I’ve been into martial arts for a while, and found a great site a few months ago on self defense.  Yesterday I noticed the guy had published a new self defense ebook, and ordered it.  The book is awesome, so if anyone is interested in self defense or martial arts I’d highly recommend it.  It’s great from a mixed martial arts perspective, as it covers a lot of MMA training as a base, but then goes into specific techniques you can add for self defense.  Plus, the guy has a post on the palm stick where he mentions how awesome the Surefire LX2 is, which I blogged about the other day. 

But lets just ignore reality and assume that human pollution is not warming the planet.  Fine.  Since when is reducing pollution a bad thing?  Since when is saving money a bad thing?  Regardless what you believe about climate change/global warming, it’s just plain smart to utilize renewable energy sources. In addition to using renewable energy sources, all of us can likely save money by reducing our energy bills. Tools like the P3 Kill A Watt make it easy.

Right now we’re getting most our energy from countries we ought not be sponsoring.  When the oil is gone we’re going to be doing the same thing if we don’t get in the race now.  China is killing us.  We’ve got the technology already, it’s just that we’re not using it.

Finding the ideal WordPress theme for a particular project isn’t easy, and sometimes it’s simply impossible.  If you’ve got a static site that you need to add a blog to, you won’t find a theme that matches exactly, and even finding one that “fits” can be a chore to say the least.  I found myself in that situation this past week, and found the perfect solution: Empty Canvas, the perfect WordPress theme.

Adrian Diaconescu created this theme as an “empty canvas” to build on.  If you’ve got a custom job to do, but you don’t feel like (or know how) to build a theme from scratch, Empty Canvas is perfect.  You don’t have to spend hours trying to undo or modify a theme’s graphics and CSS.  With Empty Canvas you really do have a blank template to quickly customize however you like.

Don’t know how to customize a theme?  It’s really not difficult.  Check out the WordPress Codex on Templates to learn how.  Let’s take the sidebar as an example (which doesn’t show by default in the Empty Canvas theme).  The Customizing Your Sidebar link on the WordPress Codex on Templates page will show you what to put in the sidebar.php file to pull the data you want there…or how to add custom static code.  For instance, to get your “pages” and “categories” to show up in the sidebar, all you need to do is add this code:

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>'); ?>
<li id="categories"><?php _e('Categories:'); ?>
<ul><?php wp_list_cats(); ?></ul>
</li>

If you want to change the way the sidebar looks, or any other part of the theme, just modify the CSS file.

Adrian has also done some incredible work on styled themes.  Check out Visual for example…an incredibly cool theme for only $25.  Enjoy!

Many content management systems, like WordPress for blogs, e-commerce carts like Interspire and OSCommerce, Drupal, Joomla, etc. create multiple versions of the same page, with different URL’s.  That’s duplicate content…when you have the same content available on two different “pages”.  Search engines don’t know which page to rank, and the “link juice” you get from people who link to your site will be watered down…split between the duplicate pages.  If you’re using a content management system, it’s likely that you need to do something about this for sites you want to rank well.

To give you an example, some e-commerce sites have sort options for products.  You can click on a link to sort by price, in alphabetical order, etc.  Each one of these sort options has a different URL.  So when Googlebot comes along and visits the links, it sees multiple versions of a nearly identical page.  This is bad.  WordPress has similar issues, splitting link juice between categories, archives, tags, etc.  (Yoast has created a WordPress plugin to deal with this.  You can also use his Robots Meta plugin to stop Google from indexing certain pages.)

Getting back to the canonical tag…  Google came out with a canonical link tag, which allows you to specify which version of your URL you want them to index, as a solution to some of these duplicate content issues.  Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam Team, also posted about this canonical link element.  The problem is, IT DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK!  Read Here.

So what can you do?

