thesavvyva asked:

thesavvyva.com How to insert a hyperlinked reference to a Wikipedia article in your blog post or page.

Let’s face the facts; there are a gazillion websites on the internet. You don’t have the luxury of publishing a mediocre site when, at most, you have only a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention. Your site design is the web with which you catch your fly. Whether they stick and stay is up to your content. One of the main reasons Thesis Wordpress Theme has become so popular, is that it provides a clean, elegant design with enough flexibility to allow you to tailor it to any need.

Design – Thesis Wordpress Theme Version 1.3

Thesis Version 1.3 continues where previous versions left off, by providing stellar typography, user accessibility, interface design and search engine optimization. The overall look is professional, with sufficient gravitas to lend authority to your content. Elements of the overall design are endlessly customizable through the easily navigated user interface. Layouts and fonts are controlled without the need to fiddle with the site’s core code. Everything is laid out in an intuitive manner which doesn’t require an advanced degree in computer science to navigate. This attribute alone makes it a perfect choice for anyone deploying a site for the first time. The interface abounds with nice ergonomic touches such as the inclusion of an asterisk next to web-safe fonts on the selection menus. And let’s not overlook the “B.A. Save Button”! But even this trademark item is customizable, although Chris Pearson, Thesis’s creator, doesn’t advise it.

Changes from Thesis Wordpress Theme Version 1.2

Many improvements were added to version 1.3 however, there are three additions that deserve special mention. The new Thesis Layout Constructor allows you to mix and match the column order any way you like, maximizing the possibilities between one, two or three column layouts. Content can be located in the middle or either side of the sidebars, all with the click of the mouse. This is possible due to a new HTML module structure creating six new possible layouts. In addition to this added flexibility, Thesis Wordpress Theme now adds a Framework Selector which allows you to select between a page framework and a full-width framework. In full-width mode, your headers and footers carry to the edge of the browser’s viewable space. Again, the concept is flexibility without having to touch the underlying core code. The third major improvement over version 1.2 is a more robust hook system. Previously, if you wanted to customize your theme, you hacked away at the HTML for each individual template file. This process was time consuming at best, and a recipe for disaster at worst. Once you worked out all the bugs, you were off and running, but what if you decide at some point to change your theme? Guess what? You get to do it all over again. The hook system, which was introduced in version 1.2, solves that problem by creating one of the most critical ways to customize your theme without touching the underlying code. Even more importantly, hooks do their work while assuring forward-compatibility. Thesis Wordpress Theme now has thirty-one hooks which allow you to add and subtract content such as ads, pictures, design attributes etc.

Thesis Wordpress Theme And Search Engine Optimization

The whole point of a website and/or blog is to drive traffic to it so that you can share your unique content. To do so, you must optimize your code for search engines, without landing in the dreaded Supplemental Index. To begin with, Wordpress is designed to be very amenable to SEO, but even with that on your side, the way your theme(s) are built have an enormous impact on how search engines view your site. Thesis Wordpress Theme includes code that is optimized for search engine retrieval without any customization. With Thesis Wordpress Theme you can easily optimize the content of a page and manage keywords for better pass-through. Of course Thesis plays well with plug-ins like SEO Title Tag for more control, but out-of-the-box, Thesis handles SEO well.

Thesis Wordpress Theme – Pricing And Support

Thesis provides purchase options to fit the needs of every level of user. The basic package, or Personal License, sells for $87 and includes a single seat license for one production site and one development server. The catch with this package is that the footer information must remain intact, although this is truly a small nit to pick. For a little less than double the price of the basic license, or $164, you get the Developer’s License which gives you unlimited use of the theme on any number of sites and the ability to remove the footer link. If you’re unsure, and just want to dip your toe in the water, you can opt for the Personal License and then upgrade to the full-up Developer’s license later for an additional $77. What do you get for your money? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot: Theme upgrades are free for life. You get total access to Thesis Forums, free tidbits to customize your theme such as styles, images and the like, all available for download, and unbelievable support. This touches on an itchy subject. We all know that claims of superior user support are, more often than not, marketing hype designed to make you feel better about putting forth the green. Except that in this case, it happens to be true. The creator of Thesis, Chris Pearson is often the one providing support, often within a day of posting your question. But you don’t need to take my word for it, just check out the testimonials page.

Thesis Wordpress Theme : The Conclusion

Yes, there are thousands of free themes out there available for download, and yes, you can create your own with Wordpress template functionality, but why? If you’re a novice webmaster or just starting to blog, then you probably don’t have the requisite skills to do all the hard-core coding. On the other hand, even if you have god-like coding fu, why bother? You have far more important things to spend time on such as researching and writing content and managing your ad revenues. Especially if you are in the latter classification, Thesis Wordpress Theme will pay for itself rather quickly. There simply is no other Wordpress theme available that delivers so much for so little. That is why Thesis is one of the best choices of Wordpress theme available today. And for the same reasons, I use Thesis Wordpress Theme for my blog.

