I usually create sites in Joomla or WordPress, but the last nine or ten sites were done in WordPress only. So I will here gather several posts by people that also install WordPress frequently, to peek a little into their gardens and see what are they doing when they are alone with WordPress.
The first article was actually No. 1 on Google at the time of this writing for the phrase “10 things to do for a new wordpress site“. It was written by Amit Agarwal and published on his blog. The article is written purely from a programming point of view, and requires you to delve into the code of WordPress itself. It is fairly easy to do, should you be inclined to.
So, here is the article:
Things You Should Do After Installing WordPress
The WordPress tips and hacks mentioned below apply to a self-hosted installation of WordPress. You may skip if your WordPress blog is hosted on WordPress.com and not WordPress.org.
Tip 0: Change the Default Image Upload Folder
The default installation of WordPress will store all your images inside wp-content/uploads folder.
You can however use a different folder or even sub-domain on your web server for saving file uploads as in the setting screen above. This offers two advantages – your image URLs become relatively shorter and second, the size of your WordPress folder will always remain small and manageable.
Also deselect the option – “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders.”
Tip 1: Remove unnecessary code from your WordPress header.
WordPress by default adds a version number to the header of all your blog pages.
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5" />This information may prove a goldmine for WordPress hackers as they can easily target blogs that are using the older and less secure versions of WordPress software. To completely remove the version number from WordPress header, add this line to your functions.php file in the WordPress themes folder.
<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); ?>Tip 2: Prevent people from casually browsing your WordPress Folders
Since you definitely don’t want Peeping Toms to navigate your WordPress files and folders using the explorer view in web browsers, add the following link to your .htaccess file that exists in the main WordPress installation directory.
Related tip: Most Essential WordPress Plugins
Options All -IndexesTip 3: Windows Live Writer Templates & WordPress
If you not blogging via the Windows Live Writer client, add the following line to your functions.php file.
<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); ?>The WLW-Manifest function is used by Windows Live Writer to download the styles / themes used in your WordPress blog. Windows Live Writer users who do not use the live preview feature may also turn off this function.
Tip 4: Turn off Post Revisions in WordPress 2.6
WordPress 2.6 introduced Wikipedia style document revisions where you have access to all previous version of the document making it easy to revert incase you make any mistakes.
This may be a great feature for blogs where multiple authors work on the same blog post but 99% of WordPress users don’t need it. Post revisions also increase the size of WordPress wp_posts table as each revision means an additional row.
To disable post revisions in WordPress 2.6, add this to your wp-config.php file.
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);Tip 5: Disable HTML in WordPress Comments
The comment box is WordPress is like a basic HTML editor – people can use HTML tags like <b>, <a>, <i>, etc to highlight certain words in their comment or add live links. If you like to disable HTML in WordPress comments, add this to your functions.php
add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_specialchars' );Tip 6: Change location of the Plugins & WordPress Themes folder
With WordPress 2.6, you can place the wp-content folder anywhere on your web server. This may come handy when you are upgrading the WordPress installation because none of your existing themes and plug-ins will get overwritten even if you replace all the WordPress files with a tar downloaded from wordpress.org.
If you decide to move the wp-content folder to another location, specify the path in the wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘http://www.labnol.org/assets/wp-content’);
Tip 7: XML Sitemaps – Change the Building Mode
If you using XML Sitemaps plugin in WordPress, try changing the building mode to “manual.”
When you publish (or delete) a blog post via the WordPress write panel, the entire XML sitemap is recreated from scratch and hence may increase the overall time it takes to publish a post as you’ll have to wait until the creation process is over.
Tip 8: Turn Off Image Thumbnails in WordPress (workaround)
When you upload an image to WordPress, it creates two additional thumbnail images in the uploads directory. I don’t know how to prevent WordPress from creating image thumbnails but there’s a workaround if you publish posts via Windows Live Writer.
Just use the FTP publishing option for images and this will automatically disable thumbnail creation because the upload happens through a different route.
Also see this tip on creating a mobile friendly WordPress blog using Google Reader. The upcoming article will be about XML-RPC support in WordPress 2.6. Stay tuned.
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After these PHP tips, which maybe a little dated but still function, here are the more classical pieces of advice on what to do after you install WordPress. It was written by Michael Martin of ProBlogDesign.com.
