I’ve said it many times before – I love WordPress – but, like any other blogging platform, it has a few issues. It doesn’t have a built in gallery, posting code is nearly impossible, and custom fields are too basic. All that aside, one of the most frustrating issues is how WordPress handles the %category% permalink structure.

By default, WordPress does not include a post’s title in its’ URL. Instead, a default URL would be similar to: http://dodesign.us/?p=123. The numbers at the end are the post’s ID number. To rank higher in Google, most bloggers change the URL structure to include the date and name (like this: http://dodesign.us/2009/07/16/sample-post/). That works for most people, but some (like myself) decide to use a custom structure and include a post’s category and title in the URL.

That’s where the problem comes in. If a post has more than one category, WordPress uses the category with the lowest ID number in the URL. It does not let you change a category’s ID number or choose which one is used.

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Organizing Your Photos is a project I launched in September of 2008 to teach readers a logical and efficient method of organizing digital photos. Many people sort them by date, but dates are hard to remember. Some sort their photos by event, but, before they know it, they have hundreds of photos (making it hard to find anything). This “system” divides the photos into categories then events using nothing but folders (creating a tree-structure).
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When was the last time you went to Google and searched “i need something like this site my daily log others site” or “include mini url?” Most likely, never, but some people do.

When I started doDesign, I thought I had to rank well for a few terms (phproxy, free web templates, etc…) to get organic traffic. For a while doDesign was on the first page of Google’s search results for “phproxy.” Sure, it brought a good amount of traffic, however, ranking well for a popular term is not necessary.

I’ve learned something in the past few months — many people search for many things.

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For the longest time I’ve designed and coded themes for PHProxy. I had nothing wrong with it, but people kept telling me about Glype. So I downloaded it, set up a test proxy, and played around with it. It’s actually really nice. It has an easy-to-use control panel, something that PHProxy doesn’t have, and a new version is in development. PHProxy has been abandoned by the developer.

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StumbleUpon recently jumped on the URL shortening bandwagon and opened Su.pr to the masses. There’s already bit.ly, tinyurl, tr.im, awe.sm, post.ly, and many, actually, too many more. For the most part, they do the same thing. Su.pr, however, claims to be “the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered!” StumbleUpon has brought me a lot of traffic in the past, so I thought I’d test it out.

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