The default title for Gallery2 item uploads is the file name of the image. It easier to name your files well from the beginning from the safety of either than edit the URL, titles, and keywords for your item after they are uploaded. My naming convention for a file name is photo_set-photo_subset-people_or_objects. For a photo of my parents, my bride and myself at my wedding, I used “wedding-party-parents-rachel-stephen.jpg”

When creating titles this script does the following via regular expressions:

• Removes ‘copy’ (a common OS-X filename suffix)
• Removes underscores at beginning
• Removes underscores at end
• Removes double underscores
• Removes left and right parenthesis
• Removes all single digit numbers and letters
• Replaces underscores and hyphens with space

When creating keywords from titles, this script removes the following common words and inserts commas between the remaining words:

a, about, above, across, act, add, after, again, against, all, along, also, amid, among, an, and, any, are, around, as, at, back, be, been, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, came, can, cause, change, close, come, concerning, considering, could, cover, cross, despite, did, differ, do, does, down, draw, during, each, even, every, except, excepting, excluding, far, few, find, follow, following, for, found, four, from, get, give, go, grow, had, hard, has, have, he, her, here, high, him, his, how, if, in, inside, into, is, it, just, keep, know, large, last, late, left, let, like, little, long, look, made, make, many, may, might, minus, more, most, move, much, must, my, near, never, no, now, of, off, on, one, only, onto, opposite, or, other, our, out, outside, over, own, part, past, per, plus, put, regarding, right, said, same, saw, say, see, self, set, she, should, side, small, so, some, still, such, take, tell, than, that, the, their, them, then, there, these, they, thing, this, three, through, to, too, toward, towards, try, two, under, underneath, unlike, until, up, upon, us, use, versus, very, via, want, was, way, we, went, were, what, when, where, which, while, who, why, will, with, within, without, would, you, your

Usage

You can either edit the setup variables in the script or use URL variables (such as “?field=g_keywords&begin_id=3000″). That example would insert keywords (test insert, not commit) based on the titles of all items after item 3000.

Requirements

• Some familiarity with the PHP language
• Login credentials: server, username, database name, password
• Item ID to begin with (default is 0, that is “all items”)
• If you want to change my default title word removal listed above, familiarity with regular expressions

Download Gallery2 titles and keywords SEO script

NOTE: You will need to rename the “.txt” file to “.php” in order to run it on your server. Also this script will edit not only item names, but also albums. I’ve included copious comments in this script to aid in customizing it to your needs.

Anti-Spam Plugins

Math Comment Spam Protection

This plugin asks an additional question after a commentors name and email to prove that the commentor is human and not a comment spam bot. I currently have my websites set up to say “Enter numeral for the sum of two and nine. (e.g. 10).” There many other types of capcha’s but this is my favorite since, it doesn’t involve titlting your head sideways and reading backwards!

Simple Trackback Validation

This plugin scans any page that tries to add a trackback to your blog. If the link to your website does not exist, the trackback link is ignored. With modern blogs using pingbacks instead of trackbacks, you may want to disable trackbacks completely.

Category/Tag Plugins

Simple Tags

This plugin allows mass-editing of tags, and it can remove unused tags.

Batch Categories

With the advent of tags, many bloggers do not categorize their posts as strictly as they used to. This plugin allows mass-editing of categories. If you have many categories and need to move posts between categories, use this plugin.

Additional Content Plugins

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This plugin creates a sitemap for users (not a XML sitemap for search engines) that lists all posts and pages by category. You can use multiple pages, but I prefer only one page.

Popularity Contes

This plugin is great for listing the “most touched” posts. By “most touched,” I mean that views, RSS views, commenting and more statistics are used and weighted to decided which posts are most popular. It’s half science, half meta-science, since items on your home page will be viewed more than items that aren’t on your home page.

FeedList
You can create your own feed reader with the classes and code that come with WordPress (function wp_rss). This plug-in just makes it easier. I use FeedList to place my RSS feed from Twitter on all my sites and to place a list of the books I am now reading in the footer of my blogs.

WP Related Posts
This plugin lists posts that have the same tags as the current post. It suggests to readers other posts they might be interested in.

Sideblog WordPress Plugin
This plugin allows you highlight a post category to always be in the sidebar (for example, Tweets via Twitter Tools if you do not want to use Twitter Tool’s widget). This plug-in is used in the sidebar of RachelandStephen.

Twitter Tools
It took me a while to “get” Twitter. For me, Twitter is a subscription-based public chatroom. You pick who you want to interrupt your day. As someone who doesn’t post to his blogs that frequently, Twitter allows me to keep my website fresh with micro-blogging. This plug-in is used with SideBlog in the sidebar of RachelandStephen. I have a tutorial on how I prefer to use Twitter Tools in my sidebar.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (‘@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded.

In Alex King’s purpose, Twitter Tools is an archiving tool that saves tweets into his blog. If you use version: 1.2b1, then Twitter Tools can hide reply tweets (those beginning with ‘@’) from displaying in the Twitter Tools sidebar widget, but it will still save every tweet as a blog post. In my purpose of Twitter Tools, I do not want to save (and thus post) tweets that begin with ‘@.’ Therefore you will still need to add the additions to the do_tweet_post function below. If you do not, all tweets will end up in your RSS feed as blog posts.

