Internet Marketing Course BLOG

By Dave Ingalls
Internet Marketing Consultant
February 21, 2010

Every now and then I get the opportunity to solve a Web site-related technical problem.  When that happens, I proudly don my “geek hat”, go under the hood and outline how I was able to solve that problem.  This time it has to do with WordPress and its use as a Web site and blog Content Management System (CMS).  I am doing this because I’ve seen several posts in forums wondering how to solve this particular problem.

WordPress is the first or second most popular open source blogging software on the Web.  Recent WordPress versions have added the ability to use the software as either a stand-alone blogging platform or as the back-end content management system for a Web site and a blog.

As part of the Web site/blog setup, WordPress provides a built-in mechanism to create a “static” Home page for the Web site and a separate “static” page that is used as the blog home page.  (I put the word static in quotes because there are really no static Web pages in WordPress – all pages and posts are created dynamically from content and graphics stored in an online database.)

Using this built-in mechanism is very straightforward – you end up with a Web site “home” page that mimics the standard “index” Web site home page and a blog “home” page that most folks name “blog”.  So far, so good.

Now, if you also structured this WordPress-based Web site so that all of the WordPress files are installed in their own sub-directory, you end up with the problem described below.

The problem: The BLOG RSS feed has an incorrect name (title) and the link to the blog “home” page is also incorrect.  (If you don’t know what a RSS feed is, please visit Wikipedia to learn about it.)

An example of what I’m talking about will be helpful.

Let’s say we named our WordPress-based Web site the “Internet Marketing Course”, and we named the  related blog the “Internet Marketing Course Blog”.  (Sound familiar?!)  When we look at the standard RSS feed created by WordPress based on the configuration described above, the BLOG RSS feed is named “Internet Marketing Course” and the Web page address it links back to is the home page of the Web site, not the blog. Oh oh!

The fix: Long story short, open the WordPress files “feed-rss.php” and “feed-rss2.php” in a text editor like Notepad.  (Both files are located in “wp-includes” directory in the WordPress installation directory.)  Then make the following changes to both files:

1. Add “echo ‘ Blog’;” in the location shown below to add the word “Blog” to the feed title:

<title><?php bloginfo_rss(‘name’); echo ‘ Blog’; wp_title_rss(); ?></title>

Note the SPACE inside the single quotation marks.

2. Remove all text between the <link> tags and then place the specific blog home page address (URL)

<link>http://www.yourdomain.com/blog</link>

If you’ve also had this problem, I hope this blog post helps!

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Internet Marketing Course Blog
Dave Ingalls
July 28, 2009

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): This IMC Blog entry is a bit different. I’m going to help readers who use Joomla and/or WordPress find out if they’ve got any Internet Explorer 6.0 (“IE6″) display issues with either their Joomla Web site templates and/or WordPress blogging themes. If they do, I also outline how they can get a head start on fixing those problems by looking “under the hood” of these 2 very popular Web applications. Why am I doing this? Because I just went thru this situation myself and I thought I’d spare my readers some of the pain I went thru finding a solution!

According to Market Solutions, 2009 YTD IE6 usage still stands at 18% of all Internet browsers. IE7 (42%) and IE8 (6% and climbing rapidly) are both taking share from IE6, but at this writing, IE6 is still the THIRD most popular Web browser in terms of usage.

So why worry about high IE6 usage by Web surfers? Because IE6 is NOT the same as IE7 or IE8. Without getting into the details, let’s just say that IE7 and IE8, along with all popular versions of the Firefox Web browser, know how to correctly interpret and display the latest underlying HTML, CSS and XHTML code that most popular Joomla! (content management system) Web site templates and WordPress (blogging software) blog themes use. IE6, however, was developed before these new browser software standards were adopted by all browser manufacturers. And with almost 20% of Web browser usage, IE6 can make your Web sites and blogs look more like a Picasso painting (no offense to the master) than the beautiful sites/blogs you see in standards compliant browsers to 1 in 5 Web surfers! Not a good situation!

What did I do about this potential problem and why did I care? Because this Internet Marketing Course Blog uses WordPress and my Internet Marketing Course Web site uses Joomla!

Here’s what I ended up doing after much surfing and trial/error.

» Continue reading “IE6 Problems-How to See Them-How to Fix Them”