Yesterday and today I was installing WordPress and bbPress on the same domain for a blog/forum solution. I was trying to set up seo friendly permalinks on bbPress all day yesterday with no success. Lots of people have had problems with getting seo friendly permalinks set up on bbPress. I could have used another forum solution but I wanted a blog on the site too and nothing integrates with WordPress as well as bbPress. I contacted Blacknight's support at 11.52 this morning and Jonathan had the issue resolved by 11.59.

He checked the ftp error logs and highlighted the fact that the server did not support Multiviews

[Thu Jul 22 12:41:28 2010] [alert] [client 86.46.136.168] /usr/local/pem/vhosts/xxxxxx/webspace/httpdocs/forum/.htaccess: Option MultiViews not allowed here

I removed this from the bbPress .htaccess file and this fixed the problem immediately. So a 7 minute turn around time for something that I was trawling forums for all day yesterday. If you need a working .htacess file for bbPress for a blacknight hosted solution feel free to contact me and I'll send it on.

This isn't the first time I've dealt with Blacknight support. The last time I had problems with Wordpress .htaccess and Jonathan also helped me fix the issue.

So if you're looking for web hosting in Ireland, I would thoroughly recommend blacknight! Just wish I contacted them yesterday

photo credit: richardmasoner

It's easiest just to place the Google Analytics code in footer.php as the footer shows up on every page and therefore this tracks all hits on your website. There's a nice article on exactly what to do over at ThemePlayground.com. It cleared things up for me as I previously thought I needed to put the Google Analytics code in a few different files, but it turns out that footer.php is the only place it needs to go! If you're using WordPress, there's lots of other nice tips on ThemePlayground and I'll be checking back there for a few tips and tricks as I continue to update this site.

Last week I added the countdown timer to pressurise myself into getting this done and I'm launching a few hours ahead of schedule. Although there's a bit more I'd like to have done, putting the countdown timer there made sure the theme got uploaded today and saves me tweaking for weeks on end trying to make everything 100% perfect and putting off the launch date again and again. I'll definitely be using this method again to get things done!

This is only version 0.1 of my customised wordpress theme and I have lots of changes still in mind for it.

Things I'm happy about:
I'm pretty happy with the general look and feel of the design. It's now a more personalised site which I thought it should be, as after all it's my online cv and I'm the man responsible for getting things done on this site and on other projects I'm working on. I had always intended to create a caricature of myself on the site and tried to give it a 3d like look by leaning over the navigation bar into my site to let readers know who's behind it. I think I've achieved this by gripping my hand over the nav bar. In general, I think the style and layout of the header looks good.

photo credit: Netream

Things I'm not happy about:
As I mentioned above this is only version 0.1 of my updated WordPress theme and there's lots more still to do. I think the cartoon that I created of myself needs some more work and I'd like to brighten it up a bit. I'll be styling the sidebar on the right hand side of the site to fit in a bit more with the look and feel of the rest of the site. I'll also be changing the style of the post titles and maybe the font used in the posts themselves. There's lots of other stuff too that I want to update pretty soon. One thing that is really annoying me is the way that the images for the site load up. It doesn't look good at the minute but I'll get this fixed by changing the background colours etc. to match a bit more. There's also some colour mismatch at the top of the page but these are simple fixes and I'll get them all sorted. The size of the images I'm using can also probably be reduced and I'll look in to doing this too.

So along with the update to version 2.8 of WordPress, my first major site update seems to have went smoothly enough. Here's a look back to what my site looked like at the very beginning. And I'll add a screenshot below here to to show how the site looks at the time of writing this on the 28th of June 2009. I like doing this as it tracks progress on how this blog is evolving:

You can see the comparison in the screenshot above on how the blog looked original and how it looks after my first major update. I think it's come a long way! I'm coming up to my 50th post and hopefully this and the theme update proves my commitment to developing my online presence with even more projects. I've talked before about potential partnerships. I'm hoping this level of commitment and the design of the theme itself gives others an idea of what I'm capable off. I'll be meeting face to face with a potential partner on Tuesday this week regarding multiple projects. As soon as we get things sorted officially, I'll be updating the new ads section on this site with details of these new projects that I'll be involved in!

So things are moving on for me and my online ventures. I was reluctant to push too hard and try to begin new visitors to this site until I had customised the theme, but there's no stopping me now and I'll be trying to boost traffic to this blog now that it gives more of an idea of who's behind iliveontheweb.com. This is version 0.1 and I wont be leaving things like this! Expect version 1 proper... maybe not today.. maybe not tomorrow... but it'll be here!

There's lots of different opinions out there on them but my thoughts really are that if you have very fixed ideas and subject areas that you are going to base your blog on then use categories. Predefine your categories so that you can tailor each post for a specific topic. At a guess, I will probably end up having between 5 and 20 categories on this blog as it evolves. When using tags, I'll use the keywords related to my post and build up a list as I go. Obviously, if I see a tag that suits in the most popular tags list i'll drop it in but I'm not going to spend ages trying to configure them and pretend I'm some kind of SEO guru. So that's my thoughts on the area. I've looked at the guidelines in the WP Forum and I suppose from now on I'll try to keep my tags inline with the example of good tags at least. I'm sure there is varying opinions on how important tags and categories are in WordPress blogs but for now I wont be concentrating too much on them. Hopefully they'll help organise my site a link a few similar articles of interest along the way

I'm sure that when I investigate and add SEO plugins for this blog then my opinions may change but for now I'm keeping it simple. Anyone with other opinions feel free to drop me a comment and link back to your thoughts on the subject.

Another couple of things that I did today, a VB program to change php and vb code so that I can drop it in to my blog if need be. The idea came to me yesterday when I came across the 'code' tags and realised they didn't work for html or php on this blog. It's a pretty robust solution but it got the job done and I'll end up using it at some stage, I'm sure. This then triggered something else that I'd been thinking about doing. I'm keeping it to myself for now but it may be another project for me depending on how the initial coding goes and if I think it's worth pursuing. I wont be wasting my time anyway as I'll learn something and it shows that this blog is working as an ideas generating centre

After all that I actually added 3 categories and 4 tags to this p st......

My next aim is to add a contact form to my site and hopefully I can add an extra tab on my nav bar for this. Another thing I've been thinking about is RSS feeds for bloggers and ensuring that your daily post is release ready before posting it. For my first two posts I was publishing and then proof reading and making edits on spelling grammar etc. and re-posting. Although I have no subscribers as yet, I was just thinking that if I did I may have released a pretty messy blog post. So it's just something to think about going forward. I wonder what kind of plugins are available to help with this kind of thing.

Anyway, that's it for now. Off to watch the World Snooker Final 2009, it's currently John Higgins 3 - 3 Shaun Murphy. I had a few smalls bets on the frame betting and I'm up about $15 dollars for the day. So that's two days in a row that I've made money online and I've posted to my blog everyday since I started so I'm going well!