Author Archives: Austin Matzko

5 Things of Interest to Developers in the New WordPress 2.8

With each major WordPress release, public changes like the new widgets administrative interface usually get all the glory. Here are some new features in WordPress 2.8 that most users won’t even know exist but you will probably care about, if you’re a WordPress developer. Widgets API The new widgets API lets you create widgets by […]

Paged Comments and the SEO Problem: A Solution

The paged comments feature new in WordPress 2.7 is handy for reducing page size, but it introduces the search engine optimization (SEO) problem of putting the same content on different permalinks, as some have pointed out. That’s because the complete post would appear at all of these permalinks: http://example.com/my-post-permalink/ http://example.com/my-post-permalink/comment-page-1/ http://example.com/my-post-permalink/comment-page-2/ My solution in this […]

WordPress Themes and Vagueness

Recently there’s been a kerfuffle in the WordPress blogosphere over the fact that WordPress.org suddenly removed 200 themes from the Extend repository, in order to make all themes comply with this apparently new stipulation: Themes for sites that support “premium” (non-GPL or compatible) themes will not be approved. Alister Cameron has written a post that’s […]

Monthly Archives Idea

Charles Stricklin, WordPress Podcast guru, had an interesting idea for arranging monthly WordPress archives, which is basically to make an archives page like this.

Happy Halloween

Does Google Discourage the use of WordPress Permalinks?

A recent blog entry by Google’s Search Quality Team members Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski somewhat confusingly gives the impression that Google does not like WordPress-style permalinks. Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all? That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent […]