Jaymin Patel » KAPISH

New WordPress Theme – Optimized and SEO Friendly

Jaymin Patel — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:01:35 +0000

I’ve subscribed to many Theme Blogs’ RSS Feeds. They publish a few posts every week featuring WordPress Themes free as well as paid. And every time I take a look at new designs, I want something like that on my blog too!. I was used to design this blog theme every month and was not satisfied until now.

Before I start designing this blog, I started taking notes from different blog themes. Mostly all themes have two and three columns layout which is very very common. My very first note was “I do not want two/three columns theme”. So I started designing HTML site with SlideDeck and Google Fonts API. I started with index.html, single.html, 404.html, archive.html and search.html. I designed my logo which is also very simple and optimized for web.

When I had all HTML files ready, I started working on SEO. Remember!! Page Titles are so important?

I installed Google Page Speed and YSlow!. I mostly profile my html pages on Google Page Speed.

Google Page Speed highly recommends,

One HTTP request for CSS
One HTTP request for JS
No whitespaces/empty lines in HTML
Compressed CSS and JS
Add Expiration Headers for JS and CSS

I am using SlideDeck Slider so I had SlideDeck CSS and my theme CSS. How could you make one HTTP request for two different files? I could think of two options:

Copy two files into one file and compress
Follow wp-admin/load-styles.php which reads so many files and compress them

I chose second option because if I upgrade SlideDeck, I will have to do exercise again. With the second option, I can just drop the file at the correct location and I’m done. I did same thing with JS files too which reads jQuery, Google Analytics and some JS code that I wrote to support this theme.

I also added mod_expire lines in my .htaccess file that tells browsers to load resources (CSS/JS/Graphics from cache if not expired). Google recommends expiration should be at least 1 week.

#Expiration ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 week" ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 week" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 week" ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 week" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 week" #End Expiration

I removed all white spaces and line breaks from my Theme files (Not sure how much that makes difference but will definitely reduce the size of the document). I also compressed JS/CSS using TextMate and YUI Compressor Bundle. I added alt text, height and width to all images I am using currently.

Compressing JS/CSS and one HTTP request for JS/CSS was helping a lot. After installing W3 Total Cache plugin, ranking went up and up.

My blog theme is not too heavy with loaded sidebars and fancy headers and footers but I smile when I see Google Page Speed Tool gives me 94 out of 100.

I want to thank the followings:

If you like this theme, contact me and I will bundle it for you.

WordPress MU: accessing blogs from dropdown in admin bar

Jaymin Patel — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:50:39 +0000

function my_blogs_listing($actions) {

global $current_user;

$blogs = get_blogs_of_user( $current_user->ID );

$actions["#"] = array("*** My Blogs ***", 'edit_dashboard');

foreach ($blogs as $blog) {

$actions["{$blog->siteurl}/wp-admin/"] = array($blog->blogname, 'level_7');

}

return $actions;

}

add_filter('favorite_actions', 'my_blogs_listing');

This code snippet (can be used as a plugin) adds list of blogs that user has access to on MU site. Blogname links to blog’s wp-admin, saving you time.

I'm attending WordCampNYC!

Jaymin Patel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:44:50 +0000

WordPress MU Site Upgrade Bug: Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it

Jaymin Patel — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:37:40 +0000

I was upgrading mu site to 2.8.4. I went to Site Admin -> Upgrade and hit Upgrade Site button. It worked for first 25 – 30 blogs and then died with message

Warning! Problem upgrading . Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.

Error message: 200: Operation timed out after 3 seconds with 0 bytes received

This is what I did to fix my problem

I opened wp-admin/wpmu-upgrade-site.php and wp-includes/http.php

function &_getTransport( $args = array() ) {

on line number 94 of wp-includes/http.php, wordpress tests different http request methods exist on your server during upgrade.

1st test was the culprit on my server which uses http_request method built into PHP. I guess this method was taking long time to resolve DNS and so it was timing out.

if ( true === WP_Http_ExtHttp::test($args) ) {

				$working_transport['exthttp'] = new WP_Http_ExtHttp();

				$blocking_transport[] = &$working_transport['exthttp'];

			}

I did comment out this test and let WordPress start with next one.

if ( true === WP_Http_Curl::test($args) ) {

				$working_transport['curl'] = new WP_Http_Curl();

				$blocking_transport[] = &$working_transport['curl'];

			}

And guess what? All 150 blogs were updated in a few minutes without any problem.

If even curl does not work for you, you can comment it out and move on to the next until WP upgrade site works for you.

Good Luck!

WordPress: Calculate font-size in Tag Cloud

Jaymin Patel — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:38:49 +0000

$fontSizeUnits = "px";

$fontSizeMin = 15;

$fontSizeMax = 50;

$maxValue = 12;

$minValue = 1;

where $results is MySQL result set.

foreach ($results as $result) {

$tag = $result->name;

$tagURI = get_option('home') . '/' . $result->taxonomy . '/' . $result->slug . '/';

$count = $result->count;

$weight = ( $count - $minValue ) / ( $maxValue - $minValue );

$fontSize = $fontSizeMin + round( ($fontSizeMax - $fontSizeMin) * $weight );

echo "".$tag."
";

}

Date archive for a category

Jaymin Patel — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:52:53 +0000

There are a few ideas out there How to build date archive for a category. I am joining the race now.

Some of us, wordpress developers, may think this is hacky but I bet a few will like it this way because this works!.

This idea would end up in url like this

/archives/category/{category-slug}/yyyy/mm/

Lets get started and you can Download code here and you can put that in your active theme’s functions.php file.

