I installed it here on WordPress Garage so you can see it in action, but basically the way it works is key terms get a dotted orange underline (which helps differentiate them from your regular links), and when you mouse-over those terms a pop-up window appears with information tabs. These tabs display the following content:

1. A short summary about the key-term (Wikipedia style information)
2. Related News, Articles & Posts
3. Related images from Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa, etc.
4. Related Tweets
5. Related Videos from Youtube
6. Related Products from Amazon
7. How your readers Facebook friends relate to the key term (requires readers to approve Facebook connection)

For geographic locations the pop-up will display a Map tab, and for films a Trailer tab will be displayed.

The field of semantic technologies is so new that Headup is only one of 9 WordPress plugins that have “semantic web” as a tag in the plugin directory.

How to install the Headup plugin

1. Go to “Add New” in the WordPress plugin menu.
2. Enter “headup” as the search term to find the plugin in the directory. There will only be one result for this term.
3. Click the “Install” button on the far right, and then activate the plugin.
4. You can configure some settings for the plugin under Settings > Headup for WordPress. There you can choose a maximum number of annotations to display on a page, how many times the same term should be annotated, and whether hyperlinks should be annotated as well.

It will take about an hour before the key terms on your site start displaying the dotted orange highlights. Here’s a short video explaining how to install the plugin:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s another video overview of the Headup Blog Widget and WordPress plugin.

Why would you use this plugin?

The creators of the plugin say that by offering this type of content, you can “reduce bounce rates and increase your readers’ engagement.” Since I tend to judge the world by my own preferences, I was a bit skeptical as to whether such a feature could really achieve those goals since I prefer to find my own info rather than have it dictated to me. Luckily, my pal Mike works at SemantiNet so I decided to ask him a few questions about this plugin, their technology, the semantic web in general, and whether he agrees that Cookies and Cream is Ben & Jerry’s best ice cream flavor.

WPG: Mike, tell me a bit about SemantiNet and what you do there.

Mike: Whereas much of the activity related to semantic web is still very much academic and theoretical, SemantiNet’s products are among the few examples of practical applications of next generation web technology anyone can enjoy today.

What our technology does is identify key-terms in publications & blogs and then provide relevant and personalized related content in real-time. For example, say you’ve written a post about Barack Obama recently being elected in Oslo to be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. What we’ll do is automatically identify the term “Barack Obama” as being president of the US, and suggest content related to him, and identify the term “Oslo” as being a city, and suggest content related to it too.

The big deal here is that the technology realizes that Oslo, the city, has different attributes from Obama, the person, so it will offer different types of information for each. For example, Oslo’s Headup results would include a city map, while Obama’s would not.

As for me, I’m a Project Manager in the company and am responsible for managing the company’s site and blog widget.

WPG: Call me an ignoramus Mike (don’t look so happy about the opportunity), but I still don’t quite get what the semantic web is about. Please explain and make me feel more intelligent.

Mike: What makes companies like SemantiNet exciting is that their understanding of online content goes beyond the basic key-word matching we’re familiar with from current search technologies, and enters the realm of true object identification. This is a fancy way of saying that whereas today, if you search for “Apple” you’ll get results related to the company and the fruit indiscriminately, the vision for Semantic Web is that the same search will deliver results that relate not only to “Apple” but also to “Steve Jobs,” “iPhones,” ”iPods,” etc. even if the word “Apple” isn’t explicitly mentioned in the text results.

For more information about the Semantic Web I recommend seeing Sir Tim Berners Lee’s excellent TED talk on the subject.

WPG: How can bloggers and publishers offer this type of rich information on their own sites?

Mike: To date we have three products people can use to get a better feeling for what this does: the Headup Firefox addon, the Headup publisher and blogger widget, and most recently, the Headup WordPress plugin.

WPG: Why should bloggers install the Headup plugin?

Mike: Bloggers who install our widget will gain longer engagement times and reduced bounce rates. Besides these advantages the widget has the ability, via the “Friends” tab, to enable readers to personalize their reading experience and see how the key terms you blogged about relate to their circle of friends. To the best of my knowledge no other widget out there has this capability.

A significant benefit is the fact that everything I’ve described so far is entirely automated. All you as a blogger need to do is a single one time installation of the plugin and within about an hour your entire archive will be covered. This level of automation is again, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented.

WPG: How does the widget promote engagement time and reduce bounce rate?

Mike: The widget reduces your reader’s incentive to browse away by letting them access all the related content they need right on top of your pages. Why go somewhere else when you have everything you need right where you are?

In your interview with Lior Haner from Yedda you asked, quite rightly, how Yedda was solving bloggers’ need to have conversations take place in their blog. We don’t deal in conversations, however as far as complementary and related content is concerned, we’ve pretty much guaranteed bloggers that their audience won’t have to open another tab or browse away to get the little extra that was missing.

