Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

Refresh

laelene Posted in general blog,Tags: , , , , ,
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It’s time for a change again. I decided this morning that I needed to update my blog theme so I could make use of a horizontal menu bar again. While I enjoyed the look of the theme I was using, it wasn’t working the way I want it to anymore. How I manage the blog evolves all the time, and so the look and organization of it gets an overhaul too. The next time I make a change, it’ll probably be to allow dropdown menus, but for now the single menu bar approach will work just fine.

little fat notebook blog with page style wordpress theme

This new look will hopefully make it easier to find my FSOT page and key categories like “how tos” and “reviews.” I also like some of the flourishes, like that super cool tiger image that makes up the comment box and the pretty Japanese kanji sprinkled throughout. I played around with the stylesheet a bit so it’s more customized for me (mainly just made the link color more visible in the post, since it was hard to tell any text was a link before). One of these days I really need to learn CSS so I can be more versatile in my editing. And when I really feel like treating myself, I’m totally getting a custom theme created. One day…

little fat notebook blog with ink and wash wordpress theme

365great Day 348: WordPress

laelene Posted in 365great,Tags: , , , , ,
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365great day 348: wordpressMy absolute favorite blogging platform is WordPress. It’s simple enough for anyone to use, yet extremely powerful for more robust needs. I’ve been maintaining my blog with it for years and the features just keep growing. It’s professional and constantly improving. You can create and manage your own website through their interface, sharing whatever content you please. You can go with WordPress.com if you just want to dabble and don’t need your own domain. Or if you’ve got your own domain, WordPress.org makes it easy to put together a wonderful site. Best of all, it’s all for free! Such great offerings. 🙂

How to: Change WordPress Permalinks

laelene Posted in how to guides,Tags: , , , , , , , ,
4

Whew! Just went through quite the headache’s worth of trouble trying to optimize my site and I want to save YOU the same trouble. Here’s a walk-through of how to ensure your old links redirect to your new links and nothing else breaks in between! (Note that this tutorial is for self-hosted WordPress blogs.)

You can read through the lessons I learned along the way, or skip straight to the step-by-step.

It started when I read about why you shouldn’t have dates in your permalink structure. This got me thinking and I agreed that most bloggers should strive for timeless content (plus I want more people clicking through from search results). People may be deterred if they see your post is “old” but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to their needs! So, I decided to make the leap from https://maryqin.com/[year]/[month]/[postname]/ to just https://maryqin.com/[postname]/.

That’s easy enough – just go your WordPress admin and find Settings > Permalinks in the lefthand toolbar. Choose the radio button that says “Post Name” as you can see I did here:

wordpress permalink settings screenshot

Your links are now updated! But if you’re like me, you linked to your blog on other sites using the old URL structure. Users who click on that would get taken to your homepage and not to the post in question, so they are likely to get confused and leave. We don’t want those linkbacks to be wasted, now do we?! This is where a 301 redirect comes in. I was told to get the “Simple 301 Redirects” plugin but I found that it only worked if I input every redirect I wanted individually. The method for doing a “mass redirect” just wasn’t working, so despite the warnings against the “Advanced Permalinks” plugin, I decided to give it a shot.

I had actually found that plugin on my own before reading up on tutorials and I probably should have just gone with it from the start. Oh well, at least I’ve figured it out now! Once I activated Advanced Permalinks, I went back to Settings > Permalinks and there were some new options available. I couldn’t figure it out on my own, so I found an article that helped me understand what to do. I went to Migration up top and put in “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/” (my old permalink structure) and BAM my links were redirecting to the new ones. Only later did I notice that my categories had broken!!

Sooo it was back to troubleshooting. I managed to figure out that it was indeed this plugin causing the issue, so I looked for a way around it. Luckily, I came across a helpful article in the support forum that showed me a quick recode was all I needed: see steps 5-7 below.

Here is the entire process broken down:

Step 1: Download & activate Advanced Permalinks plugin.

Step 2: Go to Settings > Permalinks and choose “Migration” along the top.

Step 3: In the “Old Permalink” box, input your old structure, i.e. /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/, and click Add.

Step 4: Test links with the old permalink structure to ensure they are redirecting properly. Your categories are likely broken at this point (if not, yay, you’re done!).

Step 5: To fix the broken category links, go to Plugins > Editor and choose Advanced Permalinks in the top right dropdown (it might already be open since plugins are arranged alphabetically).

Step 6: Make sure the file open is “advanced-permalinks/advanced-permalinks.php” and search for “$this->add_filter (‘category_rewrite_rules’);

Step 7: Add // in front so that you have “//$this->add_filter (‘category_rewrite_rules’);” and click Update File. Done!

Now your links should all be working and the categories won’t be broken. If you run across any other issues, let me know and we can troubleshoot together!

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