I’m just back from two information packed days at WordCamp Chicago. After a conference, I try to find time to write down my takeaways. Generally my intention is to act upon the takeaways in a timely fashion. That does not always happen. So, writing this post serves two purposes for me: sharing the ideas and information with you and putting all the links in a place I can quickly find them later.
5 Things I liked/learned at WordCamp Chicago
1. KickPress – I kicked the conference off by attending Beyond the Theme – WordPress as an API presented by David Tufts. Later this summer, David is going to be releasing the KickPress plugin back to the WordPress communicate as a free open source tool that turns WordPress into an API-based content management system. This will greatly simplify getting your content to mobile applications you build for the Android and iPhone platforms.
2. Nginx – The techie in me couldn’t resist attending TJ Stein’s Developing Fast & Scalable Servers for WordPress session. I run my sites on self-hosted Virtual Private Servers and up until now have always used the Apache web server. After TJ’s presentation, I’ll be setting up a test server to see if I can get Nginx running in my environment. TJ shared this quote during his presentation that sold me on giving it a try.
“Apache is like Microsoft Word. It does 50,000 things pretty well. The problem is you only use it to do like 5 of those things. Nginx does those 5 things 5 to 50 times better and faster than Apache.”
3. Online is beginning to mirror humanity – During Mary DuQuaine’s WordPress and the Digital Ecosystem presentation, she discussed how Google+ Circles are getting very close to how we as humans organize our lives. There’s very little in our offline existence that we share with everyone we know. Yet online tools like Twitter only allow us to broadcast to the entire population. It was a presentation that got me thinking abut broadcasting less and focusing on targets groups more.
4. Hide date and time of posts that aren’t perishable. After our She Said, He Said session, I was approached by an audience member with a potential solution to an SEO problem I’m having. I struggle with the “Double your htc EVO battery life” series of posts falling in and out of Google SEO favor. It seems I need to find a way to hide the published time and date on those posts. Otherwise, I’ll continue to lose Google juice over time as the search algorithms look at those posts as “news” and thus somewhat time sensitive. I’ll be researching that.
5. Search for ‘search’ on Google – When you get done laughing at what the number one result is, consider taking a look at the awesome support page Google provides for webmasters. Nicole Yeary shared both these gems and more during her WordPress as Your Social Media/SEO Hub presentation. That’s the link to her presentation and it contains several action items you can dig into today! During her session, Shelby shared the following tweet that became a Twitter Top Tweet. Pretty cool for both you ladies.
If you attended WordCamp Chicago and feel I missed something, please use the comments to point us all in the right direction.
“Hide date and time of posts that aren’t perishable”
ALL content is perishable. Some of it may have a longer shelf life than other posts, but as a user it infuriates me when I find a post that has no date attached to it. I have no way of knowing how fresh or relevant the content is — was it written two years ago or two days ago?
This goes double for tech-related posts — an answer given two months ago may not be even remotely relevant anymore, much less two years ago.
I can see the point of that – I like being able to use the Google advanced search feature to limit my search to the last month or the last year, especially when I’m researching stuff about WordPress where version compatibility and features will be important.
But for some blogs, this is a decision that you can make with your permalinks. Do you need to have it down to the day? Or do you even need dates in your permalinks? I run several different WP installs at work and for various personal projects and I often don’t do dates there.
Good for for thought. I liked Pete Prodoehl’s idea as an alternative. I’ve also created a category page and I don’t think that has a date/time associated with it. Perhaps some middle ground lies in one of those approaches.
Tom, I may have found a way to satisfy both of us. I’ve added all my htc EVO battery life posts to a new category. The category has no date, yet the combination of WordPress and my theme now have that category page doing quite well in SEO rankings. So, If you click on the category you come to the site, see all three posts with the appropriate and original dates 🙂
While I agree with Tom that few things are as maddening as a post with no date indicator (especially for technical information that is constantly changing) I ended up creating a Projects section of my site with pages (maintainer by WordPress) that can collect information in a static-way, but still link to blog posts about the topic. I don’t know if something similar might work for your issue. Here’s what my Projects section looks like: http://rasterweb.net/raster/projects/
Pete – Thanks for the idea. I like the way that looks and perhaps that’s a better answer. That’s pretty much what Shelby and i have done with the “She Said, He Said” page. https://jimraffel.com/shehechat/
Glad to hear you had some good takeaways! As for the top tweet, that rocks!! An important thing to remember =) Â Thanks, again WP friends!
I printed out and read the Goggle SEO guide. Wish I’d found that about 24 months ago. Can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone trying to learn SEO on your own.