Ikiru Design

Last week, I finally switched my blog, Frozen Toothpaste, to a theme of my own creation. It’s unoriginally called “FTp_one,” after BWO_one on which it’s based. And though FTp_one will probably never be freely-available, I’m going to do my best to make any interesting aspects of it — sadly there aren’t many — common knowledge.

One of the best features in FTp_one is the Archives. I talked about how to improve archives from the WordPress norm previously, and what I’m about to explain builds on that. You may also want to find out how to show your archives page in WordPress, if you’re not certain of that process.

How it’s better

The Frozen Toothpaste archive began with the same archives.php file that is included in my themes (that’s the one with Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin built in). I added three aspects, however, all of which are significant improvements on that version. Because they’re still far from the norm in WordPress themes, I’ve decided I don’t want to natively include them in my themes, but I do want to make them easy to implement. That’s why you’ll find a link at the bottom of this article to the full archives.php I’m using at Frozen Toothpaste. This should easily drop into place in ANY WordPress theme and installation, though it may look a little wonky without the necessary styles.

Okay, lets discuss the three big improvements. The first is that there are words on the Archives page. This shouldn’t be half as novel as it is. It’s also notable that in those words are links to each section of what can be a very long archives page.

Secondly, there is a recommendations section. This is a very useful feature because, well, no one’s likely to read everything you’ve ever written to find the best stuff. The recommendations sections is great way for visitors to see some your best stuff and easily find out if they like what you’re doing.

The final feature is the tag cloud. Since WordPress 2.3 was released, making a tag cloud has been easy. The issue is that for established blogs with lots of back content, getting all of that tagged is problematic. Also, because many people are still running WP2.2 and earlier, I’ve decided to leave any tag data out of my canonical theme work.

How I did it

Now to the implementation. Both the “text” and recommendations section are enabled by the same basic features that all other archives.php seem to lack (for reasons I don’t understand). Essentially, most archive pages omit The Loop, which tells WordPess to get the words entered into the “Post” section for your archives page (as it does for every other page.) To correct this problem takes only a few simple lines:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="archivetext">
<?php the_content(); ?>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

These lines are essentially the basic loop that makes WordPress run. The first line tells WordPress to proceed if there’s text to display, the third line spits out the text, and the fifth tells the processor to proceed if there was nothing to display. (Lines two and four are merely to make it easy to style the text that WordPress has spit out.)

With this code included in your archives.php file, any text you enter into WordPress (as you normally would) will be displayed. This allows you to easily create and edit your recommendations section, because it’s as easy to get to as a normal page in WordPress. This also allows you to create links your category section, for example, by simply including a link to “#category.”

Finally, the tag cloud. As I said, this is scandalously easy to do in 2.3 and above. All you need are these two lines:

<h3><a name="tags"></a>By tags:</h3>
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=10&largest=28&number=30'); ?>

Here the first line merely gives us a title for the section, including the syntax so you can link to the section with a simple “#tags” link. The second line leverages WordPress’s wp_tag_cloud command to create the cloud. It also includes instructions that the smallest output should be 10 pixels tall, the largest should be 28, and that we only want it to show the 30 most common tags. All of those values can be changed to anything you want. (There are also other variables for this command, which you can find in the WordPress Codex.)

Give it to me

There it is: all the instructions you need to improve any archives.php page. And now, the whole page, as promised, for you to drop into any theme you think could benefit from a better archive. Download it! (The file you’re downloading is archives.phps, you’ll want to rename it archives.php before you try to use it.) Happy blogging!

I was working on another post (here’s the first) about improving your WordPress Archives pages when I realized that some may not even know how to show the one they already have. If that’s your situation, fear not: it’s very easy, and I’ve got pictures.

Essentially, to get the archives(.php) page included in the theme you’re using to display, you have to create a page with the Archives template applied to it. If that’s sufficient for you to do it, feel free to stop reading. If you’re still a little confused, read on.

Since I also don’t have an archives page (as of this writing), you can follow along as I create one.

First, from the dashboard, click on “Write.”

Then, click “Write Page.”

Title the page, I chose the bland but useful “Archives.” In almost all cases this will only by used to determine the the text that links to the page. It’s rare (but not impossible) for the archives page to reflect the title you gave it.

Locate and enlarge the “Page Template” box in the right sidebar.

Change the page template, to “Archives” it should be there for most themes. If it’s not you’ll either need to put a new archives.php into the theme’s folder, or use a new theme. But we’ll move on like you’ve found it.

Press “Publish,” and bask in the glow of work well done. See my result here.

Just a quick note: I’ve hastily decided to switch Ikiru Design to an “orangified” version of my Carter’s Line theme. Mostly because I was getting bored with BWO_one, especially since I switched my blog, Frozen Toothpaste, to a modification of it.

You hear it a lot on the internet, and even off, “content is king.” “Why isn’t my blog making money?” “Because you’ve got bad content” is the pat — which is hardly to say correct — reply. This argument doesn’t make a lot of sense though. Some of the most well-known and profitable blogs are essentially lukewarm summaries of other people’s content or worse yet, warmed-over platitudes. Something else clearly matters.

Perhaps the simplest and most useful analogy for how content matters on the internet is offline publishing. Although both magazines and books have ever-increasing online presences, they still live primarily in an offline world, as any publisher can tell you. And though the analogy isn’t perfect, it demonstrates a few of the essential reasons that content isn’t king.