Thesis Wordpress Theme Version 1.3.2 is already out. And the newest version of Thesis includes more fantastic features that makes blogging more efficient. Some of the added features are: more SEO options and improvements, fixes on SEO plugin compatibility, improved multi-media box functionality, new page template functionality and hooks, design and layout changes, and MANY MORE!

What do you think of Thesis?

chrisabraham asked:

Chris Abraham walks you through how to join the fastest-growing and most elegant free blogging services, wordpress.com. Go from the simple acts of joining all the way through set up and administration. Become a blogger in less than and hour. Most folks only need the first 15 minutes to get you started. Chris is a professional blogging instructor. Enjoy! All of you have been asking me to update my step-by-step tutorial on how to use Wordpress.com as a blogging platform — please check it out and please let me know what I have missed.

The 404/Not Found error message is one of the most hated screens on the Internet; it indicates that though you, the browser, were able to communicate with the server, the page you need was not delivered either because it was not found or because the server for some reason was configured to not fulfill the request (which is happening in some countries with pages containing illegal content).

The page you actually see is not generated by your computer; instead, it is a special page on the server you’ve tried to contact. Many web sites create their own special 404 pages either for artistic reasons, or because the site owner wants to put specific data, like contact or redirect information, on the page. In Apache, having your own special 404 page is as simple as modifying the .htaccess file. (The only caveat: the page must be larger than 512 bytes or IE will not display it.)

In most cases, the 404 error comes up when a page has been moved or deleted from a site. However, in the case of WordPress, an annoying bug can cause permalinks to point to the 404 page instead of the page you want to have it bring up.

How Do WordPress Permalinks Work?

Permalinks are permanent URLs generated to point to your individual weblog posts, categories, and weblog lists. Other bloggers will use a permalink to point to your post from their own articles, or you can send links to other people via a permalink. When they are linked to an individual post, the URL is supposed to be permanent, not dynamic (changing).

The three types of permalinks WordPress delivers are the Default (aka “Ugly”) form, mod rewrite (“Pretty”), and PATHINFO (“Almost Pretty”).

Default links are formatted according to the default settings of a new WordPress install, and will work on all server environments. It looks like this: http://example.com/?p=N , N being a number. It is neither neat nor elegant, but it does the job. Pretty mod rewrite links look more like this: http://example.com/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/ . These permalinks require Apache’s mod_rewrite module, and won’t work on other server types. PATHINFO permalinks look like this: http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/ , and will work on other server types besides Apache.

Because you’re going from a dynamic to a fixed environment with your permalinks, a variety of things can go wrong with them. For instance, if your server includes Frontpage Extensions, permalinks will not function at all without doing a manual fix. Without this fix, any changes to the permalinks section from the WordPress admin interface will corrupt the Frontpage server extensions because it interferes with the .htaccess file.

Long permalinks can get chopped off as well, with only part of it working properly or with the entire link disabled. This will cause a 404 error to be generated – but not because there’s something wrong with your permalink, rather because the title is too long. You can fix it by editing your .htaccess file to add a line:

RewriteRule ^post/([0-9]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?p=$1&page=$2 [QSA]

You can also make a habit of posting URLs with angle brackets () on either end. Most email and other problematic software won’t truncate URLs formatted this way.

Permalink Structure in WordPress

When your links don’t work, it’s often because you didn’t update your Permalink structure. Every time you add a new static page to your WordPress files, you must generate and update new rules to the .htaccess (which in newer versions is taken care of through the admin control area). If you don’t get a page returned at all, even a 404, and you use PHP 4.4 or 5 with Apache 2, you should look that up in the PHP bugs and issues pages. This is a specific known bug.

When you’re creating permalinks, another strange thing can happen: your WordPress blog must start the process of creating a permalink before it knows whether or not the page you’re creating one for actually exists. If it doesn’t, too late – your link is already pointing at a 404 page. To repair this, you need to include a 404 direction in the header of your .htaccess file so that your rewrite conditions allow for a not-found error, and simply eliminate that page from your permalinks task. Try adding the following line above the WordPress rewrite rules, outside of #BEGIN Wordpress[...]#END Wordpress. Some plugins will overwrite this part if you edit the permalinks structure if it’s in the wrong place.

ErrorDocument 404/index.php?error=404?

Another solution is to use this following:

ErrorDocument 404/foo/index.php?error=404

foo = the directory you are using as a blog. The structure should be like this:

/foo/%category%/%postname%/

If you call a nonexistent directory, however, you’re still going to get that 404 permalink.

You can automate your permalinks tasks with several plugins, though. The Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) has gotten some good reviews, especially for search-engine sensitive pages. Google Sitemaps is a good plugin as well.

One more thing: if you use the xampp setup, your WordPress permalinks won’t work at all in the default installation..