WPG: Can bloggers contact you with questions?

Mike: For sure! I’m personally available for any support needed both on twitter @headup and via email – miked[at]semantinet[dot]com. Don’t be Shy!

WPG: Anything else you’d care to add?

Mike: I agree that Cookies and Cream is Ben & Jerry’s best flavor.

WPG: Of course you do! That’s why we’re pals.

So there you have it. I’d love it if you, our readers, would check out this new feature here and tell me what you think: is it useful, annoying, or somewhere in between?

Old Permalink structure: /%author%/%category%/%postname%/

to:

New Permalink structure: /%author%/%category%/%postname%/%post_id%/

so that they would qualify for Google News. Apparently you need at least 3 digits in your URL in order to qualify for Google News.

I wanted to simply change the Permalink structure by going to Settings>Permalinks in WordPress. However, the problem is that Google sees 2 URLs for the same post which could cause Google to penalize you for duplicate content:

Google would see both the old and new Permalink structure for the same content:

For example, Google would see:

(old) http://example.com/Rebecca/News/MyPost/

and

(new) http://example.com/Rebecca/News/MyPost/222

So we need to make sure the old Permalink structure has a 301 redirect to the new Permalink structure.

Thankfully, after trying many plugins, we finally found and successfully implemented this plugin: Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin

The directions on the site are very old and quite confusing.

Here’s how to use Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin

1. Download, Install and activate the plugin
2. Go to Settings>Permalinks and copy down your old permalink structure
3. While you’re in Settings>Permalinks, change the Permalink structure to your new permalink structure
4. Go to Settings>Permalink Redirect and where it says “Old Permalink Structures”, paste in your old permalink structure

That’s it.

The site in question is still in Beta, so I can’t give out the link yet. But here’s a snapshot to give you a better idea of what we were going for.

We also used the plugin User Photo to show each author’s thumbnail, which I have come to love and recommend.

Thanks to Mark Kaplun for this great solution:

Open your Sidebar.php file and add the following:

Please note: this code uses the plugin Limit Posts to create excerpts. But you can substitute that snippet with any type of excerpt code.

<?php $authors = get_users_of_blog(); ?>

<?php
$latest_posts = array();
foreach ( $authors as $author ) {
$user = new WP_User( $author->ID );
if ($user->has_cap(’level_7′))
continue;
$ps = get_posts(’numberposts=1&post_type=post&author=’ . $author->ID . ‘&cat=-9,-3′);
foreach ($ps as $p) {
$latest_posts[$p->post_date] = $p;
}
}
krsort($latest_posts);
?>
<?php //query_posts(’author=’ . $author->ID . ‘&showposts=1&cat=-9,-3′); ?>
<?php
$counter =0;
foreach ($latest_posts as $post) {
$counter++;
if ($counter > 4)
break;
setup_postdata($post);
?>

<?php // while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<li>
<?php userphoto_the_author_thumbnail(); ?>
<span class=”blogauthor”> <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?> </span>
<div class=”blog”>    <a title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>” href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></div>
<br />

<?php  the_content_limit(’55,read more’); ?> <strong><a title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>” href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>Read more</a>   </strong>
</li>
<?php } ?>

<?php // }; ?>

The End. Yay code!

Let’s say we have 2 search forms on our site:

1. General Site-Wide Search
2. Recipe Search – searches subcategories of the Recipe Category

The first thing we need to do is tweak the search.php template to use it as a filter that will recognize if a search is coming from the Site-Wide search form or the Recipe Search form.

1. Open Search.php and delete everything.  Add the following code:

<?php
/* Template Name: Search Results */
$search_refer = $_GET["site_section"];
if ($search_refer == ‘recipe’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/recipe-search.php’); }
elseif ($search_refer == ’site-search’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/site-search.php’); }; ?>

2. Open Header.php or wherever the General Site-Wide Search Form is located and add this line:

<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”site-search” />

The Site-Wide Search form will look something like this:

<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(’home’); ?>/”>
<div id=”search”>
<input type=”text” value=” ” onclick=”this.value=”;” name=”s” id=”s” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”site-search” />
<input name=”" type=”image” src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/styles/<?php echo “$style_path”; ?>/search.gif” value=”Go” />
</div><!–/search –>
</form>

3. Open Recipes.php or wherever your second search is and insert this line:

<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”recipe” />

You can change the value “recipe” to whatever suits your needs. Just make sure it matches the value in search.php.

The Recipe Search form for your second search will look something like this. In my case, this second search is meant to search the subcategories of the Recipe category.  See my previous post to learn about hacking the search function to search subcategories.

