M ax G allina. en

Release, as expected, after about a month of a fix release of various bug fixes and security patches found after the long work for the 2.5 branch!

Usual upgrade procedure and usually link to the download of WordPress !

Upgraded from WordPress 2.1.3 to 2.2 convinced that all would be well, and so it was ... or at least almost!

The theme that I used at the bottom of the page provides the insertion of my blogroll divided into two columns (respectively a category each).

The code that allowed this has always been get_links (arguments), namely this:

', '

','', False,' name ', FALSE, 1,
-1, 1);?>

but alas, using this old command get_links was created a strange space between each item and the other, thus making the output painful!

After smadonnato a bit 'in all languages ​​searching for information about on similar issue, I discovered that get_links as wp_get_links or older are considered deprecated, and should be used in their place a new command: wp_list_bookmarks (arguments).

Armed with good patience I am reading the documentation on the site of WordPress up to find that you have to use (in my case) this syntax:

category_name=0&title_li=&before= &after=

&
show_images = 1 & show_description = 0 & orderby = name ');?>

You may find further information on the use of wp_list_bookmarks the official documentation .

Maybe not all webmasters are aware that the sitemap (XML, TXT or ROR) is a powerful tool that allows you to increase the presence of your site in search engines. Thanks to the sitemap engine crawlers are more easily index the pages of the site and in the most correct way.

A web tool that facilitates the creation of sitemap is definitely XML-Sitemaps.com that with a simple click allows you to create your sitemap.

The types of maps are available XML (for Google), Text (for Yahoo), ROR (for other search engines) and HTML (to be integrated within the site for ease of navigation for users).

However convenient, using WordPress, to refer to a very interesting plugin that automatically regenerates your sitemap whenever you change or insert a new article on the blog! This plugin is called Google Sitemaps .

The output you can see it here (after applying a style sheet): sitemap.xml !

The site will now be visited more frequently by search engines and thus gain more popularity!

You've just created a new site? Do not forget to enter your robots.txt in your root directory.

What is the robots.txt file?
(Carry quote from Wikipedia)

The robots.txt file contains settings used by the crawler (also called spiders) to enforce restrictions of analysis on the pages of a website.
The web crawlers are automated software programmed to search and indexing periodicals. In the first phase of analysis of a website control the existence of the robots.txt file to apply any restrictions required by the site's webmaster.

The fields are available:

1. User-Agent, the value of this field contains the name of the robot that must comply with the restrictions. With the character '*' rule applies to any robot;
2. Disallow, the value of this field contains pages on the site that should be excluded from the robot during indexing. It may indicate a specific URL or a series of URLs belonging to a pattern.

HERE you can see an example of a file robots.txt

An example of writing can be this:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

we say to the bot "Googlebot-Image", which scours the web in search of images, do not visit the whole root of our site ... and move on!

Or again:
User-agent: * # Applica a tutti i bot
Disallow: /private_directory/ # Blocca /private_directory/
Request-rate: 1/5 # Visita al massimo una pagina ogni 5 secondi
Visit-time: 0700-0845 # Vista soo tra 7:00 AM e 8:45 AM UT (GMT)

A face wrote the robots.txt file, just save it in the root directory of the site and the bot will learn not browse more on our site!

And now we have to verify that you have correctly written the "code" of our using the robots.txt validator web .

At the suggestion of Dade ` I also tried this beautiful and handy software called CSSEdit .

It is characterized by a innanziatutto graphica clean and very intuitive, but especially for his ability to give way to those who have a thorough knowledge of CSS to modify at all the details a style sheet.

You insert the URL of the site that you want to change and you find yourself in front of the CSS written immediately place ... then you can intervene with disarming simplicity of all that created and then continue the style sheet with sempici click! It is a software that greatly simplifies the work of the webmaster because each change is shown in real time in the preview screen (especially useful when working on the margin and on the various containers posizionamente "div")!

Here's a screenshot of the program in action ...

[Click to enlarge]