Lee Turner

Do I Speak Your Language?

Lee Turner — Wed, 19 May 2010 10:38:40 +0000

I have to say up front that my skill with languages is very poor. It is something I have struggled with since I was at school when I sat in my French exam blankly staring at the examiner who was expecting me to impress him with some fluent expression of how nice the weather was (or something like that - I have blanked most of it out of my mind). However, one thing that I am pretty good at is testing and tracking different things on my sites.

If you have any kind of analytics package installed on your b2evolution blog, you will probably have more data than you know what to do with about how many visitors come to your site, how long they stay and the pages they visit etc. One of the things that interests me is looking at where the visitors to my site are coming from and Google Analytics has a very nice map overlay allowing you to pinpoint geographically where your visitors access your website from. You can also click on the map and drill down even further to individual cities and towns which is great if you are looking to target specific regions with any of your SEO effort.

Here is the Map Overlay for this site:

As you can see from the map, the visitors to my site come from all over the world (57 countries to be exact). As this site is written totally in English I had to ask myself whether the people visiting were able to consume the content in any kind of meaningful way. Looking into this a little further, I can see that the top two countries hitting this site are the USA and the UK, which are both English speaking countries. So at least I know a high percentage will be able to read the content on this site. However, I want there to be as few barriers as possible to people getting the most out of this blog as possible. The solution to this turns out to be very easy.

Enter Google Translate Tools

Using Google’s Translate Tools you can simply add a little snippet of code to your site to add Google’s website translator to your web pages giving your visitors the ability to instantly translate your content into their chosen language. I added this to the sidebar of my site by simply adding a Free HTML Widget to my sidebar and entered the following code:

Code:

<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

This code specifies that my website content is in English so if your content is in a different language head on over to the Google’s Translate Tools page and generate the code for your language.

Do I Speak Your Language?

Manage Your Meta Descriptions in b2evolution

Lee Turner — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:03:08 +0000

This question was sent to me via email and asked “How do I add unique meta description tags in b2evolution?”. You can either watch the video which shows you step by step how to do this or follow along by reading the post below the video.

Before we go into the specifics of how you manage your meta description tags in b2evolution it is important to say what they are and why you would want them in your HTML pages.

The purpose of the meta description tag is to give a unique description of each of your web pages. Ideally each page on your site would have a totally unique and acurate description of what that page is about. From a HTML perspective all <meta> elements (there are more than one) live in the <head> of your web page and has the following format:

So, now you know what they are why would you want to make sure you have them on your html pages? Well, the short answer for this is that the search engines will use them when thay are displaying your pages in the search engine results pages (SERPS). This is not always the case as they may choose to display different snippets of your page content if they feel this is more relevant to the search query but it is often the case that the meta description is used as the dscription for your pages. See the video for an example of this. You will therefore want to make sure that your meta descriptions are unique and relevant to your page content to make the search engines happy and entice users to click through to your pages.

In b2evolution 3.3.3 there are multiple ways to manage your meta description tags. You can set them at the blog level (like the idex page of your blog), the page level (like an individual post or page) and the category level (the page displayed when you click on a category link).

Blog Level Meta Description Tags

Blog Settings -> [your blog] -> Advanced

Down at the bottom of this screen you will see a section called Meta data. In there is a field called ‘Short Description’ which is used as the meta description at the blog level.

Page Level Meta Description Tags

To edit the page level meta description tag you need to head on over to the write/edit screen for each post. Make sure that you are on the Expert tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called Advanced properties. There you will see a field called <meta> desc. This is where you enter your meta description for this specific post.

Category Page Meta Description Tags

OK, so the next place you can set your meta description is for your category pages. To do this you need to do two things. the first is to enable the feature in your SEO settings for your blog, so head on over to:

Blog Settings -> [your blog] -> SEO

Scroll down to the section called Category pages and in there you will see a tick box called Meta description. Tick this box and save your settings. Now head on over to the Category tab for your blog:

Blog Settings -> [your blog] -> Categories

Click on the edit icon for each of your categories and fill in the Description field with what you want to appear as the meta description for that category page.

Using Excerpt As Meta Description Tags

There is one other setting in b2evolution 3.3.3 that relates to meta description tags and this is on the SEO tab in the section called Single post pages / “Permalink” pages. This setting allows your to set the meta description for each post/page to be the same as the excerpt for that post. I personally recommend taking the time to specify a meta description for each post in the way I have mentioned above to enable you to make sure it is unique and has all the relevant keywords you are optimising for in the description. The excerpt is not going to be as optimised as a description you can set yourself.

Best,

Manage Your Meta Descriptions in b2evolution

A few updates to the Frugal theme

Lee Turner — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:23:30 +0000

This is just a short post to let you know that I have made a few updates to the b2evo 3.3.x version of the Frugal Theme. These are not really changes that you will see on the front end but more structural changes:

Removed a duplicate ID so the theme is now xhtml compliant
Change a few h1, h2 and h3 tags to make the structure of the pages a little better

None of these changes should effect the way the skin looks as all the css for the changed title tags have been updated to make them the same as before so this should be a drop in replacement for the previous version (unless you have made changes to the skin yourself). Please had on over to the Frugal Theme page and download the new version.

