January 2008

The following guide was developed using WordPress 2.3.2. Previous versions have not been tested.

As part of the recent redesign of this site, I looked into the subject of page titles — the content of HTML’s TITLE tags.

Previously, I was using a theme which output titles in this form: “Post at Site.” For example, a page title may have been, “How to Do This, That, and the Other at Foo’s Really Cool Bar.”

I had two problems with that.

First, the word “at” is extraneous; I should hope search engines ignore it as a minor word, but I would much rather have some form of punctuation or other symbol which unquestionably demarcates the post title and the site title. To deal in a hypothetical, imagine a blog named “Science at Home”; that blogger decides to write a post about an experiment which took place in his freezer, a post which he titles “Various Liquids at Sub-Freezing Temps.” Now put them together: “Various Liquids at Sub-Freezing Temps at Science at Home.”

I hope I’m not the only one who thinks such a title is less than great. We’re smart enough these days to distinguish “Article Titles” from Magazine Titles, so why not bring some clarity to the new media of blogging?

Second, when using Mint to track my stats, the pages that people visited would be organized based upon whatever was in the TITLE tags of the pages. That area of Mint’s stats very quickly looked cluttered with overly long titles containing useless information — it’s reasonable to assume that if you install Mint on “Science at Home,” the pages which are tracked will be part of “Science at Home.” We shouldn’t need Mint to tell us that. Resolving that became a priority as well.

In solving these issues, I came up with a nifty little function that can be added to your WordPress blog theme’s functions file. You’ll also need to edit your theme’s header.php file to take advantage of our new function.

• Open and/or create the file functions.php in your theme’s folder. If you had to create the file, go ahead and add this content:

  <?php
  
  ?>

• Next, you’ll need to add the following code, which is designed to put together what I consider to be a fairly optimal title. Various archives, page not found errors, pages, posts, and so on are all accounted for. If there is already content in the file aside from the tags added in the previous step, scroll all the way down. Now you’ll need to add the following code just before the closing ?> (keeping ?> on its own line at the end, of course).

  function title_construct($mint = false)
  {
  	$separator = ' — ';
  
  	if (is_home())
  	{
  		if ($mint)
  		{
  			echo 'Home page';
  		}
  		else
  		{
  			bloginfo('description');
  			echo $separator;
  			bloginfo('name');
  		}
  	}
  	elseif (is_404())
  	{
  		echo 'Content Not Found', $separator;
  		bloginfo('name');
  	}
  	else
  	{
  		// Page / Single post
  		if (is_page() || is_single())
  		{
  			if (have_posts())
  			{
  				echo trim(wp_title('', false));
  			}
  			else
  			{
  				echo 'Content Not Found';
  			}
  		}
  		// Category archive
  		elseif (is_category())
  		{
  			single_cat_title();
  			echo ' (category archive)';
  		}
  		// Tag archive
  		elseif (is_tag())
  		{
  			single_tag_title();
  			echo ' (tag archive)';
  		}
  		// General archive
  		elseif (is_archive())
  		{
  			wp_title('');
  			echo ' (archive)';
  		}
  		// Search results
  		elseif (is_search())
  		{
  			echo get_query_var('s'), ' (search results)';
  		}
  
  		if (!$mint)
  		{
  			if (!is_home() && !is_404())
  			{
  				echo $separator;
  			}
  			bloginfo('name');
  		}
  	}
  }

  That code is based off of the title-generating code in the header file of K2.

• Save and upload the functions file; visiting your blog should confirm that nothing has broken, but it will also confirm that the above code does nothing. That’s because we haven’t actually called that function anywhere. So go ahead and open your theme’s header.php file.
• Locate the TITLE tags; they look like <title>...</title>. What is actually between them will vary from theme to theme. However, what you will want to do is delete everything between the tags and add a call to our function which we defined just a bit ago. In other words, modify the TITLE tags so that they look like this and then save and upload that file:
• You should now see a difference in how page titles are rendered when you visit your blog.

Excellent, you now have optimized titles which emphasize the title of the current page while still providing the site name as well as tertiary data such as “(tag archive)” or “(category archive).”

The above code can very easily be customized, too! For instance, I have it outputting “Content Not Found” in 404 situations. You can change that text to whatever you want (e.g., “HTTP 404″ or “Uh-oh, You Broke It!”). Likewise, the tertiary info mentioned in the previous paragraph is very much based upon my own tastes. You may prefer a tag archive to have a title of “Tagname Tag Archive,” in which case you’ll want to find and replace “(tag archive)” with “Tag Archive.” My theory is that by using the parenthetical form, the name of the tag itself will be further emphasized.

Moving along, you can take advantage of the title_construct() function in tracking stats with Mint as well. If you followed the Mint install instructions correctly, you should have a bit of code in header.php which follows the title of your site and looks similar to this: <script src="/mint/?js" type="text/javascript"></script>

It has been reported that you can override the title that Mint sees with a very brief bit of JavaScript, which is exactly what we’ll be doing here. Between the TITLE tags that we added title_construct() to above and the Mint JavaScript code, go ahead and add the following:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
	var Mint_SI_DocumentTitle = '<?php title_construct(true); ?>';
// ]]></script>

It is very important that the code appears after your page’s regular title but before the call to Mint’s JavaScript. If it appears anywhere else, you’re just wasting your time as Mint will not pick up on the code.