1. Change the Admin Password and Manage Your Authors
WordPress gives you some random concoction of a password that you’re *never* going to remember so the first thing you need to do is change this to something memorable.
Manage your user settings via the Users panel, and you can add any additional blog authors here.
2. Edit Permalinks
By default your articles’ urls will look something like www.leemunroe.com/?p=396. This url structure is poor for SEO and poor for usability (makes no sense to your users).
By changing your url structure to something like www.leemunroe.com/25-hot-female-web-designers you can include the post’s keywords in the url and it makes more sense to your users.
- Go to Settings > Permalinks
- Under ‘Common settings’ choose ‘Custom Structure’
- Enter %postname%/ in the field
- Or if you prefer to have the category in the url as well, enter %category%/%postname%/
3. Upload Your Theme and Activate It
- Download a theme or design your own
- Unzip and upload it to wp-content > themes
- Activate it via Appearance > Themes (then just click on your theme)
4. Add Your Categories and Change the Default
When you install WordPress the default category is ‘Uncategorized’ and this just looks ugly. Assume at some point you’re going to post an article and forget to select a category – what would you want that post to come under by default? I tend to use News or something general like that.
- Go to Posts > Categories
- Click on ‘Uncategorized’ to edit it – change it to ‘News‘ or similar
- Add your other blog categories
5. Activate Akismet
Akismet is a plugin that blocks comment spam and if your blog allows comments then trust me, you’re going to get spammed.
Fortunately Akismet comes with WordPress, you just need to activate it.
- Go to the Plugins page in the admin area and activate Akismet
- To complete Akismet activation, WordPress requires an API key. You can get this by registering on WordPress.com then viewing your profile.
- Now go to Plugins > Akismet Configuration, and paste in your key.
6. Install Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps generates a compliant XML-Sitemap for your site, allowing the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN) to easily index your site. Every time you edit or add a post, the sitemap will modify itself.
Click here for Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
Now go to Google Webmaster Central and log in with your Google Account. On the first page, there will be a link to “Verify” your site. Follow the instructions there.
Once that’s done, you can then click the “Add Sitemap” link from the first page and put in the URL to your sitemap, which will be http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
7. Install WordPress Database Backup
Always good to have a backup in place. Things may go wrong with your server, or you could even make a mistake yourself.
WordPress Database Backup will backup your WordPress blog, and you can even set it so it will email you a backup on a weekly basis, so you don’t have to do anything yourself but activate it.
Click here for WordPress Database Backup plugin, or read a complete guide to automatic backups on Pro Blog Design.
8. Test Your Blog With Dummy Content
You’ll not know what your blog will truly look like until you have thoroughly tested it with multiple posts and all types of formatting applied.
Save yourself some time by using this sample post collection from WP Candy.
Import the sample post collection (Tools > Import > WordPress) and your blog will compile with sample posts including comments, parent/child categories and formatting, allowing you to thoroughly test it and make any theme alterations.
9. Add your RSS feed to Feedburner
First edit your RSS settings. Settings > Reading and you can edit how many posts you want to show in your RSS feed and whether they should show the full post or not.
Now you want to burn your feed with Feedburner. Feedburner will provide you with stats on your feeds and automatically ping services so your new content is updated immediately along with a whole host of other services.
Once you have signed up to Feedburner, change your feed subscription link in your theme. Place the following code between the head tags.
1 |
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Feed Title" href="YOUR FEEDBURNER URL" /> |
10. Activate your Analytics
Keep track of your users and traffic. I recommend Google Analytics. Other good analytic services available include Mint and StatCounter.
Optional
Here’s a few optional to-dos. Not as major as the above but you still might need to check them.
Change your Media image sizes
Change your image sizes depending on the size of your content area.
Settings > Media
Change your blog tagline
Your tagline may or may not be included in your theme but it’s most likely included in your RSS feed.
Settings > General
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Here is another set of rules you might want to follow to update your new WordPress installation. It was written by Ajay from the WebTechLife.com blog.
Top 10 things you must do with your new WordPress blog
Posted In Blogging, Featured, Google, SEO, Wordpress – By Ajay On Saturday, February 5th, 2011 With 1 CommentYou have finally decided to start your own blog. So, you buy a domain and install wordpress. But, do you know what are the things you must do after setting up WordPress. Don’t worry if you don’t, we tell you what to do.