1. Disallow pages/areas via robots.txt (this leaks a bit of “page rank”, but is probably better than duplicate content)
2. Add a noindex, follow tag to the header of pages you don’t want indexed, but still want “page rank” to flow through.
3. Block Googlebot from seeing the link at all by using an iframe or a javascript hide (javascript needs to be in an external file for this to work…maybe)

It’s not a simple topic, but it’s a problem that many webmasters have, and one that needs to be dealt with if you want your site to rank.  If you have any questions, post them in the comments below.

1.  Get yourself a domain name (register one at Godaddy).

2.  Get a hosting account (Dreamhost is cheap and easy to use).

3.  Add your domain to your account at Dreamhost in the “Manage Domain” section.

4.  Change your “nameservers” on your domain at Godaddy to the ones Dreamhost gives you.

5.  Click “Goodies” in your Dreamhost control panel, select “one click install”, use the “advanced” installation, choose WordPress, and follow the instructions.  Bam!  You’ve got yourself a blog.  Moving it to a new domain is another story though!  Here’s how to do so and avoid all the mistakes I made on my first blog move:

Moving your WordPress Blog

You must follow the steps below in the EXACT order they are presented, or risk having your blog flushed down the toilet.  Yes, you may be able to rescue it, but you’ll likely have poo poo all over your body from climbing around in the sewer.

1.  Save a backup copy of ALL your files and your database. Filezilla is a great FTP program you can get for free, and use to copy your “blog” folder to your hard drive.  Then, export your database to a file on your computer.  To export your database from Dreamhost, just go to “databases”, log into phpMyAdmin, select your database, select export, and use the following settings:

Click to Enlarge

The above will make a copy of your old blog files and database.  It’s a good idea to have this in case your move fails and you need to start over.

2.  Go into the admin section of your blog, and change the domain in the “settings” to the new location where you want your blog to reside.

3.  Go back to Dreamhost and export the database AGAIN, to a new file.  This time, the database is going to use the new domain that you switched to in step 2 above.

4.  Create a new database on your new domain/server. This should be a very easy step.  Just go to the database portion of your control panel and select to create a new database.  Take note of the database name, userid, password, and host/location.

5.  Import the database you exported in step 3 (your old database files) to the new database you just created in step 4.

6.  Go into your blog files you have on your computer (which you moved in step 1), and find the wp-config.php file.  It will be at the root level.  Open the file with Notepad, and change the database name, userid, password, and host/location to the new info you made note of in step 4.

7.  Move the entire “blog” folder onto your new domain wherever you want it to reside.  If you want it to be at www.site.com, move all the contents of your blog folder directly onto the root.  If you want it to reside at www.site.com/blog, just move the entire folder names “blog” onto the root.

The shorter and harder to follow WordPress instructions will tell you you’re done now…but you may not be!

I’ve run into two additional problems:

1.  If you’ve moved from the root directory on one domain to a “blog” directory on another domain or vice versa, you may have to modify your .htaccess file, ESPECIALLY if you’re using custom permalinks…which you should be!  WordPress will need to redirect their crappy URL’s to your custom permalinks, and it needs to modify the .htaccess file to do this.  But, it may not be able to modify the .htaccess file if it’s in a different directory.  So you’ll need to go to the permalinks section of WordPress under settings, select the “custom” box, put in your custom link structure (which should ideally be: /%postname%/), and copy the .htaccess code that will apear at the bottom of the screen to paste into your .htaccess file if it WordPress wasn’t able to do it.

2.  Your “file permissions” may have changed when you uploaded them to your new server, and WordPress may be unable to access folders it need to be able to access.  Using Filezilla (FTP), set your folder permissions to 755 and your file permissions to 644.  This SHOULD allow WordPress to function.  If you have problems with image uploads you may have to temporarily go into WordPress and increase the accessibility of your uploads folder to the likes of 777.  BUT, only do this temporarily, as it will allow hackers to upload malicious scripts in your comments!

Finally, go back to your old domain, and upload a new .htaccess file that redirects users and search engines to your new blog.  You can use this code if your blog was in the root directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]

Change blog/ to wherever your blog is now, or leave it off if your blog is going to be in your root directory again.  If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.  Happy blogging!