If you want a live example, go ahead and view the source of this page. I choose to keep most of my JavaScript in the footer of the page, so you’ll have to scroll nearly to the end to see the added code. Note that by adding the code to the footer, it’s definitely doing to be after the regular page title!

Once that code is added and you’ve saved and uploaded the header.php file, you should start seeing nicer titles appearing in your Mint stats; keep in mind, though, that it may take a while for old data to cycle through.

And yes, I know that there is a plugin available which allows you to specify custom titles for Mint. However, I didn’t want to go that route because it was a whole lot less “set it and forget it” than the above method is. The plugin only set custom titles for Mint on posts, and it only did that if a custom title was specified in the post’s custom fields. If that’s all you need, by all means go get the plugin! And I gotta admit, I’m impressed with how quickly the plugin was developed and released!

So anyway, that’s what I’m doing to get optimized titles around here. If you have any questions, recommendations, or concerns, feel free to drop a comment!

I’m pretty sure if you end a post title with a “\” you will break the JavaScript which sets a custom title for Mint; the ending “\” will escape right out of the apostrophes enclosing the custom title. That is bad. I’d appreciate any possible solutions to that problem, though I’d imagine ending a post title with a “\” is a rare enough occurrence for me to let it slide for the time being.

Popularity: 8%

I’m about to say one of the very few things I have ever posted here which probably every one of my (legitimate human) readers will be able to agree with:

Spam sucks!

And to be quite honest, I’m getting sick of it. I think a lot of people simply get sick of dealing with the spam, but it’s getting to the point that having to look at comment spam here and on the other blogs I maintain is sickening.

I log in to my spam filter knowing that there’s going to be at least some comments that need purging, but I do so hoping that they are of the variety, “Great blog post. Check my link. Happy Thursday,” and so on. At least those I can scan over and not feel as though my eyes need bleaching. Rarely are those the only bits of garbage in the can. It’s the large chunks of fetid, festering filth that have motivated me to think about better spam protection here on the blog.

And I wanted to do this with as little fuss as possible:

• Plugins which simply send spam to the moderation queue are pointless here — I don’t want to have to deal with it at all; a moderation queue requires, well, some moderation in order to prevent spam (read: legitimate comments) from being blocked.
• WordPress offers built in moderation and blacklist lists within which common spam words can be added. Comments which match something in the moderation list will be held for moderation, while comments which match anything in the blacklist will be deleted on the spot. I like this idea, but maintaining such a list has got to be a pain in the butt, and I can imagine all sorts of discussions — such as comments concerning anti-spam solutions — which may make use of any number of spam words. I don’t want to hurt legitimate users!

So what to do?

I’ve heard it mentioned many times before, and it suddenly started sounding like a good idea: simply rename the /wp-comments-post.php file to something else, and spam bots will no longer be able to post.

So that’s what I did. There was only one line of code which I had to change as well. In the /comments.php of my theme, I had to adjust the address for the commenting form. The bit of code that needed changed looked like this:

/wp-comments-post.php

So I edited that to match the new filename I had chosen, saved it, and uploaded. After a test comment to make sure everything was kosher, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking everything would be smooth sailing — though I’d still receive trackback spam, I’m sure, but that’s another subject for another time.

Still the spam comes in. Evidently, spam bots are being more intelligently written; I checked my host’s access logs and noticed that the spammers are loading posts first and submitting the spam in a very legitimate looking way. That sucks.

Perhaps my change will slow the influx of spam. I can hope, right?

I’m curious if anyone else has any ingenious little antispam tweaks in place on their sites? It doesn’t have to be specific to WordPress; I don’t have access to my Apache httpd.conf, but I certainly can tweak around in .htaccess.

Popularity: 19%

“The Nazi State will however not tolerate under any circumstances any new or any continued political activity of the denominations. … But we will ensure the purging from our public life of all those priests who have mistaken their profession and who ought to have been politicians and not pastors.” — Adolf Hitler, as quoted on Chester Street.

In the various American history courses I took in middle & high school, I don’t recall this ever having been mentioned, though I suppose they wanted us to recognize the Nazis as evil, something altogether different from America. Yet, Hitler’s view of the churches’ involvement in politics seems quite similar to the ACLU’s and others who would seek to silence the churches’ opinions of and involvement in American politics based upon either a complete inability to understand the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment or willing ignorance to the meaning thereof.

Popularity: 2%

If I were to tell you that within four years, billions of people will die, how would you react? Concerned? Shocked? Or would you write me off as a crazed Doomsday Prophet before I finish the word “die”?

I know it sounds crazy, and I’m not even sure if I believe it or not… “Billions to Die!” It’s unimaginable.

Yet that is exactly the impression I’m getting lately. End Times scholars, such as Irvin Baxter, have redoubled their efforts to warn the populace of the impending judgment day.

Baxter in particular has made it his ministry’s goal to reach every man, woman, and child on Earth with the Gospel message within 2008. [click to continue...]

Popularity: 40%