I’ve been working on a link exchange management service lately and its now ready for production. There are still things that need to be done on it but its now operational and ready for public consumption. The service is called, LinkLuna, and you can use it to manage your link exchanges. Best of all its a free service that anyone can use. It integrates easily into your existing site using our simple api and I even had a Wordpress plugin built to save you time integrating it into your blog. Try it out for free and let me know how I can improve the services.

Over this past summer I’ve been working on a project for my wife Laura. She’s the technology teacher at school and needed an easy way for her teachers to create their own classroom webpage. Before Webster’s Classroom she had to manually create every teacher’s page and ftp it to a county server downtown. Needless to say, no one had websites.

We created an easy way for teachers to do this by using Webster’s Classroom. Best of all, we’re offering it to teachers absolutely FREE. Laura got a warm reception from her peers when she demonstrated our software during the first few days of school. A number of teachers have already used our software to setup their own customized classroom webpage and appear enthusiastic about using it throughout the year. We have many plans for additional features in the next year. So far we are getting very positive feedback on the site and we are excited to add new features to the site. We will be aggressively marketing it at the software matures over the coming months and I’ll be sure to post updates every so often on it.

There are plenty of people talking about how you can make your Wordpress blog titles more SEO friendly. No one I’ve found however has mentioned what I’ve stumbled upon by accident. Pseudo-indented listings in Google search results. What I’ve started doing on my blogs is making my title like this:


<title>
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; <? } ?> <?php wp_title(''); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; < ? } ?> < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>


This adds a » in front of your post title. The result is that when the search results show up in Google your links look like it stands out more because of the » in the title. It almost makes it look like your site is more official and Google is giving you a little arrow in front of your link to prove it. It won’t effect your rankings as far as I know. Its more of a psychological advantage than anything else but I have no scientific data to back up that claim. Take a look at the title of this post to see an example title.

I just spent the last few hours trying to figure out what was wrong with my new Wordpress plugin. My plugin requires another plugin and what was happening was Wordpress was running my plugin first. This was the source of the problem and it took me awhile to figure that out. Then I had to figure out how to force Wordpress to run my plugin first. I tried a code solution but there isn’t any way to tell Wordpress in the code to run one plugin before the other. Then I tried modifying their order in the database but Wordpress kept rewriting the row I would change. So then I thought, alphabetical ordering. I don’t want to have to rename my plugin just because of some stupid limitation of the Wordpress plugin architecture. I noticed that it was running the plugins that had their own subdirectories first and then it would execute plugins that were just single files inside the plugins directory. Bingo. I removed the directory I had put my plugin from and just dumped it right in the plugins directory. Now it works beautifully. It was troubling me because I already had the plugin working on another blog (before I made the subdirectory modification) and was scratching my head why it wasn’t working here. Its all simple in retrospect.

I just finished writing a Wordpress plugin called delicious-tagger. It automatically adds a new bookmark to your del.icio.us account using the tags you define with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. This is a pretty slick piece of work that I whipped up and should boost your site’s exposure on del.icio.us considerably. That’s the hope anyway. :)