<form method=”get” id=”rsearchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(’home’); ?>/”>
<div id=”rsearch”>
<input type=”text” value=”Recipe Search… ” onclick=”this.value=”;” name=”s” id=”rs” />
<?php $categories = get_categories(’child_of=11′);
$catlist = ”;
foreach ($categories as $cat) {
$catlist.= $cat->cat_ID.’,';
}
$catlist.’11′;
?>
<input type=”hidden” name=”cat” value=”<?php echo “$catlist”?>” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”recipe” />
<input name=”" type=”image” src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/styles/<?php echo “$style_path”; ?>/search.gif” value=”Go” />
</div><!–/search –>
</form>

4. Customize the Search Results Templates

If you recall, in step 1, we added the following to the search.php page.

if ($search_refer == ‘recipe’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/recipe-search.php’); }
elseif ($search_refer == ’site-search’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/site-search.php’); }; ?>

Create recipe-search.php (or whatever you named this template) and customize the layout of the results page to your liking. You can use index.php to start with and customize from there.

Create site-search.php (or whatever you named this template) and customize the layout of the results page to your liking. You can use index.php to start with and customize from there.

However, not everybody is a fan of the forum format – including me. You have to remember to check back (yes, I know there are RSS feeds, but I don’t even go into my RSS reader on a daily basis anymore), and only people who keep an eye on new topics see your questions.

My experience is that mailing lists work great since everybody on the list sees the emails, and good conversations can ensue. Also, users are encouraged to answer questions because it gives them the opportunity to showcase their expertise.

Apparently, there are quite a lot of people who prefer mailing lists, and over the last year or so the WP-Pro mailing list has been getting quite a lot of posts about how to do certain things with WordPress. That would be great if the purpose of the list was for community support – but it’s not! The WP-Pro list is for people who are searching for WordPress service providers to work with, i.e. if you want to pay someone to fix/build/advise your WordPress project, that’s the place to go. If you want to know what the best WordPress SEO plugin is…well, the only place to turn to was the forum.

WP Garage Mailing List – An Online/Email WordPress Community

Not any more! I have set up a mailing list/email group called WP Garage (well, I couldn’t think of another name!), for just these types of questions – if you are looking for plugins, code hacks, tips or just plain ol’ WordPress advice, this new list is for you! The goal is to provide an open and accepting place for WordPress users of all levels to ask and answer WordPress related questions. In the beginning, I will be moderating the posts to make sure no garbage gets through, but if I see that things are pretty clean I’ll ease up on the moderation.

So please come join us, either by clicking on this link or by entering your email address in the field below:

Subscribe to WP Garage Mailing List

1. Search One or More Categories Manually

If we want to search one category, we could have used this solution which lets you manually add category numbers to the search function:

[Replace value="5" with your category number.]

<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(’home’); ?>/”>
<div>
<input type=”text” value=”<?php echo wp_specialchars($s, 1); ?>” name=”s” id=”s” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”cat” value=”5″ />
<input type=”submit” id=”searchsubmit” value=”Search” />
</div>
</form>

2. Search Subcategories Dynamically

However, we wanted to dynamically search only the subcategories of the Recipe Category. The reason being that if you’re already in the Recipes section of the site, seeing a recipe labeled as Recipes is not helpful. However, seeing a recipe labeled as Dessert (mmm..) and Breakfast is helpful. So, each recipe that the client adds will be in a subcategory of recipes (ex. Dessert), but they won’t have to check off the checkbox next to the Recipes category itself.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for this solution for a long time and now, thanks to Ilan Cohen, I present it to you.

[Replace the number 5 with the parent category.]

<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(’home’); ?>/”>
<div id=”search”>
<input type=”text” value=”Search… ” onclick=”this.value=”;” name=”s” id=”s” />
<?php $categories = get_categories(’child_of=5′);
$catlist = ”;
foreach ($categories as $cat) {
$catlist.= $cat->cat_ID.’,';
}
$catlist.’5′;
?>
<input type=”hidden” name=”cat” value=”<?php echo “$catlist”?>” />
<input name=”" type=”image” src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/styles/<?php echo “$style_path”; ?>/search.gif” value=”Go” class=”btn” />
</div><!–/search –>
</form>

The code searches through all the child categories of Category 5 (Recipes). Then, you’ll see we added an additional “5″ in this line: $catlist.’5′; just in case the client puts a recipe in the Recipes category, and not one of its subcategories.

