Creating the image

The first thing you need to do is to create the image that you want to use as favicon. Don’t make your image too complex because small detail tend to get lost when resized to a tiny 16 by 16 pixels.

If you want to easily draw your own favicon, there is a great online tool called Favicon.cc. It lets you draw your own icon while the Favicon in the browser updates in real time to reflect your changes. If you use this tool you can skip the next step as the tool will handle the conversion to .ico as well.

Converting your favicon to .ico format

If you draw your image with Photoshop or any other editor, you will need to convert your file to .ico format. Modern web browsers will generally let you get away with using a png, gif or even a jpeg for your favicon, but to be compatible with older version of internet explorer and Firefox, you’ll have to convert the image to .ico format.

To convert your image, you can also use the Favicon.cc website, only this time, click the “Import Image” button on the left side of the page and upload your image. The tool will convert your image to .ico format and let you download the final product.

Add the favicon to your site

Then make sure you store/save your favicon icon inside your Wordpress Theme images folder. For example /patagonia/images/favicon.ico.

Then, assuming you save your favicon.ico file in your theme directory, add the following anywhere between the tags.

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/favicon.ico”>

Just copy that line and paste it in the header.php. In patagonia theme, you can paste this line right after the <link rel=”pingback”…> line.

To those people, good news! A little over a week ago Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress, announced the release of BuddyPress 1.2, which can now be used on single installations of WordPress.

To keep your current theme with BuddyPress you can add The BuddyPress Template Pack directly from your WordPress admin, and it will walk you through the theme additions step by step. Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can also keep your existing theme.

If you have many sites and you want to track the whole server, the best option is to use a single web server script. These are easy to install and run. You can contact your hosting support and they will install it in a few minutes. Some hosting companies have a 1 click install of these tools. Others come with stats installed by default.

Many different free and paid web stats tools are available. I will show two of the best known free web stats tools. I tried both on my own sites and I will show you how they work, along with their pros and cons below.

Webalizer:

Webalizer is a free open source script written in C. It has a very simple interface with a straight to the point approach. Some people like using Webalizer because it’s a nice tool for viewing web stats quickly. You can choose to have the stats either protected by username and password or open to the public. Remember the best part of using your own server based script like webalizer or awstats, is that you don’t have to insert any code on your pages. If you have a lot of pages, webalizer will track the activity in all of them automatically. No codes needed like with google analytics. This is a huge advantage and you also have full control over your stats.

Visitor tracking and stats information are GOLD nowadays. With Webalizer, you’ll be able to see your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly traffic stats. Also referrers, spiders and KB’s used. Sometimes you see a lot of traffic coming in and you don’t know who’s sending you that traffic. Webalizer will tell you. It will recognize most traffic sources. You can sort the traffic by Hourly Statistics, URLs, Entry URLs, Exit URLs, Agents, Systems and Countries. Here is just a sample screenshot, as you can see the graphic environment is pretty basic, but in terms of information it is a great script. It’s a “lite” script, which means that it can be used in very small servers and still process big amounts of traffic. You can get Webalizer here.

AWStats:

AWStats is a free open source script written in Perl. Some webmasters prefer AWStats due to its fancy report format. Although the type of information AWStats displays is similar to the type of information Webalizer displays, for some statistics the reporting values might vary between Webalizer and AWStats due to the different way they process logs. To choose the one that’s right for you, review both types of reports. One report may be clearer or easier to understand for a specific web metric. You may also have an aesthetic preference. The key is to find something that works for you and meets your needs and comfort level. Here is a sample screenshot of AWStats:

You can download AWStats here. There is a more detailed graphic analysis of both scripts on their sites. You can take a look at the demo account to get a better idea.

Many other web stats tools are available, and although we covered only two of the most popular ones, don’t be afraid to experiment with others until you find the one that meets your requirements. You could also look for a paid tool if you or your client can afford it. These two tools we covered are the standard scripts in shared hosting environments.

Make sure to subscribe to the RSS and follow me on Twitter.

Good luck everyone!

Download Theme

Changelog includes the following additions among other small improvements: Facebook Support was added. You can add your facebook profile and activate it from the admin panel. It will show up with Twitter and RSS. Another improvement is that options panel URLs were “sanitized” to avoid undesirable characters to display. This is to comply with the latest wordpress version security demands.