The user ‘admin’
Most of us are familiar with this but we’ll state it still for the information sake. When you setup wordpress for the first time you are the user ‘admin’ with ‘admin’ as the password. Change it. Create a new user with any name and password you wish and delete the user admin.
Permalink Structure
Change your permalink structure, that defines what your URL’s are going to be. URL’s containing the post names are more search-engine and reader friendly than with the one’s containing something like “?id=12?”. You can have whatever structure you like but most people set it to /%post name%/.
Robots.txt
Configure you robots.txt file to tell the search engine bots to not crawl on the content you specify. Configuring your robots.txt is easy.
You can include these 3 variables in your robots.txt file:
- User-agent:
- Disallow:
- Crawl-Delay:
User-agent: - This is the name that the bots use to identify itself when accessing pages on your server. The value * is used to specify the bots.
Disallow: – Folder and filenames in this variable are the one’s that user-agent will not be able to access.Crawl-Delay: – This is the time for which the bot should wait before moving on to the next page.
Allow: – This tag is read only by Googlebot. If you want to block every crawler for your whole site except Googlebot, the command will be like this
User-agent: *
Disallow: /User-agent: Googlebot
allow: /Add # symbol before a line if you want that line to be ignored by the BOT.
Be SEO friendly
Optimize your blog for better search engine results. You can use a plugin called ‘All in One SEO’ for this purpose. Search it through WordPress or grab it from here http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/. It is a must do as most of the traffic you receive will be from search engine results.
Customize your 404 Error page
If any of your user accidentally lands on an error page try to give them something better and informative. You can include your recent posts or tag clouds. And if they are on the error page from through a search result, try giving them list of posts in your blog that are related to there search query.
You can use a plugin called ‘Askapache Google 404’ to do this. It converts all such 404 Error pages into rich AJAX forms. You can download it from here http://www.askapache.com/seo/404-google-wordpress-plugin.html .
Reduce your Site load time
Speed is one of the most crucial factors in determining your site’s daily Indexing Rate. Obviously, the faster the bot can visit your site the more number of pages will get indexed. So you want to reduce the load time as much as you can. There are many ways to do that but the 2 most important things to do are
- Install this plugin called ‘WP-Super Cache’. It decreases the load time of your site and gives it a performance boost. It will also decrease the server load so your site won’t crash when its getting high amount of traffic. You can grab it from here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/ .
- Another thing to make sure is that you have a good web host. Never pay an unknown company for hosting your website just because it is cheap. Look for one’s who keep their servers updated so that you are not the one who has to suffer. Our personal recommendations are Hostgator and HostMonster. They have faster servers.
Use Google Webmaster Tools
If you want you site to be optimized for Google, Google Webmaster Tools are really a wonderful resource. These tools provide you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. Visit this link to find out how to use it to your advantage http://www.dailyblogtips.com/the-bloggers-guide-to-google-webmaster-tools/ .
Add FeedBurner feed to your blog
It is really important that your daily visitors are able to subscribe to your blog and get updates directly to their inboxes, so make a feed for your blog. You can do that by downloading FeedBurner plugin for WordPress from here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-plugin/ . And don’t forget to add the RSS icon on your blog page either in header somewhere or on the top of sidebar which is the best place for RSS.
Install Google Sitemap
For Google to start indexing your blog, you would have to submit your sitemap. The Google XML Sitemap plugin will do 90% of your job of generating and submitting your sitemaps to different search engines. The sitemap.xml file it creates is compatible with most of the search engines. Download it from this link http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/ .
Setup Google Analytics
You can view and monitor your stats just by adding a script to your page. Signup for Google Analytics, they will give you a code which you will have to add to your website and verify. Now you are done setting up Google Analytics and are ready to monitor your stats.
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Finally, here is what I do with my WordPress blogs, apart from applying most of the above ideas:
I also change the height of the writing screen to 20, so that I can actually see something when I write or edit the text of the posts.
I create a new theme with Artisteer. If you are serious about making money with your sites, you must have Artisteer!
There are some 20-odd plugins that I almost always install with a WordPress site. Some of the will require additional setup, so you might be at work for your new site for hours in the end.
