None of the News that’s Fit to Print

By default Firefox comes with a popup blocker enabled that prevents popups from automatically opening, that is the ones that you don’t specifically request, but that open just because you visit a page. So that’s fine. That problem is solved. However, many sites make good use of popups to improve your user experience, such as showing a large version of a product picture without making you navigate away from the page with product information.
Unfortunately, quite often lazy or stupid developers inadvertently make these popups incredibly annoying as well. You end up with a window open that is not resizeable, has no navigation, and is missing all sorts of information. In the least objectionable case, this means an image that is slightly cropped. More commonly, it means a page that is incomprehensible because you can’t read what’s there, can’t see even the important part of the image all at once, or worst of all, that has necessary links which then take you away to pages intended to be viewed in the full browser, but now you’re stuck in that little window. That has always annoyed me beyond reason, but I’m sort of a curmudgeon.
» Read on to fix popup annoyances in Firefox »

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.
»Read on to master duplicate content and 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.
»Read more about Friendly 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 »