Let’s not mince words here

If you link your tweets and publish them in your RSS feed, you may have noticed that Twitter Tools trims tweets at 30 characters and usually cuts off a title mid-word. It would be better to index to the previous space and trim the post-slug there. Replacing the code of the function, trim_add_elipsis (at about line 1030 in twitter-tools.php, before function ak_gmmktime()) with the code that follows will do this:

if (!function_exists('trim_add_elipsis')) {
// smjdesign edit begin - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
function trim_add_elipsis($string, $limit = 100) {
// shorten string
$string = substr($string, 0, $limit);
//find last space character
$max_char_pos = strrpos($string, ' ');
// shorten to last space and add ellipsis
if ($max_char_pos > 0)    { $string = substr($string, 0, $max_char_pos)."..."; }
return $string;
}
// smjdesign edit end - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As a bonus, I’ll tell you were you can change the length of the title, too. It’s around line 205 within the do_tweet_post function. Look for a ’30′ at the end of a line containing “trim_add_elipsis” Change the ’30′ to something larger, for instance 40 or 50.

When indirect communication is preferred

UPDATE: Alex has made ignoring reply tweets (beginning with ‘@’) a standard option within Twitter Tools. However, I still recommend changing the trim size as I mention above.

I can’t imagine using Twitter Tools without the following change. If not made, one will be listing half conversations in their blog. In order to ignore direct tweets (or more specifically tweets that start with ‘@’), edit the following code at the end of the do_tweet_post function (at about line 215 in twitter-tools.php):

function do_tweet_post($tweet) {
global $wpdb;
remove_action('publish_post', 'aktt_notify_twitter');
$data = array(
'post_content' => $wpdb->escape(aktt_make_clickable($tweet->tw_text))
// smjdesign edit begin - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
, 'post_title' => $wpdb->escape(trim_add_elipsis($tweet->tw_text, 40))
// smjdesign edit end - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
, 'post_date' => get_date_from_gmt(date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $tweet->tw_created_at))
, 'post_category' => array($this->blog_post_category)
, 'post_status' => 'publish'
, 'post_author' => $wpdb->escape($this->blog_post_author)
);
// smjdesign edit begin - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
if(substr($data["post_content"], 0, 1) != '@') {
$post_id = wp_insert_post($data);
add_post_meta($post_id, 'aktt_twitter_id', $tweet->tw_id, true);
wp_set_post_tags($post_id, $this->blog_post_tags);
}
// smjdesign edit end - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
add_action('publish_post', 'aktt_notify_twitter');
}

As always, you can email me from the contact page and ask me for the entire PHP file if you do not feel comfortable editing the file yourself.

The premise of my presentation was to show an overview of the process between layout in Illustrator and PhotoShop to coding in HTML and CSS. I find that web design is often segmented between the coders and graphic designers. I propose that the best outcome can come from bridging that gap. I do this in my daily workplace and try to show tips and techniques for others to bridge that gap. The time slot was only a half hour, so I could not go into coding detail, but only point to tutorials via links.

You can view the Graphic Web Design and Cascading Style Sheets PowerPoint (431KB) or view the presentation in HTML. Some support images and all sites discussed can be found on Delicious (theses are notated by “{link}” within the presentation).

WordPress 2.3, which was released back in September, includes among other things: a native tag system, plug-in and platform upgrade notification, post management interface improvements, roll your own dashboard, and roll your own RSS libraries. Many of these items have been addressed by plug-ins. Tagging especially comes to mind. I love Ultimate Tag Warrior and use it on all my blogs.

But I have to say goodbye to Ultimate Tag Warrior (well, not really, I hear there’s a UTW hack compatible with WordPress 2.3), because, as in all platforms, the best third party features eventually get implemented by the parent company. I recommending reading, How to Switch from Ultimate Tag Warrior to WordPress 2.3 Tagging, if you currently use Ultimate Tag Warrior and are upgrading to 2.3. I still had errors and installed UTW Theme Compatibility Thing but it did not work for me in listed related posts. For my related posts, I installed WordPress 2.3 Related Posts Plugin, since I couldn’t get UTW’s related posts tag to work.

As for mass editing and management of tags in WP 2.3, I am liking the features of Simple Tags. I have not used their tag clouds and related posts features however.

I think it took about as long to install WP 2.3 as it did to write this post, so check your plug-ins’ compatibility and then upgrade!

CUSTOM THEME NOTES:

Sounds easy doesn’t it? Well, not exactly if you use a customized blog and do not just download an upgrade ready-to-wear theme. You will need to change out all your UTW tags to WordPress tags (at the time of posting, this wiki is incomplete). Below are specific items I had issues with when upgrading:

• Be sure to update your tags.php with the native WP tags instead of the UTW tags–although with the UTW Theme Compatibility Thing plug-in, you should be able get away with not changing these tags. There are no where near as many options with the native tags, so you may have to change the format of the tags in your blog.
• I have had problems with the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plug-in since the category database schema has changes. Update to the latest version to fix this.
• Unlike UTW’s use of the tag.php for listing posts filed under a tag. The native tagging system of WordPress 2.3 uses the archive.php (just like viewing a category). Takes a glance at the code of /wp-content/themes/default/archive.php in order to customize your “Posts Tagged with ????” pages. It took me a while to figure this out in my customized themes.
• I suggest creating a mod_rewrite entry in your .htaccess similar to “RewriteRule ^tag/(.+)$ http://www.example.com/archives/tag/$1/ [R=301,L]“, since tags will now be under the URL set for permalinks in the Options menu (e.g.- http://www.example.com/archives/tag/)
• According to the Wp 2.3 ChangeLog, there are deprecated functions you will need to update in your template. Template tag permalink_link() has been deprecated in favor of the_permalink(); permalink_single_rss() has been deprecated in favor of the_permalink_rss().
• I like to use variable font sizes (i.e.- ‘em’ instead of ‘pt’) for accessibility issues. The WordPress 2.3 tag, wp_tag_cloud, has problems with the unit, ‘em.’ Use ‘smallest=1&largest=1.01&unit=em’ for the parameter to keep all the tags the same size.