As beautiful as they are, the email entry forms automatically created by aWeber are alway vertical. Why aweber has no option to create a horizontal opt-in form is beyond me, but there seems to be a way. From Warrior forum I gathered this much:
<form method=”post” action=”http://www.aweber.com/scripts/addlead.pl” target=”_new”>
<input name=”meta_web_form_id” value=”YOUR10Digit#” type=”hidden”><input name=”meta_split_id” value=”" type=”hidden”>
<input name=”unit” value=”CAMPAIGN-NAMEHERE” type=”hidden”><input name=”redirect” value=”http://www.YOURSITEHERE.com” type=”hidden”>
<input name=”meta_adtracking” value=”FORMNAME” type=”hidden”><input name=”meta_message” value=”1″ type=”hidden”>
<input name=”meta_required” value=”from,name” type=”hidden”><input name=”meta_forward_vars” value=”0″ type=”hidden”>
<table cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”10″>
<tbody>
<tr>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Name:</td><td><input name=”name” value=”" size=”20″ type=”text”></td>
<td>Email:</td><td><input name=”from” value=”" size=”20″ type=”text”></td>
<td>Phone:</td><td><input name=”custom Phone” value=”" size=”20″ type=”text”></td>
<td>Website:</td><td><input name=”custom website” value=”http://” size=”20″ type=”text”></td>
<td colspan=”2″ align=”center”><input name=”submit” value=”CONTINUE >>” type=”submit”></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</form>
There is also a corresponding video:
Here is a good article on creating perfect Facebook fan pages.
Here are several videos on how to create a custom Facebook fan page:
And then, there is this video:
Ok, my personal blog should be used for my personal adventures in programming. Recently, I have started list building in earnest, through Aweber. That is not my first try, I already have one list of 1500 people and counting, but that list was gathered by people opening accounts and registering for a Jommla site. Now I want to email all those people through Aweber, and I want all new members of the site to bu automatically on an Aweber list. Therefore, there is a definite need for a plugin that will do add new Joomla members to an aWeber list. There is one such piece of software, and I’d just like to buy, but they sell only through PayPal, and that is not available in my country. So, I’d either be without it or I’d have to write it on my own. Being a programmer since 1976, I thought that writing my own module or Joomla plugin might be a good “software adventure” and fun.
Looking around I saw that there used to be a Joomla plugin doing exactly that, but it is left in the dark, not being supported by any means. But it was useful studying it, because I saw that I needed a plugin and not a module. From Joomla 1.5 the names of mandatory Joomla events changed quite a bit, and here is the list. Since the original plugin used event onBeforeContentSave()which now is called onContentBeforeSave(), the idea is to catch the event onUserAfterSave and see whether I could write a message “Hello, world!”.
BTW, you can also have a look at Adapting a Joomla 1.5 extension to Joomla 1.6, which is a more formal introduction to the theme.
Learning to Write a Joomla 1.7 Plugin
This link, from Andrew Eddie, caught my attention. but it seems I was running before I learned to walk. So I typed “write a plugin in joomla from scratch” into Google and here’s an excellent introduction to writing a Joomla 1.5 plugin. (Once I learnt that, it would be just a matter of technicality to upgrade it to a Joomla 1.7 plugin.)
Still surfing, here is a good explanation of what user events do in Joomla 1.5.
Simple approach to using databases in RadPHP.
Here is the introductory lesson about using RadPHP XE2.
To learn programming in RadPHP, you can go to the Embarcadero help page.
I have a Windows computer which is almost six years old and although it is not really slow, every bit of speed improvement is welcome. I regularly use FireFox, now in its version 9, and of lately, I also tend to use Google Chrome. I find FireFox very slow when browsing the administration panel of WordPress, so I use Chrome for that all the more. But, it has always been possible to tweak FireFox a little and here is a post that I found useful. I have applied all FireFox speed tweaks and it seems to me that this did speed FireFox up. I did not speed test FireFox so if there is improvement, it is not measured scientifically.
Speed Up FireFox 9 by Changing Preferences
Here is the gist of the article I used to increase FireFox speed:
Changing Preferences
Change or add the following preferences to the new values shown. If the preference is already set to this value then skip it and move on the next. If the preference does not exist then you need to add it:
browser.display.show_image_placeholders: false
Stops the display of placeholders while images are loading to speed up the page. Default is True
browser.tabs.animate: false
Disables all tab animation features (e.g. when you click the ‘New Tab’ (+) button) to make the tab interface feel quicker. Default is True
network.prefetch-next: true
This allows Firefox to automatically prefetch (load) the contents of pages linked to by the page you are viewing e.g. this site uses prefetch to load the TechLogon homepage in the background, making it quicker for you to view next if you want to
For pure internet speed, keep this setting at the Default which is True.