So, I started exploring the whole family in Wordpress – grandparents, parents, and children. Translation for those not yet used to seeing Wordpress analagous to the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding: Pages, sub-pages, and sub-sub pages

Simple Directory Setup

• Directory Page (grandparent): Displays list of Non-Profit Organization Categories (ex. social, environment, health, etc.)
• Category Page (parent): Show title and excerpt of each Organization within a category (ex. Environment Organizations)
• Single Organization Page (child/current): Show content about a single organization(ex. SaveTheEarth – made up org for this example)

Here’s how to do it

1. Create a Page Called Directory. This will be the Directory Page (grandparent)
2. Find the Page ID. Let’s say the Page ID = 5. Depending on how you want to display the category info, you can
3. Manually add the name of each category, a short description and a link
4. Open up page.php so we can setup The Category Page (Parent Page). We want to show title and excerpts of each organization for each category.
5. Add this code to page.php – Checks if we’re on a sub page / child page of the Directory (Page ID =10) and if so, list the pages in alphabetical order with excerpts. For the excerpt, I’m using the plugin Limit Posts since it didn’t work with The Excerpt Reloaded.<?php
   $current = $post->ID;
   $parent = $post->post_parent;
   $grandparent_get = get_post($parent);
   $grandparent = $grandparent_get->post_parent;
   ?>

   <?php if ( $post->post_parent==”10″   ){ ?>
   <?php $pageChildren = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT *    FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_parent = “.$post->ID.”    AND post_type = ‘page’ ORDER BY post_title ASC”, ‘OBJECT’);    ?>

   <h2 class=”titles”><a href=”<? php echo get_permalink($pageChild->ID);  ?>”> <? php echo $pageChild->post_title;  ?></a></h2>

   <?php the_content_limit(280, “”); ?><div class=”readmore”><a href=”<?php echo get_permalink($pageChild->ID); ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <? php echo $pageChild->post_title;   ?>”>Read More &raquo;</a></div>

   (make sure to delete the space between <? and php -  I had to to do that so it wouldn’t execute in this post)

6. Single Organization Page (Child Page) On page.php, after the code you added in step 5, add this code that will check to see if we’re on the grandchild page. This will be the actual organization’s page. In our example, the SaveTheEarth Page. This is very helpful information in case you want to add a different style or add special items in the sidebar, etc.
   <?php if ( $pageChildren ) : foreach ( $pageChildren as $pageChild ) : setup_postdata( $pageChild ); ?>

7. Set up how the rest of the pages on your site will look:

On page.php, after the code in step 6, add this code which instructs every other page in the site to act normally and display the content

<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php else : ?>

<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php  endif; ?>

You can see the full page.php code here

You can see the directory in action here

I figured this out using the following helpful posts:

* http://wordpress.org/support/topic/186206
* http://wpguru.co.za/page/display-title-excerpt-of-child-page

Wordpress is often criticized for having duplicate content since new posts appear on many pages including category pages, archive pages, feeds, and trackbacks.  While this helps visitors find the content they are looking for, it confuses search engines, forcing them to “choose” which URL to serve in search results.

And so… Google (Yahoo and Microsoft too)  recently came out with a new link tag to help with the duplicate content issue which can be added to the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

But honestly, who can be bothered to go into the <head> for every post. Luckily, there are 2 Wordpress plugins that are here to help:

Yoast adds rel=”canonical” links to your blogs <head> section

SEO No duplicate – This simple plugin helps you easily tell the search engine bots the preferred version of a page by specifying the canonical properly within your head tag.

For more information, read the official announcement from Google.

According to the official Wordpress site, Wordpress Plugins directory search is no longer a big mess, and can actually help you find the plugin you’re looking for. Last week I think I did a search for “video” and got results like contact form, social bookmarking, etc. and had to resort to a Google search. But now the search brings up much better results and is a great resource.

Wordpress improved the search using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power the search from the plugins directory and from your blog’s admin area (Plugins>add new)

All I can say, is, give it another chance and you may just find a great plugin from the 4,245 available.

Setting up a blog with good foundations for the future on WordPress.com or Blogli

Many people prefer to start their blogging career on free sites like WordPress.com, or the Israeli version called Blogli. These sites take away the headache involved in installing the software and managing technical issues. They also allow for a soft start with little financial investment.

However, if you are serious about blogging, then you will want to see your blog grow. As it grows, you may find that it outgrows the limitations of WordPress.com, where you can’t upload plugins or completely customize the appearance of your blog. So while using WordPress.com for your blog is a great choice, you should make sure to implement a few things to ensure that if you do decide to move to a self-hosted blog in the future, it’s not too painful. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to use your own domain name from the start on WordPress.com by upgrading your account. It costs about $10 a month, and is worth it.

Automating your blogging and social media activity

A site or blog is no longer enough if you want to create a web presence that really works for you. It is important to integrate social media into your online strategy so that people can find you off your site as well. But we all know that managing a blog takes tons of time; how in the world do we find time to also manage social media profiles?

This presentation shows you plugins and online apps that will help you automate many of your social media/blogging activities to save you time, and make sure you can still have a bit of life offline too.

And finally, here are links to some other people who wrote about WordCamp Israel 2008 both before and after the event:

WordCamp Israel Has 560 Registrants

Photos and Links from Wordcamp Israel 2008

??????? ????? 2008 – ???? ????? ??? ???? ?????

WordCamp – Raanan Bar-Cohen – Tips for “virtual” company

WordCamp Israel