Publishing Offline

As any publisher can tell you, distribution is the most important component of selling a book. A great book in a well-designed jacket cannot sell if the only place you can buy it is the publisher’s warehouse. Distribution, to brick and mortar stores like your local bookseller, Barnes & Noble, or Walmart is still the best way to make sure a book is visible. Being listed on Amazon.com certainly adds to a book’s visibility as well, but when the majority of books are still purchased offline, it’s not enough to be available there.

Having a visible presence for a book in a brick-and-mortar store is the first step toward selling a book, but it’s not the only one. Once a book is visible, it needs to be looked at. If being visible is analogous to being seen, being visually interesting is the first step toward being looked at. In an offline bookstore, the number of bound pages you see is astronomically larger than the number you actually look at. Being looked at means that, at least, your eyes linger long enough to read the title and author of the book. Perhaps you’ll pick it up and thumb through it, but that’s often a step beyond being looked at.

And as any book publisher or customer are Border’s will tell you, the most important thing in getting looked at is being visually interesting. Imagine a book called Pooh and Eeyore. One version of the book merely says those words and lists the author but is otherwise blank. The second version has a colorful picture of a half-eaten Pooh coming out of Eeyore’s mouth, and the subtitle, “A chilling tale of lies, deceit, and revenge.” There’s little doubt that even if the second book’s cover is a little sensational, it’s also going to be looked at more than three times as much, and bought probably twice as often.

Once a book is seen and looked at, its contents finally matters. Once you’re looking at a book, you’ll read the book jacket and figure out if the topic really interests you, you’ll flip the pages and maybe even read a few. But it is only here that content matters. In the process of determining if a customer buys a book or not, content comes in third, hardly a kingly position.

Some Caveats

Having just told you how “content is jack” is more true, if less elegant, than “content is king,” I’m now obligated to tell you a few of the reasons that my story fails.

The first problems is that a book’s contents determine if a publisher buys a book from its author. That is, publishers — though it may sometimes seem otherwise — usually make content king in the first place. They then make sure that the distribution network, and the visual impact of the book’s jacket, matches the good content inside.

But for the self-published, both in books and blogs, there isn’t a publisher to take care of the distribution and design for you. So they are, again, very important for you in the dual role of “author” and “publisher.”

The other important caveat for the above story is that search engines are meant to negate the seeing→looking at→reading process. Google should — not to say it does — tell you the best article about any given topic, and if you’ve written the best article, you’ll be seen. So ideally, Google would assure that even for the self-published without great distribution or design they get seen.

But this fact underestimates that Google evaluates what is the best by how many links it has. And the number of links that content gets is driven, at least a little, by how easily it moves from being considered “unkown” to “great content,” the essence of our story.

What to do

So you’ve got a blog that you want people to read. You think its content is great but you’re not seeing the type of traffic you’d expect. What to do?

The best answer is that there really is no solution but that pat suggestions you’ll find all over the internet. There is no single thing that will get your blog seen, looked at, and read by the masses of people you desire. But there are many things you can do to help. I’ve listed a few of the more novel ideas below.

1. Have a unique design that highlights your content. This is crucial for moving people from “seeing” to “looking” and onto “reading.” When someone arrives — via Google, Digg, or StumbleUpon — they’re likely to leave if the content looks like “Just another WordPress weblog.” If you blog looks novel and well-designed, they’re much more likely to stick around.
2. Comment on other people’s blogs. When someone sees that you’ve read what they’ve written, they’re more likely to read what you’ve written.
3. Advertise. I say this fully aware that the average blogger loathes the idea and that the average list of “improve your blog” sites thus don’t give it. After all, this list can’t just become a grouping of what I called “warmed-over platitudes” at this article’s outset. But advertising is great way to drive traffic you’re willing to pay, and thus get more eyeball a chance to see your content.
4. Join blog networks. When you join a blog network, either explicitly or implicitly (with a blogroll) you assure that people with interests in similar content as you will see your content.
5. Highlight your best work. I’ve sort-of addressed this before, but the newest-first mentality of blogs can easily mean that your best content is missed by new visitors. It’s useful to have a list of some of your best stuff in an easy-to-find place, perhaps the sidebar or your archives page.

Follow all of that advice and… something might happen. I’m not going to make any hollow guarantees. The fact is that content matters more than my iconoclastic title allowed (even if it also matters less than the conventional wisdom allows). No new publication becomes suddenly popular. It takes time, word of mouth, and in the case of books, magazines, CDs, and movies, millions of dollars worth of advertising. It’s good not to forget that fact.

A note to myself:

Keeping version numbers (and a changelog) inside the style sheets you make for themes isn’t a bad idea. It really convenient for you and anyone else that uses your themes. But — and this is a big one — you need to actually update it as you make changes to the theme for it to have any value. You haven’t been doing that. Instead your making changes — sometimes very big and important — but leaving the version numbers and change logs out-of-date.

You should resolve that starting on January 1, you’ll always keep this information up-to-date. I know you never really liked New Years Resolutions, but this is a good and coming-soon landmark to use. You can start to keep track now, but you must be keeping track by then.

To make it even more necessary and final, you should make sure all the themes you’ve made so far are at version 1.0 by January 1. It doesn’t matter if it’s flawless and “featureful” but that would be a real bonus as well.

With sincere admiration and modest disappointment,

You

For anyone who wasn’t myself and didn’t read the above note — thanks respecting my privacy by the way ;) — here’ the take away: my themes will be updated and brought to version 1.0 by January 1, 2008. From then on I’ll do my best to keep version numbers and change logs on track. I should have been doing this all along, but it’s better late than never I suppose.