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 8
Increases the maximum number of persistent connections per server which can help speed up loading of multimedia rich sites. Default is 6
network.http.pipelining: true
Can send multiple requests to a server together in order to speed up loading of webpages. This is not supported by ALL servers – some servers may even behave incorrectly if they receive pipelined requests. Default is False
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 8
Sets a maximum number of multiple requests that can be pipelined to prevent overloading the server. Higher values will cause a delay before the first request completes but will make the last request complete sooner. Higher values will also cause more of a delay if a connection fails. The maximum value is 8. Default is 4
network.dns.disableIPv6: true
Disables IPv6 DNS lookups to prevent a significant delay with poorly configured IPv6 servers. Default is False
The last time I did something similar was to speed up FireFox 3, so I tried to find a video to make things easier.
Video to Boost FireFox Speed
Happy FireFoxing!
Current wisdom has it that every Internet marketeer must have at least one Facebook and Twitter account. If you have more sites, you should have more accounts — but that is the point of view I have never subscribed to. It is as if you ought to have had a new account for every forum out there. I do not deny that some people have done exactly that, but I also know that it is not for me.
There is that useful notion of the “brand of one”. I have first encountered it while studing the 10 day course from SiteSell.com, the famous SBI. It is a very powerful concept, but not for everyone. If you want to brand yourself, you should be honest and first convince yourself that you are worthy of being promoted as a brand. You must also be dedicated to such success, never faltering and doubting whether are you “the one” or not.
You should be able to be yourself and to be paid because of that, not because you are pretending to be someone else.
The case in point is the very notion of “Internet marketing” in which only marketing exists, and everything else — product creation in the first place — is expendable and neglibigle.
Anonimity is not the route to success. Creating false personas for this or that niche is a waste of time. You are either a succes or you are not a success. That fear of not being worthy is what brings so many people down.
You are better than you think you are. Start from there and see how you can help other people solve their problems. Give freely and create a debt, let them be forced to pay you and thus attract their energy to you, not yours towards them.
That is where you start getting rich, although that is not really the point here.
So Goodbye Yellow Twit Road and goodbye Facebook as well. Every link to your sites that I put on my site, is taking away my traffic towards you, away from me. That’s being sold cheap, for the “love of sharing” with friends and followers, 99.99% you have never and you will never, ever meet physically.
And oh, my dear visitor, I have nothing against you spending your time over there and talking about me. 46% of effective marketing is “through the grapewine” anyways.
It is obvious now that your site has to be mobile friendly. One of my sites, for instance, has the following proportion of visitors from mobile devices within a couple of days:
Operating System |
Visits |
% Visits |
|---|---|---|
|
Android
|
68
|
52
|
|
iPad
|
57
|
28.93
|
|
iPhone
|
53
|
26.90
|
|
iPod
|
6
|
3.05
|
|
BlackBerry
|
5
|
2.54
|
|
SymbianOS
|
4
|
2.03
|
|
Samsung
|
2
|
1.02
|
|
Nokia
|
1
|
0.51
|
|
Windows
|
1
|
0.51
|
So, here are the tips from various sources on how to make your site more appealing to the mobile users out there. The first take is from site CBSNews.com, written by Jeff Haden.
Eight Simple Tips to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
(MoneyWatch) My neighbor is 72. She uses her iPhone for shopping.
Do I have to say more about ensuring your small business website is mobile friendly? It’s fairly easy, and you don’t need to develop an app or spend thousands on programming and site redesign. Just take care of a few basics:
- Focus on critical needs. Mobile users typically won’t browse for more than a few minutes. Most just want a specific piece of information. Make sure major services, major products, phone numbers, addresses — the basics of what you do and who you are — are easy to find and view. A friend who runs a chain of retail stores estimates that at least 30% of mobile visitors to his site only come for locations, phone numbers, and store hours.
- Take out the Flash. Flash is cool in normal browsers but won’t display on many mobile devices. Consider removing Flash on pages mobile users are likely to visit; if you can’t, use Javascript, embed YouTube links, or ask your Web designer for other possible workarounds.