I am going to use init hook.

add_action('init','my_date_archive_for_category');

We can check if incoming request contains /archives/category/ inside my_date_archive_for_category function. If it does, this is our category/date archive page.

Now breakup incoming request, and check every part of the request. We need category slug, year and month in place.

$request_parts = explode('/', $request);

Parts of request

Array ( [0] => [1] => archives [2] => category [3] => category-slug [4] => yyyy [5] => mm [6] => )

Here, we need to validate a few parts of the request like category slug, yyyy and mm.

$category_array = get_term_by('slug', $request_parts["3"], "category", ARRAY_A);

Now time to query wordpress.

query_posts(array('cat'=>$category_array["term_id"], 'year'=>$request_parts["4"], 'monthnum'=>$request_parts["5"]));

If we have posts, display them otherwise set a flag which we can use later to show 404 so visitors do not get confused.



if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();

........

endwhile;

else:

$is404 = true; /* set the flag so we know no posts found and display 404. */

endif;

DO NOT FORGET to put

exit;

at the end.

Putting exit at the end will end further PHP execution on your blog.

Do not forget to let me know how this works on your blog.

JSON and WordPress

Jaymin Patel — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:54:46 +0000

If you want to encode/decode JSON within/using wordpress, you can take a look at

/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/spellchecker/classes/utils/JSON.php

This file has Moxiecode_JSON class which can do that for you.

Sample code

require_once(ABSPATH."/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/spellchecker/classes/utils/JSON.php");

$json_obj = new Moxiecode_JSON();

/* encode */

$json = $json_obj->encode(array("key1"=>"value1","key2"=>"value2"));

//$json should have {"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}

/* decode */

$json_array = $json_obj->decode($json);

//$json_array will be an array("key1"=>"value1","key2"=>"value2")

Back in USA

Jaymin Patel — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:26:25 +0000

Hi Everyone. I’m back in the business!

I decided I will write about my trip the same day I was landed in USA but I was caught up checking 1,000 emails and work load.

It’s always great going back home and meeting your people. I enjoyed a lot this time in India. Hanging out with friends, family regroup, my grandmother and a lot! This year I relaxed a bit as well and some days were so busy. Kite Fastival, Uttarayana or Makarsakranti was too good. I fly kites after 2 years.

Still transfering pictures from my camera and an iPhone to my new MacBook. I’ll upload them to Flickr sometime today. There are 900 pictures. WOW!

I remember I was not quite happy coming back in Dec 2007. But this time, I’m happy. Jasmin and Jay stayed there so missing them a lot but it’s a matter of 8 weeks only. Since I was away for 3 weeks, first 3 days just passed but missing them a lot today. Do not know how these 8 weeks will go.

Jasmin was asking me this morning “Are you coming here on Valentine Day?”. I said “I want to but there is no chance”. I wish, I could.

I’ll have to update Jay’s blog as well. I did not write to his blog for last 4 months. That’s a big project!

So.. back to work now! Trying to keep myself a lot busy!!

WordPress: Automatically adjust for daylight saving time

Jaymin Patel — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:55:36 +0000

I have been googling for this and (again) I had to come up with my own solution.

function my_set_gmt_offset($offset) {
        global $wpdb;

        /* WordPress default sets to UTC timezone
        in wp-settings.php.
        you can change this line to whatever your timezone is.
        I set it to my timezone (NY)
        More: http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
        */

        if(function_exists('date_default_timezone_set'))
	        date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');

	$timezone = date("T");

        /* Now we have your local timezone stored in $timezone
        so lets restore wordpress setting as in wp-settings.php */

        if ( function_exists('date_default_timezone_set') )
	       date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

	$current_offset = $offset;

	if($timezone == 'EDT') {
		$offset = '-4';
	}
	else if($timezone == 'EST') {
		$offset = '-5';
	}

	if($offset != $current_offset) {
		/* update offset in database if new offset is different.
		   Do not use update_option since it will call
                   this filter again and cause infinite loop.
		 */
		$wpdb->query( $wpdb->prepare( "UPDATE $wpdb->options
		SET option_value = %s WHERE
		option_name = %s", $offset, 'gmt_offset' ) );

		/* let wordpress regenerate cache from database */
		wp_cache_set('gmt_offset', 'checkthedatabaseplease', 'options');
	}

	return $offset;
}

add_filter('option_gmt_offset', 'my_set_gmt_offset');

Share your feedback via comments.

Comments Pagination – WordPress – Bug Fixed!

Jaymin Patel — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:09:09 +0000

Actually, I did not create a plugin but I wrote a code snippet that did this job for me.

Add these lines to comments.php in your active theme folder.

$comments_per_page = 5;

global $post;

$total = $post->comment_count;

if($total > 0) {

$apage=isset($_GET['apage']) ? intval($_GET['apage']) : 1;

$comments=array_slice($comments, intval(($apage-1)*$comments_per_page),intval($comments_per_page));

}

Insert this code right after if ($comments) statement

$commentCounter = (($apage-1)*$comments_per_page);

$from_page = $commentCounter+1;

if($apage == 1) {

$to_page = $comments_per_page;

if($total < $to_page) {

$to_page = $total;

}

}

else {

$to_page = $from_page + $comments_per_page - 1;

if($to_page > $total) {

$to_page = $total;

}

}

Insert this line where you want page links to appear in comments.php.


'base' => add_query_arg( 'apage', '%#%#comments' ),

'format' => '',

'total' => ceil($total / intval($comments_per_page)),

'current' => $apage

));

I think this is it. It should work. Give it a try and share your feedback via comments.

Jaymin Patel » KAPISH

New WordPress Theme – Optimized and SEO Friendly

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