If you are upgrading Patagonia and your theme was manually customized, remember to save those changes before upgrading. Wordpress will probably release a feature to make theme upgrades easier in a coming future, specially for users who customize themes. You can also update Patagonia theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually.

Have a great weekend everyone!

This tool has seen several upgrades and face-lifts over the past few years. Google didn’t start with Google Analytics from scratch. In fact, it bought the idea from another company. They describe the Analytics platform as “enterprise-class features delivered on Google’s world-class platform.” One of the advantages of Google Analytics is integration with AdWords and AdSense. Additional benefits include multimedia tracking, customized reporting and data visualization. Perhaps its most enticing feature is that it is completely free.

Installating Google Analytics:

You need to place a small piece of JavaScript code in every page that requires tracking. Before you can use Google Analytics, you must register for a Google account. You can sign up for an account by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics/.

The code looks similar to the following fragment:

<script type=”text/javascript”>// <![CDATA[
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
"https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost +
"google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
// ]]></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>// <![CDATA[
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-9899851-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
// ]]></script>

They give you the option of using the legacy code, which lacks some of the features in the latest version. Google supports the old code, as many sites are still using it. Do not use both pieces of code, as this may produce inaccurate reported data. The next thing to do is to place the code within your site. Instead of placing this code into every single HTML or PHP file, you can create a new widget in wordpress. Choose a text widget and paste the code there.

By late 2001, Google was well on their way to claiming a dominant position in the search market, and everyone was looking for links. Because of the “link building arms race” that Google started back then, link building has changed a lot since 2001. Link building has become a discipline unto itself, and one short chapter isn’t enough. Bing has also been using a similar concept since 2009.

The first step in understanding link building is getting a sense of how the search engines see things. As explained in a previous article, all of the search engines use link analysis to help them determine page rankings and choose relevant pages.

There are only a few areas where the search engines are actively working to fight what they call “webspam” and link analysis is by far the most active subject in that area. As a result, it’s very important for you to understand their position, and what they’re looking for, if you want to create an intelligent link building strategy for your site and stay alive.

There are a number of ways to look at any given link that you find on the web. From your perspective as the webmaster trying to get ranked, it might seem that the only important questions are: What page does this link point to? What words are used in the text? How much “link juice” am I going to get from this link? Is there any risk of being penalized?

In order to understand the answers, you need to understand the questions, and that means starting with the search engines’ perspective. So, make sure to check and analyze the sites you exchange links with.

A list for all seasons: Wordpress developers have the wp-hackers mailing list to discuss core and plugin code. Sometimes UI/UX stuff comes up and gets discussed there, but there is a whole universe of discussion around navigation labels, gradients, button styling, templates, alignment, design in general and more. Designers need a list to call their own, and now we have one. You can sign up for the wp-ui list to discuss ways to improve the interface or user experience of WordPress, and to discuss progress on design-related projects for the open source project, like the design challenges we’re going to have.

Design Challenges: We learned a lot from the icon design in the past, and we want to do these kind of open design challenges on a regular basis. If we could do one contest per month, that would be ideal. As each challenge is posted, people can use the list to bounce ideas off each other and work toward optimal solutions. I’m hoping the design challenges will evolve to be less contest and more collaboration. We’ll announce the first one before the end of January, so if you’re interested, please sign up for the list!

Distributed Usability Testing: We started to try this out last year, and several dozen usability professionals volunteered to help get the program going, but a combination of scheduling and infrastructure issues combined to stall the progress. Having the “UI/UX contributor team” infrastructure in place, starting with the mailing list, will make it much easier to get this project going again.

Chit-chat: The weekly developer chats in IRC at #wordpress-dev have been very productive. We’ve created an IRC room at #wordpress-ui on irc.freenode.net so that we can have the same kind of “water cooler” for UI/UX contributors as for core code contributors. In addition to being a place where you can drop in and discuss core UI/UX (note: this room will not be a place to discuss the design of blog themes, it’s to discuss the design of the Wordpress application itself), we’ll set up a weekly chat. Choosing a day and time for the chats will probably be the first discussion on the mailing list.

A blog of our own: Once again, taking a page from the code contributor infrastructure, we’ll set up a blog for UI/UX updates, announcements, progress reports and more. This will be located on WordPress.org, and will be announced to the mailing list when it is live.

So, if you want to become a contributor to core WordPress by using your design skills and talent, join the wp-ui mailing list and get ready for a fun year!

Happy Wordpressing!