All About Leatherman Tools

I don’t know how important tagging is, both in terms of search engine optimization as well as in terms of site usability. All I know is that tagging is another way to provide users with access to information in a classified manner. When writing an article for a blog we have the option of “tagging” the article. The problem is that unlike categories where WordPress gives you a list of categories to choose from, tagging is more of a free style process that gives you granular control of how an article is found on your blog.

This is great and simple enough to use, but if you write a lot of articles on the same topic, then tagging can be a chore. Luckily there’s a great plugin for WordPress that makes tagging less of a chore. You can find it here: Simple Tags. The developer’s website is here: Simple Tags Developer.

Simple Tags offers many options that add value to your articles, in particular, the following are worth mentioning:

1. You can select tags from previously written articles.  This creates a consistent tagging experience for both the writer and the reader.
2. Simple Tags will also suggest tags from Yahoo and the Internet, this is really cool.
3. Simple Tags integrates with the All in One SEO plugin in that certain features are disabled if the All in One SEO plugin is installed.
4. Embedded tagging allows you to write articles and embed tags in the articles, by using the “tagging” element identifiers which are customizable.  This is particularly useful if you’re submitting articles to your blog via e-mail.

There are many more features that we’ll discuss as we develop this blog.

A the end of the day, all of us bloggers are looking for ways to improve our Search Engine standings.  This blogger is no different.  Using the WordPress platform for blogging is teaching me a lot about page relevant page components and their importance in making sure that the search engines can find your site.

The plugins available for this platform, continue to amaze me in their simplicity, both in installation and usage as well as how much they bring to the table in terms of getting our blogs properly indexed out there.  The latest addition to my plugin arsental is the must have All in One SEO Pack.

I downloaded and installed this plugin tonigh and have already easily configured a variety of the options available through this plugin and the options are teriffic.  From home page title, to meta tag descriptions, it all counts in the quest for rankings.  Below is an image of the options page associated with this plugin:

One of the things I wanted to add to this blog is an image gallery, specifically for the purpose of uploading multiple images and easily showing them to the visitors of the site.  Turns out that there are a lot of options around this particular excercise but it seemed that one of the most popular was NextGen by Alex Rabe.  You can find it here: Next Gen Gallery.  The forum is pretty extensive and can be found here: Next Gen Gallery Forum. 

So I downloaded the gallery, installed it (combined with the image rotation flash file) and activated it.  Turns out that there are definitely a few things that you have to take into consideration when using this gallery:

1. Prepare your images.  The gallery automaically creates thumbnails for uploaded images but there is limited control over those thumbnails.  The initial batch of images that I uploaded contained images of varying shapes and sizes.  This wasn’t done on purpose, it just happened to be the case.  The generated thumbnails were inconsistent with the uploaded images and cropped the images incorrectly.  I tried to no avail to fix the situation within the gallery, even going so far as posting a message on the forum but it just didn’t work.  The solution as it turns out is to make sure that all of the images uploaded to a particular gallery are pre-configured to be of the same size, the gallery seems to prefer 800×600, although, I’m sure it works for other image sizes provided they are the same for any given gallery.  The second set of images that I uploaded were all 800×600 and the thumbnails worked great.
2. Upload your images.  One of the coolest parts of the gallery is that it lets you upload images in a single zip file and the plugin automatically opens up the zip and grabs the images, this makes it really easy to create libraries and push content.
3. The good thing about this plugin is that it offers a lot of options.
4. The bad thing about this plugin is that there is limited documentation and you’re pretty much on your own to try and figure out everything and how it works for you.

Any additional information / comments / tips about this library would be greatly appreciated.

I finally figured out what trackbacs are and how to configure them in WordPress (not that it was that hard). Essentially, when you link to another “blog” that blog gets notified that there’s another blogger writing about it. In WordPress, the trackback settings are in the “Options->Discussion” section, and you should check all of the relevant options, see image below:

There’s a great article on problogger.net that does a great job at explaining this particular topic. I do need to learn more about them to understand how one gets notified when there’s a trackback as well as if there are any stats about trackbacks that can be quantified and measured. The article can be found here:

Introduction to Trackbacks

I have to say that installing the sitemap plugin and actually generating a sitemap using the plugin was surprisingly simple.  This particluar plugin offers many options which should be explored individually to make sure that the site is as fine tuned as possible, for now, the sitemap has been created (you can see it here: http://www.skeletoolcx.com/sitemap.xml).

Now what? The next step is to let Google know about the existence of the sitemap and its location.  In the Google webmaster tool section (after you’vie activated the free Google webmaster tool suite for your site), you can let Google know about the site’s sitemap.  Click on the “Sitemaps” tab, enter the URL of the sitemap and submit, that’s it.  Google says it will take several hours for their system to recognize the sitemap that has been submitted, that’s ok, there’s more to be done.