- Limit images. While product photos are important, “atmosphere” images are irritating to mobile users and typically increase page load times. Mobile users are more interested in the fast food approach to website visits: They know what they want, they want it fast, and they won’t pay (in this case, in terms of time and use of browsing) for ambiance. Make sure critical pages are to the point and clutter free.
- Simplify navigation. Links are not always easy to “click” on a smart phone, so a cluttered navigation scheme is definitely frustrating. (Admit it; you’ve occasionally struggled to click the right link on your mobile device.) Keep the number of links to a minimum and make overall navigation easy and intuitive. Don’t expect any mobile users to “figure out” how your site works; they’ll leave instead.
- Avoid forms when possible. Forms are a pain to fill out on smart phones (at least they are for me.) If you must use forms, only ask for the information you absolutely need.
- Take advantage of plugins. If your website was built using a CMS (content management system), check out the mobile plugins available. Some are free, others cost less than $50. A good plugin will optimize your site for mobile viewers without the need for a manual re-design.
- Use CSS. Cascading Style Sheets can control the look and feel of your site, ensuring it appears the way you want it to across multiple browsers and platforms. If your site wasn’t built using CSS, it makes sense to do so even if you aren’t worried about being mobile-friendly. Your content can stay the same, but how it is displayed will change based on the device and browser used to view it.
- Test. Check out your site on a number of devices. And try some of the online testing sites, like this one. Never assume your site looks great or works well across multiple platforms and devices, because it probably doesn’t — and if it doesn’t, you may lose potential customers.
Here is how to get your feet wet with PHP and .htaccess on your site. The following quotation is from a site called Mike Industries, from this post called Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes, written by Mike Davidson.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes
Four easy steps
Outlined below are the four steps to get this done in a matter of minutes, provided you are in an Apache environment and can run PHP. If you’re not, these steps can easily be adaptable to other technologies.
Step 1: Set up a domain mirror
If your site lives at
www.myawesomeblog.com, you’re going to want to set up a subdomain atmobile.myawesomeblog.com. How you accomplish this is usually pretty straightforward but differs depending on your host. I use Dreamhost and from their control panel, I can add subdomains effortlessly until I pass out from excitement. You want to set up your subdomain as a “mirror” of your main site, meaning the subdomain is really just pointing to your existing site.Step 2: Create global_prepend file
The next thing we’re going to do is a create a PHP file which will be automatically prepended to every page of our site. Call this file something like
"global_prepend.php"and throw it at the root of your server:This code uses a PHP function called
ob_start()to read in your entire HTML source, run some rules on it, and then send the output to users’ web browsers… all in real time. The first"if"statement simply checks to see if the user is coming from our special “mobile” URL, and if so, runs seven replace statements on the code. Here’s what each line does:
- Changes all URLs to “mobile”-ized URLs.
- Strips all linefeeds, carriage returns, and tabs.
- Trims multiple spaces down to one (HTML doesn’t recognize more than one space in a row).
- Changes any anchored images with alt text to plain text anchors.
- Strips all stylesheets, images, inline styles, scripts, and comments (including RDF).
- Tells search engine robots not to index or crawl the mobile version of the site so as to not create duplicate listings.
Step 3: Create global_append file
Next, we need to create a tiny PHP file which will automatically get added to the end of every file on our site. This is the code that actually outputs the page to the browser. So the flow is like so: Suck code into buffer, siphon fat away, spit contents of buffer into browser.
The code for the global_append file is below. Call it something like
"global_append.php"and throw it at the root of your server:Step 4: Enable prepends and appends using .htaccess
If you don’t already have an
.htaccessfile at the root of your server, open up a new text file and add these lines to it:
php_value auto_prepend_file /localfilepath/global_prepend.php
php_value auto_append_file /localfilepath/global_append.phpThen save it to the root of your server with the filename
".htaccess". If you already have an .htaccess file, just add the above lines to it.* Important Note: If you copy these two lines from your web browser, you might need to delete the carriage return and make your own. Sometimes a browser’s carriage return will cause your .htaccess file to fail (you’ll know immediately if it has failed because your site won’t come up).
Assuming your subdomain is live, you should now be able to hit your site in a web browser using the special mobile URL and see a nice, compact, imageless, styleless, scriptless version of your site. Voila!
Here is in an excellent infographic for the above process:
How To Make Your Site Compatible For Cell Phones
This here will be a not so large but growing list of the links that I like and visit: