8×10Gallery.com

Archive for April, 2007

I mentioned before that I am using the CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper to create the sitemap for this site. The really useful part of the program is that you can see the map on the screen so you can see all the headings and titles that you’ve used throughout the site. At a glance you can see your Title Pages, the name of the HTML files used etc. This is how I uncovered all the mistakes I’d made on the site.

For example I had spaces in the filenames. An Internet No-No.
- None of the Picture Gallery index pages were numbered so they all looked the same.
- None of the Picture Gallery pages had the correct titles. Some had the name of the folders from my hard drive as the gallery title. Not very useful.
- I didn’t use the same words in the title for pages in the same gallery. Some places I spelled out the word, other I abbreviated.
- I found spelling errors in the titles.

And all sorts of other things.

The main problem was the spaces in the filenames. The sitemapper changed these to a “+” plus sign so all the filenames were wrong when they were parsed by Google. Pages started to disappear out of the index since they couldn’t be found!

It was time to do a massive overhaul of my naming structure. Not only did I have to rename all the graphics files to remove the spaces in the name I had to change every HTML file that referenced them so they would load correctly.

As I contemplated the mess I’d made, I almost decided to scrap the site and start over. After staring blankly at the screen for several minutes I came up with an idea. I had a theory on how to salvage the site.

I knew I could rename all the files very quickly using CKRename. It’s a small app that allows string substitutions for files. I could replace the space with the underscore or any other changes, that part was easy, but how to change the filename in every HTML file without opening every one of them?

I ended up using UltraEdit which has a Replace in Files function which does exactly what I need. You give the search string, the replace string and then pick the directory it should work on. At first it seemed almost too easy. There is no way it could be this simple to get myself out of this. But it was!

The Replace in File function blasted through each gallery and fixed all the filenames in a matter of seconds! I was absolutely amazed! I made all these changes right on the server. I don’t think there’s anyway I could have done this using Expression Web.

Now that I had a way to change text in all my files I decided to make quite a few changes. I updated a bunch of the picture titles to something that was meaningful. I adjusted tons of descriptions within a slew of the HTML files. The more I fixed, the more I saw that needed to be fixed.

It took about 3 hours to clean up after myself, but that includes changing thousands of filenames and adjusting hundreds of web pages. What I thought was going to take a few weeks to fix only took a few hours.

I can’t say the site is perfect, but it’s so much better than it used to be. At least the correct words and phrases will get indexed now rather than information no one will use or search for.

And now that I know how to make these mass changes I may continue to update the titles to make sure they’re useful and accurate. Hopefully you won’t make the same stupid mistake I did, but if you do, there’s a pretty simple answer. CKRename will change all your filenames and UltraEdit will change all references within your HMTL files.

Here’s to not being an idiot in the future!

The website hits 3 months…

Yeah, I know, the site is just a baby, but it’s my little baby and I need to mark these little milestones. It’s been a long 3 months that have just flown by.

I started the New Year with an idea to build a page and display some photos. I’m pretty surprised at how it’s turned out even after just these few short months. It’s been a lot easier and a lot harder than I thought it would be. I’ve made plenty of mistakes so far and even suffered some unexpected hardware glitches. But, it has also been a lot more fun than I thought and I’m enjoying putting it all together a lot more than I expected. I like going through the pictures to find nice to display. I like looking through other sites to find ideas and answers. And I’ve been exposed to some impressive tools I probably never would have come across if I hadn’t started this experiment; Expression Web, Google Sitemapper, Wordpress, PHP, MySql, just to name a few.

Even though I’ve just started, a vast amount of work has been completed; the picture galleries, the sitemaps, the optimization, keywords, grammatical mistakes, taking photos, keeping the server running, DNS errors, SMTP problems, drive cloning, and learning HTML, just to name a few more.

All of that in just 3 months. Kind of scares me to think what the next 3 months will bring. Or for that matter, where will I be at the end of the year with this project?

And there is so much more still to come. Of course more photos, but lots of changes to the site like Resource Guides, Software Reviews, links to other photography sites and magazines, more lens reviews, a full catalog of my photos for sale, fully indexed site searches, and lots of other ideas. I will just keep adding and subtracting as ideas come to me.

And so many new places to go this year – lighthouses, beaches, mountains, back to the deserts of Arizona, macro photography galore at the botanical gardens. When you really start taking photos, there are so many more photos you want to take. It’s a good thing!

Of course let us not forget, so many new lenses to lust after – wide angles and hefty 500mm tele zooms, plus maybe another 70mm and 135mm IS just for good measure!

Crashes and glitches, problems and solutions. It’s been easy, fun and nerve racking!

But I’m having a ball!

This has been driving me nuts and I can’t believe how simple it is to change! I haven’t been able to find where the “About” text is stored and apparently I’m not the only one. Thousands of blogs all have the “This is an example of a WordPress page…”

And here is the incredibly simple answer on how to fix it!

In your Wordpress backend/dashboard hit the ‘manage’ tab and then hit the ‘pages’ tab. In the list of pages that you see there you’ll find the page that needs changing (in this case it’s the ‘About’ page). Click the ‘edit’ link and make some changes.

I stole this information from: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/08/02/the-problem-of-default-about-pages/

I just wanted to pass it along since I couldn’t find it very easily.