Mastering the “three Rs” was essential for knowledge workers in the twentieth century. Today, knowledge workers need to master the “three Cs” in order to succeed in our connected economy. Learn about the “three Cs”, and learn how your blog, the search engines, and social networking sites cooperate to create and enhance your professional reputation. Discover the limitations of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as publishing platforms, and learn the critical features of WordPress that make it the premier platform for sharing your talents with the world.

WordPress is an Open Source Web Powerhouse

WordPress 2.7 Make it Easy To…

• post articles
• add media
• add sidebar widgets
• upgrade the core code
• add and upgrade plugins
• manage comments
• add and switch themes

Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress on your web site should take no longer than a few minutes. Some hosts provide one-click installations (GoDaddy, Dreamhost). Others provide the Fantastico installer within a CPanel hosting interface (Hostgator, Geekstorage).

After installation, your site will display the default WordPress theme and will have a sample “About” page and a sample “Hello World” blog post.

Choosing a WordPress Theme

Much of the user interface and visual appearance of the site is the responsibility of the Theme. A theme is a collection of program files, CSS text files, and images that are copied into a special directory called “themes”. The themes directory sites inside the “wp-content” directory. wp-content is where most of the site-specific files are placed. Outside of this directory most WordPress configurations are very similar.

The WordPress.org sites hosts GPL-licensed themes which are, by definition, open source and freely modifiable. You can also purchase a theme from a third-party like iThemes, Elegant Themes, Graph Paper Press. WordPress Remix has a unique theme package specialized for using WordPress to build regular websites that are not specifically blogs.

What to look for in a theme:

• SEO: designer should have tags and titles designed properly
• Widget-ready sidebars: a feature of all contemporary themes
• Valid XHTML + CSS: this means clean, lightweight code for your site
• configurable: options for color, header, and layout
• Gravatar ready: supports comment avatar images
• spam-free: some themes come preloaded with links to the designers AdSense account, or worse, links to pr0n or gambling sites. All themes in the WordPress.org repository have been checked for spam, but “in the wild” you’ll need to do your own hand-checking and validation.

Optimum WordPress Configuration Settings

“Out of the box”, WordPress works just fine, but it will be plain and not optimized for the search engines. We fixed the appearance by selecting and tweaking the theme. There are several other settings that we need to edit to make the site run optimally.

Title and Description

In the General settings you set the name of the site and the description. Be sure to include the most important keyphrases for your site as these words will probably be on every page. On this settings page you’ll also set the Timezone, and whether your site accepts new registrations of subscribers and authors.

Home Page Settings

In the Reading settings you select if the front page (home page) is a static page or a series of recent blog posts. You also set the number of posts per page that will display.

Permalinks

To get fancy search engine optimized URLs you need to set the Permalinks to something other than the default ?p=999. Permalinks should include realwords and descriptive keyphrases that tell the search engine what a page is about. I set my Permalinks to /%post_id%/%postname%/ this gives each post a unique ID number and adds an optimized version of the post title at the end.

Comment Settings

In the Discussion settings you select whether your site is open for comments and whether you will need to approve each comment before it gets posted.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins add functionality to WordPress websites. The WordPress development team strives to keep WordPress as “lightweight” as possible, leaving specialized functionality to third parties. WordPress currently has over 4200 plugins in the official repository.

Some plugins interface with other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Others handle media–making it easier to embed videos or podcasts into web pages.

Tony’s Favorite WordPress Plugins

• Akismet – comment spam assasination
• All in One SEO Pack – handles titles, descriptions, meta-tags
• Automatic Timezone – fixes a missing (as of WordPress 2.7) automatic timezone adjustment feature
• AZIndex – creates an easy-to-read index of posts
• Contact Form 7 – simple, but essential contact form
• CryptX – encrypts email addresses so simple SpamBots cannot read them
• Google Sitemap Generator – automatically creates a sitemap and posts it to Google, Yahoo, & MSN
• OIO Publisher – self-service advertising on your site – sell banners, text, links, and more
• Plugin Central – provides one-click upgrade of all plugins
• PodPress – handles audio file playback and submission to iTunes
• Register Plus – full-featured registration page with additional fields, password strength, and more
• Snazzy Archives – Gorgeous Thumbnailed Post Archives
• StatPressCN – simple blog statistics
• WordPress Database Backup – keep your database backed up, features auto backup scheduling
• WordTube – manage your videos, create playlists, embeds full-featured video player
• WP Super Cache – prepare for traffic surges with this full-featured caching system

WordPress developers have created some gorgeous websites that do not look like ordinary blogs, they look like, well, gorgeous websites. To see some showcased sites, see the WordPress.org showcase.

Technorati Tags: website, WordPress

Visual search, with an iTunes-like visual scrolling (Cover Flow), seems like a the logical next step in the user-interface of search. searchme.com shows off an excellent demo of their visual approach.

Is this the next killer app? Should Google be concerned? It’s too early to tell how this will work in real life settings. Like the, thumbnail-focused www.pixsy.com, searchme believes that the future of search is visual.

The history of visual approaches to search, including 3D flythroughs and other graphical models, has been littered with failure. VRML comes to mind, in the 1990s this was going to be “next-gen” the 3D web. In early-2008, with broadband and ubiquitous dual-core cpu power, we still have not seen a visual approach to user-interface gain much traction in the marketplace. (The desktop metaphor–invented at Parc in the early ’80s, popularized by Apple, and copied by Microsoft–has been the last major epoch in user-interface development. We really haven’t moved much past overlapping windows in the past 28 years.)

Enabled by Adobe’s® Flex 3® software Searchme emphasizes that their technology is more than a slick UI.

“The Searchme visual search engine, which leverages the power and ubiquity of Adobe Flash™ software and Adobe Flex, is an innovative rich Internet application that could help fundamentally change the Internet search experience,” said Chris Rogers, West Region Leader, Adobe Consulting at Adobe. “It’s more than a slick UI; it’s an engaging search experience that emphasizes relevance and usability to help users more easily find what they’re looking for on the Web.” [press release]

I believe that people think primarily in verbal concepts, our brain has uniquely evolved to the complex task of reading in ways that cognitive neuroscientists like Dr. Maryann Wolf are just now discovering. While, plain text is not as sexy as animated flipping thumbnails, I believe that relevance and simplicity are still king.

Amazing overview of how technology permits the interlinking of minds.
How does this change who we are, and how does it change our civilization?

Where 2.0: Google Launches Streetside View with Tech from ImmersiveMedia

Virtual reality took another step forward when Google showed off their “Streetside View” at the Where 2.0 conference. Using a slick Flash interface you can access a ground-view perspective of a mapped area. If we apply the Law of Accelerating Returns, the resolution of these images and the density of mapping will increase one thousandfold in a decade. Imagine dropping into an immersive video projection of a Paris boulevard cafe to have your next team meeting. It’s closer than you think.

No one can tell you about Street View, you have to see it for yourself.

“With all respect to Google, it is Web 1.0.
” Roger McNamee’s seemingly derogatory observation of Google (TICKER:GOOG) – the greatest search engine in the universe, the God of the Web, the organizer of our cluttered online lives — was one of the many provocative lines coming out of a panel discussion hosted by the Churchill Club…

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