So you’ve read Wordpress Setup Part 1 and setup Wordpress so it has nice, pretty, descriptive URLs. Now you’re done right? Well, not exactly. Wordpress default installs are great for crawlability, meaning that because it has links all over the place, the search engines can always find a path to any article. On the bad side, they can often find six or ten paths to any article. Once upon a time (okay, before Wordpress 2.3), you had to worry about actual posts having multiple URLs, but that issue has pretty much disappeared. There is typically only one path to a page, but this doesn’t mean you can’t end up with duplicate content and wasted link juice.
Avoid duplicate content and add meta titles in Wordpress... »

Wordpress URLs by default aren’t real helpful. They give your visitor no information about the page. They add nothing to the information in your search listings. And they tell the search engines nothing about your page. That’s three wasted opportunities and it’s dead simple to fix.
Thoughts on choosing URLs in Wordpress... »

Q. What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming over the hill?
A. “Look! Here come the elephants!”

Q. What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming over the hill wearing dark glasses?
A. Nothing. He didn’t recognize them.

Q. Why do elephants have wrinkled knees?
A. Their pink tennis shoes are too tight.

Q. Why do elephants have flat feet?
A. From jumping out of trees.

Q. How do you spot an elephant up in a tree?
A. Look for their pink tennis shoes.

Unresolved Conspiracy Theory Question: why are there no elephants in the space program?

Why elephant jokes? Because I’ll be using this as a fun way illustrate a number of things in my upcoming series on setting up Wordpress and doing some basic search engine optimization.

By the way, these all came from a book I had as a kid. I lost the book 30 years ago, shortly before I lost my mind. These jokes are all that remain of either the book or my mind from that period. Of the two, I would really prefer to find the book.

I’ve always wanted to be able to try out Apple’s Safari browser, but I’ve never really had the chance since I own a Windows computer and don’t plan on buying another one anytime soon (though my next computer might be an Apple). So now Apple has released Safari in beta for Windows. Excellent! Or maybe not.
Read why Safari is not installed on my machine » »

I totally messed things up with a botched uninstall of Adobe CS3. Basically, all I was trying to do was get rid of the absurd and unnecessary Version Cue Server, which absolutely should not be installed, and Version Cue, which should not be a default option. I was hoping it might help my group manage collaboration on InDesign documents, but it is not appropriate for what we want (I want real concurrent versioning for Word or InDesign, but I don’t think it’s possible). So anyway, I got stuck in this thing where I had some parts of CS3 removed, which was causing other parts to fail, but I could neither repair the installation nor remove the apps. So I was stuck. What follows is what I did step-by-step to get unstuck. Fix your bad CS3 install » »

Welcome to my brain dump. I have no idea what will end up on this site, but basically, I’m planning to use it to put some fiction up that has languised on my hard drive for years and also to be a sort of external memory to keep track of various things I learn. The earliest posts on here are about setting up Wordpress because this site runs on Wordpress, so as I set it up, I just keep a running log, so I can go back and redo it for other sites or what have you.

Originally, I bought this domain with the idea of encouraging kids to write their fictional biographies—that is the biography of who they wished they were. Now it doesn’t seem like there’s any need for such a thing since they can post their writings on Facebook, Myspace, Blogger or whatever. So “raised by turtles” was supposed to be the tag line of my biography. I wasn’t raised by wolves. I was raised by turtles and as a result, I’m slow to get anything done, but I can hold my breath for a long time.

You know how they say you should find a focussed blog topic and stick to it? It’s possible that the fake-biography–fiction-history-memorials-wordpress–drupal niche is a little poorly defined, but it’s more about having a place to put my notes down, not about becoming the next inspiring celebrity hero like… um… Carrot Top. Yeah, I’m not shooting to be the next Carrot Top or anything, just putting down thoughts.