Two things conspired together to great effect today – one, I have a spare domain name to mess around with and, two, Wordpress 3.0 is due for release within the next few weeks and I read it has multi site functionality. so, as Wordpress 3.0 RC 1 is already available to download ,I chose to install it, try it out and document my thoughts for all to read.
WordPress 3.0 – A First Look Review
Installing WordPress 3.0 is as easy as installing WordPress 2.x – just upload it, unpack it and browse it.
My first opinion of Wordpress 3.0 was Wow! The front end looks cleaner and crisper, it loads quicker, the admin panel’s sleeker, what’s it got under its bonnet?
After a few clicks in the admin panel I noticed it was little different to Wordpress 2.9. The options are roughly the same and are mostly in their old locations and the post creation page still uses the restricted version of the TinyMCE visual editor.
The main change I noticed in the admin panel is the configurable theme background and header image. After a little bit of research I learned that this is now a core part of Wordpress – theme designers can let the Wordpress API handle the integration of a blogger’s chosen images into his (or her) theme…
The Sitemap is the Holy Grail of a website. It’s the sheet (or sheets) of xml that new webmasters don’t know to use and some experienced webmasters neglect to create. Consider that every website has a front, a back, a mouthpiece, a gang of security guards and a guide. Visitors see the front, the webmaster uses the backend to create the front, the RSS feed tells the world what’s happening at the website, robots.txt and other little bits help protect it, and the sitemap guides search engine spiders around the it.
Usually, if you use a content management system (CMS) you will be blessed with automatic sitemap generation either through an inbuilt process or a plugin. In which case, you only need to locate it, submit it to search engines, link to it from your index page or the footer of every page, and regularly ping it to tell search engines about updates to it. You will usually find your sitemap sitting comfortably close to your robots.txt at the root of your domain e.g. your-domain.com/sitemap.xml
A lonely fact of a webmasters life is the time spent locked away in solitude as we notch up backlinks to our websites. Some come organically through people visiting our sites and bookmarking us on a do-follow social networking site or by placing a link to us on one of their own websites such as a free Wordpress or Tumblr blog. Other links we create artificially by connecting with other webmasters and asking them to link to us in return for a link back to them or we add our sites into the many directories that are available to us. It takes a lot of time to build backlinks even when auto submitters are used.
A couple of days ago I learned about a directory project that is changing all that. It is called BungeeBones and offers 10,000 backlinks for the price of 1. Intrigued, I took a look, thought this sounds good – too good to be true; so I looked more deeply into it and contacted the project’s leader to find out more details. After several email exchanges, which I might write about in a later article, and a bit of research I concluded the project is genuine and will do as it heralds, namely, give thousands of backlinks for the free price of one.
BungeeBones is a directory with a difference – it is a remotely hosted human edited directory hub that allows webmasters to plug-in to it and display it on their own websites. Any webmaster can submit URLs to the directory and can optionally place a version of the directory on a submitted site. Each version of the directory is a stand alone product. Thousands of webmasters are already plugged in and connected through it so a link submitted to a directory on one site will potentially display in every other directory that is connected to the hub. It is like using an automatic directory submitter: one click submits a link to thousands of directories.