Best,

A few updates to the Frugal theme

Frugal Theme updated to b2evolution 3.x

Lee Turner — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:25:33 +0000

The Frugal Theme for b2evolution has gone through a major update in that is now supports the new b2evolution 3.x features like intro posts. You can see them in action at the top of the main page of this blog with my 'Subscribe to RSS or see me on twitter' box. This is basically an intro post. The skin now also uses skin settings to allow you to turn off post metadata and choose whether to display the b2evolution logo (the link back in the footer is always maintained)

If you are using the 2.4.x version of the Frugal theme on a 3.x install of b2evolution then I recommend you head over to the Frugal Theme page and download the new version.

Best,

Frugal Theme updated to b2evolution 3.x

Do you "Follow Up" or not?

Lee Turner — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:47:39 +0000

I was recently asked on twitter if there was a way to change the "Follow Up" text that appears in your post when create an extended post (see the demo site for an example of an extended post) I had never tried this so I thought I would have a play to see if it could be done.

It is possible but it isn't as easy as it sounds so I thought I would document it here for others to have a go. This was all done on a 3.x install of b2evolution and hasn't been tried or tested on any other version

REMEMBER: backup your skin files before making any changes

First thing you need to do is see if there is a file called _item_content.inc.php in your skin folder and if there isn't, copy the file _item_content.inc.php from the /skins folder to the /skins/yourskinfolderyour

Now open that file in your skin folder and look for the bit of text that looks like this:

PHP:

	`$Item->more_link( array(`
	`'force_more' => $params['force_more'],`
	`'before' => $params['before_more_link'],`
	`'after' => $params['after_more_link'],`
	`'link_text' => $params['more_link_text'],`
	`) );`

Now edit that bit of text so it looks like this:

PHP:

	`$Item->more_link( array(`
	`'force_more' => $params['force_more'],`
	`'before' => $params['before_more_link'],`
	`'after' => $params['after_more_link'],`
	`'link_text' => $params['more_link_text'],`
	`'anchor_text' => $params['anchor_text'],`
	`) );`

I think you should have a file called _item_block.inc.php in your skin folder already so open that up and find the bit of text that looks like this:

PHP:

<?php
// ---------------------- POST CONTENT INCLUDED HERE ----------------------
skin_include( '_item_content.inc.php', $params );
// Note: You can customize the default item feedback by copying the generic
// /skins/_item_content.inc.php file into the current skin folder.
// -------------------------- END OF POST CONTENT -------------------------
?>

Replace that with this:

PHP:

	`<?php`
	`// ---------------------- POST CONTENT INCLUDED HERE ----------------------`
	`skin_include( '_item_content.inc.php', array(`
	`'anchor_text' => 'Lee Woz Ere',`
	`) );`
	`// Note: You can customize the default item feedback by copying the generic`
	`// /skins/_item_content.inc.php file into the current skin folder.`
	`// -------------------------- END OF POST CONTENT -------------------------`
	`?>`

Obviously replacing 'Lee Woz Ere' with the words of your choosing. This is the text that will appear instead of "Follow up:" in your blog posts.

Save all the files and give it a go.

Best,

Do you "Follow Up" or not?

Premiumseries Skin

Lee Turner — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:14:18 +0000

Premiumseries is a 3 column fixed width skin. There is 1 main content area and 2 sidebars located on the left and right of the content area. It is valid XHTML and fully b2evolution 3.x compliant so it supports all the intro posts etc. Skin settings are used to allow you to turn off post metadata and choose whether to display the b2evolution logo (the link back in the footer is always maintained)

Original design from Free CSS Templates.

Download the Premiumseries skin, upload it to your skins folder and install it via the Global Settings - Skins tab. Please feel free to post a comment here with any questions.

Premiumseries Skin | b2evolution skins

Republic Skin

Lee Turner — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:21:00 +0000

Republic is a 2 column fixed width skin. There is 1 main content area and 1 sidebar located on the right of the content area. It is valid XHTML and fully b2evolution 3.x compliant so it supports all the intro posts etc. Skin settings are used to allow you to turn off post metadata and choose whether to display the b2evolution logo (the link back in the footer is always maintained)

Original design from Free CSS Templates

Download the Republic skin, upload it to your skins folder and install it via the Global Settings - Skins tab. Please feel free to post a comment here with any questions.

Republic Skin | b2evolution skins

Hot Air Balloon Skin

Lee Turner — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:01:58 +0000

Hot air balloons is a 2 column fixed width skin. There is 1 main content area and 1 sidebar located on the left of the content area. It is valid XHTML and fully b2evolution 3.x compliant so it supports all the intro posts etc. Skin settings are used to allow you to turn off post metadata and choose whether to display the b2evolution logo (the link back in the footer is always maintained)

Original design from Free CSS Templates

Download the Hot air balloon skin, upload it to your skins folder and install it via the Global Settings - Skins tab. Please feel free to post a comment here with any questions.

Hot Air Balloon Skin | b2evolution skins

	`<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>`
	`function googleTranslateElementInit() {`
	`new google.translate.TranslateElement({`
	`pageLanguage: 'en'`
	`}, 'google_translate_element');`
	`}`
	`</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>`