as the website, so it’s getting easier to find themes that can fit that need.

news revolution

Revolution Themes by Brian Gardner is one such set of themes which allow WordPress to appear as a magazine almost. The theme makes good use of a number of factors important to magazine sites including:

  1. front page space allowing main features to be shown,
  2. lots of links to recent articles,
  3. videos and large graphics
  4. mailing list box,
  5. 486×60 box for graphic,
  6. archives,
  7. Section Pages

There is also space for a lot of other things, too, at the bottom and in the middle. Since the quality of the design is excellent, and it would likely appeal to those creating a magazine style website, it’s not free, but at $99 for a single install, it could be a good deal! His other notable themes include the Blue Zinfandel series.

While for those on a budget, there are a couple of ‘free’ themes that work along the same line of thinking, of which the best seemed to be ‘The Morning After’ from Arun Kale.

home preview tma

To get the posts working, you’d need to create two additional categories for the blog. But it looks good and might be a good way to test out a magazine format. Other features include:

  1. A three-column home page
  2. “Featured” post highlighting
  3. Associating images/thumbnails with recent posts
  4. Customisable logo/header image
  5. Easy CSS classes for adding captions and wrapping text around images in posts
  6. Asides

Whether or not your blog is becoming a magazine, the number of links on the front page to your archives in either of these formats would be a good way to drive traffic to your older posts. You could tweak the formats even more to add extra stories, this would help your older stories be found more easily, especially if you have so much of the content that is hidden away (on my primary blog, there are now nearly 800 individual posts!).

Tips: How many posts on your blog’s frontpage?

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Over the months since I started blogging this blog, I’ve tried a number of different variations of the front page: columns on the left or the right, one column (or two or three or more), many themes, images, etc. but I didn’t pay much attention to one question: How many posts should you have on your frontpage?

It’s a central question: have too few and you risk new readers clicking away when they find nothing of interest within their first glimpses; have too many, and you risk confusion, slow download times, and mental overload. So what is the right number for your front page?

This also begs another related question: should you publish whole posts on the front page or should you just show excerpts to attract attention, so that readers have to click through to the actual page? If so, perhaps that number of excerpts can be greater than if full posts were used.

The default setting in WP is 10 which you can access in your WordPress Dashboard under Options >>> Reading under the section ‘Blog Pages’ pictured here:

readingoptions

So how many posts should you set? Let’s deal with some popular blogs to see what number these popular bloggers are comfortable with:

  1. John Chow dot com: John has only 5 posts displayed, but each post is fully readable. Additionally, his posts are tending to be quite long.
  2. Naturally, JohnCow also features 5 full posts in the same format.
  3. CashQuests dot com: Currently is displaying 11 posts but all are excerpted. She features one article at the top that may be a recent article. In the main area, she shows 10 general posts.
  4. ProBlogger: Darren’s blog is features 8 excerpted posts, one video, and a long list of popular posts.
  5. AndyBeard: Again it’s 10 posts, but they’re all excerpted.
  6. GeniusTypes: He has 16 posts, but all excerpted.
  7. NetBusinessBlog: There are 10 full posts on the frontpage.
  8. Blueprint for Financial Prosperity: He has 7 full articles.
  9. Beyond the Rhetoric: He has got 6 full posts of moderate or greater length.
  10. the.[ED]ition: Ed has 5 full-length posts on his front page.

Calculator’s out: the average seems to be about 8 posts per frontpage. If you’re setting up your blog for the first time, then the default might be fine. I’m shooting for between 3 and 5 on my own page because it’s quicker to scan, and identify posts of interest. But that might be too few.

There seems to be some loose connection between increasing the number of posts and using excerpts, but the data set is really too small to draw any actual conclusions… I did check other prominent bloggers, but since there are thousands of blogs, why not do your own check, and let me know the results in the comments! That’d be interesting.

Techniques: 5 ways to speed up Wordpress

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The last few weeks haven’t been the happiest time for my blog because of hosting issues, network problems, and server problems. But with them out of the way, I came across an interesting article on Lorelle on speeding up your WP installation. So I’m putting this in my ‘Sunday Projects’ category:

The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress
So, in the past 2 weeks I’ve had 3 articles hit the front page of Digg. Let me just tell you, the onslaught of traffic can bring a server to it’s knees. Over the last many months I’ve learned a thing or two about tweaking WordPress, and while this is not meant to be an exhaustive tutorial on how to survive a Digg, it will give you some tips that can definitely improve your blog’s performance for all of your visitors.

OK, what have I done? Let’s see, I’ve done five things to speed things along.

1. Unused Plugins: Or what do you do when you have more than 30 plugins?

On Lorelle’s advice, I moved ALL my unused plugins to a separate folder in my root folder, out of the way of the Wordpress Software. If I need them, I can move them back. If not, why are they are there? She noted that they will slow down a WP installation.

2. Unused Themes: 49ers?

I also moved my 49 unused themes (some of them quite hideous) to the same location. I don’t know if it made any difference or not, but finding the theme should be much quicker when there is one in the theme presentation folder!

3. My Sidebar

I cut down, removed, and converted elements in my sidebar. I cut down on useless stuff such as Javascripts to online services (I only kept Payperpost, Google Adsense and Analytics, and Alexa). I trimmed my comments and recent posts to only five items each to see how that would fare. Also, I decided only to have twelve categories after all. I simply copied the text from the front page, pasted it into a new post, switched to code view, retrieved that new HTML code, and pasted it into an already used widget. You can’t tell, can you? I also did the same thing to the blogroll. Still can’t tell, can you?

4. Maximum number of posts per page

I trimmed the number of posts on each page to three. Most people have five or even ten, but I can’t at the moment. It slows the server down too much. So I opted for three. It’s not ideal, but…

5. Standard PHP Code

I am slowly thinking of following another of her suggestions: switching ‘static’ php code to its html equivalent to speed up things. For example, in this theme, a PHP call for the blog URL and title and so on would require three separate routines for the same information (ie. the same everytime it’s called). I’ve kind of already done it with the sidebar itself. I’m thinking of switching to HTML from PHP for some of the plugins that I use or use to have: such as using a real robots.txt file instead of a plugin, re-adding my signature as HTML with local hosted images, and so on. I already removed the footer PHP for that reason and the Archives page has become static HTML, too.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Jorge at Investing Adventures dot com for keeping an eye on things and giving me feedback when my blog is slow. It was taking 20 seconds or more for a page to load, right now as I type this pages are loading in under 10 seconds. But I’ll keep an eye on the load, speed and traffic over the next few days to make sure things are ‘normal’.