smart computer use?

I have to admit, as much as I like the huge overhauls on the admin side of Wordpress 2.5, I really need to just get comfortable with the changes.

Interface changes cause mixed feelings

As any computer use knows, when your interface for whatever program you like changes, it takes some getting used to.

I like all the new changes in Wordpress 2.5. It’s great stuff. But, at the same time, it’s different, and I gotta concentrate a bit harder when putting new content on my Wordpress driven web sites. Just today I started to feel pretty comfortable with the Wordpress 2.5 admin layout changes, but it’s taken a week to get that comfortable.

Examples of what I’m ranting about

For one, on the admin side, when making a new post, the Categories section is now just below the post. I can’t even drag-drop it to the right side where I used to have it. On several occasions I have simply forgotten to put my new post in any categories. After an hour, or a day, I notice that I hadn’t assigned the post to a category and need to hop into the admin to make the category assignment. Oh well. I’ll get used to it.

I am really liking the built-in tags, built-in galleries, and the now better built-in media handling. I no longer need a third party plugin to easily add YouTube videos, for example. I like it. At the same time, I still kinda miss the ease of use of Viper’s Video Quicktags, but my plugin still works so it is there and available if I need it.

Speaking of which, with Wordpress 2.5, I was able to update the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin using the simple built-in plugin updater. Nice!

All in all, Wordpress 2.5 is a nice remix and upgrade

Wordpress just took a huge leap forward with these new admin updates. That’s GREAT! At the same time, it’s gonna take some time to get comfortable with it. But I’m fine with that.

It’s great to be a computer user, eh?

That’s just part of being a computer user. Always having to jump over a learning curve to reap the benefits of the latest and greatest things to use on your computer. Yeah!

Edit: Lol. I posted this without assigning any tags or categories, and just noticed when reviewing the post on the site. Hehe. Good stuff. I gotta remember to scroll down instead of looking to the right when adding new content to my Wordpress sites now.

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I always like it when I’m using software and I see a little humor mixed in with honesty. A great example of this would be a small line of text I just saw in the new 2.5 version of Wordpress regarding having to manually update your site for daylight savings time.

I like this type of approach from developers of software. It shows that they recognize this issue, they explain what to expect from the current version of the software, and they humble themselves in the eyes of the users all in one shot. It even got me to chuckle a bit.

Good stuff.

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I pretty much am just gonna call myself out here and say that I need to pay more attention to this site. I’m not saying it’s a bad site. I like to add content to it, it will mature. I’m not there yet. I’m realizing that few things are gonna probably need to be attended to.

1. There’s no about page. I’m not sure if I just turned it off or deleted the content. But that’s a problem. I’m sure there’s gotta be at least a couple readers of this site that have dug around trying to find more info about the site, beyond the somewhat daily articles.
2. Categories change every couple of weeks. I’m still not liking the category structure, but I don’t want to change it anymore, and I feel what is there is fine. I also dealt with a bad early site setup decision by including category names in the perma-links, which was a bad idea.
3. Easier way to browse the archives. I need to make it easier to browse posts by title once you hit the archive section of the site.

Either way, I’m already working on improvements. Web sites are interesting digital beasts. I’m posting this here so that some might learn from my mistakes and save themselves some trouble.

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I like to argue that you should not use category names in your permalinks. I argue this because the fact that I did use category names in the permalinks kinda backfired on me quick. I hope to maybe save you a little bit of trouble.

Soon after setting up my first Wordpress web site, I found myself in a mess with my categories. I had been making new categories, it seemed, for every two or three posts. Only a couple categories escaped this rut and had more than two or three entries.

A quick digression, I also found out that a couple pages were nicely ranked by Google and sucking in some traffic.

Now, here’s the thing. I started realizing I was going to need to re-work my category structure to simplify site navigation. I also then realized that I’d be breaking the permalinks that Google had indexed by moving those articles to different categories, because I had included the name of the category in the permalinks.

So, then, after going into the options of the Wordpress site and removing the category name from the permalink structure, I had effectively broken the links from Google.

I actually didn’t care too much about having to do this, I just want to make sure I never have to do that again to another site. I can chalk this first mistake up to experience.

Google will re-crawl my site and re-index links eventually.

Please do learn from this small mistake. I’m glad I caught it early in the life of the website.

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If you blog at all, you write headlines for your articles. Have you put much thought into how your word your articles? The headline can be the most important part of your blog post. You need to spend time on your headlines and put thought into your headlines.

Over at RSS Pieces there is a great article about how to go about writing different types of headlines. A short quip from the article:

No matter how good your content is, if you don’t’ get people to read it, all that information that you are providing is lost to your audience.

If you haven’t put much thought into writing smart headlines, you are wasting a lot of the potential of your articles and posts. You gotta sell your information, and the best way to start selling your thoughts and info is with a well though out headline that grabs the reader by the shoulders and shakes them, saying “You want to read this, you must read this, you need to know this”. And then conversely the reader agrees, grabs their sore shoulder, and trudges on into your article.

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