The ultimate solution is actually to install WordPress 2.0.2; this new version has repaired the permalinks problem as well as a number of other problems.

Always double-check all your pages before you start working with permalinks, and after you’ve permalinked them. In some cases, you may have to delete all the permalinks and start over, but in most cases just taking a look at what you’re telling your server to do will prevent you from making a lot of stupid mistakes.

WordPress, the premier free open-source blogging utility, has gone through several upgrades in its life. Today it’s one of the most popular blogging tools on the Internet; it’s easy to use, powerful, and very versatile. It also has a very active base of skilled users who are eager to improve the product and to help out those who haven’t tried it before.

Though the Strayhorn 1.5 version is the favorite for many, it is not as stable or as secure as the newest version 2.0.3. The best part of the new version is the security patch; the new “nonce” security key reduces the chances of a malicious hacker finding a way into your admin panel. Besides the security patch, though, several minor bugs have been squashed with this version. Though a major upgrade to 2.1 is due out soon, the 2.0.3 is something you should definitely download and install if only because of the security fixes, which were actually backported from the major upgrade files.

In addition to the 2.0.3 install, you should be aware that some bugs have already been found, and that a plugin will need to be installed to repair those bugs. If you modify any of the files that this patch plugin fixes, you’ll need to either merge the changes with the new files or make those changes manually once again. You can find these issues by running a diff to locate changes; if the only changes you find are your own, then you’re fine, and otherwise you’ll need to merge them manually into the new files.

The short list of what WordPress 2.0.3 fixes includes:

•Small performance enhancements

•Movable Type / Typepad importer fix

•Enclosure (podcasting) fix

•The aforementioned security enhancements (nonces)

One mostly annoying bug shipped with 2.0.3 as well. It gives you an “Are You Sure?” dialog when you edit comments, and adds a backslash before each quotation mark in the post you’re editing. Make certain to download the patch.

What’s Up With The Security Problem?

The security problem seems minor, but the WordPress team is fixing it before it grows into something major. It’s a bug that takes advantage of the cookie you download when you sign into WordPress. The cookie in question prevents anyone unauthorized from accessing your admin panel. It’s tied to your user account, and verifies that you are the authorized administrator of the account you’re working on.

The bug that’s being fixed is one that takes advantage of a sociological trick. If someone created a link or a form pointing to your WordPress admin account, they might possibly be able to trick you into clicking the link. In the case of the one here, you delete a post. This sounds both minor and highly unlikely; but a small ***** in the door can be exploited later by a dedicated hacker. And this is also the kind of bug that, a few years ago, allowed a hacker access to the Microsoft databases, from which he stole portions of the Longhorn and other codes. So yes, you do need to take it seriously.

WordPress had ensured you were safe from this kind of hacking by using a utility called HTTPREFERER. But this utility has some issues. For instance, with JavaScript in Internet Explorer, it can be spoofed. In addition, certain firewalls and proxies can strip the information it’s supposed to carry out, causing some people to be unable to use their WordPress admin accounts the way they’re supposed to be able to.

Now, instead of the HTTPREFERER, a nonce is used; this is a number used once. It’s like a password that changes every twelve hours, and is valid for twenty-four hours. The nonce is unique to the specific WordPress install being used, the WordPress user logged in, the action, the object of the action, and the 24-hour time of the action. When any of these is changed, the nonce is no longer valid. All plugin authors will have to ensure the nonce is added to their forms and other interactive capabilities that may be affected.

Upgrading from WordPress 2.0.2 to 2.0.3

As with any upgrade, the first thing you should do is back up everything: the files in your WordPress directory, the database plugin with any changes, and any data you have added should be backed up as well. In addition, it might be a good idea to do a second backup of your entire WordPress directory just in case something goes wrong with your install.

Now remove the wp-admin directory entirely. Also remove the wp-includes directory, except for any translation and language files or directories you may have added; add these files to the backup files you created earlier. Finally, remove all the files where WordPress is installed with the exception of the file http://wp-config.php.

Now you’re ready to start your install. Download and unpack the 2.0.3 version in a separate install directory. You want to make sure you can control files and directories you copy over. Now install the new wp-admin and wp-includes directories.

Install the rest of the files of the top directory, with the exception of the http://wp-config-sample.php file.

Now enter the admin panel. You should see the following message: “Your database is out of date. Please upgrade.” Follow the link provided to update the database, and follow the directions there. Now remove the files wp-admin/upgrade.php and wp-admin/install.php. Download the plugin fix; add it and activate it. Replace your backup files where they need to be, and do the comparisons if you’ve modified any of your earlier files. This should take care of the whole thing.

For geeks, there is also an upgrade package that only includes the changed files. Look for it under Changes Diff (2.0.2 > 2.0.3). It consists of a zip file that is much quicker to install, but you should be certain you can handle it before using it.