Yup, another blog.

If you read back through the archives here you’ll see that I have a real problem with starting new projects. Not that I have a problem starting one. I have a problem starting too many. Right now I’ve got 2 forums, 1 eCommerce site, and 6 blogs (only 3 of which are regularly updated).

But, I had an idea for a new blog so about 2 hours after I registered the domain name ForumsBlogsWikis.com is live. The idea is to keep up with news on any web programs that allow interaction with your visitors.

A few months ago I started my first ecommerce site at TikiTemplates.com where I have several Photoshop templates aimed at photographers available - some free, some for sale. And to try and draw a few visitors over there I’ve posted a couple times here with new templates. Fortunately I found a post on embedding WordPress in osCommerce and set up a new blog on my TikiTemplates.com site and this blog will get to go back to the random photography and PHP postings that fill up the most space.

Almost every posting you read on how to “correctly” run a blog says you shouldn’t have too many categories. I was guilty of that problem, so I trimmed down my categories quite a bit with the help of a plugin called Category Converter.

It’s a one file plugin that you upload to the plugin folder of your Wordpress site. After activation you’ll have a new menu under Options that’ll allow you to move every posting from one category to another category while deleting the first category along the way.

So I’ve gone from about 30 categories to about a dozen, stripping out a few that only had one or two posts in them.

On my first Wordpress site I went and added all of the files I didn't want search engines indexing to my robots.txt file thinking that it was necessary to keep them out of the SERPS. But Wordpress makes it easier than I was trying to make it by starting almost every file in the root, and all subfolders, with 'wp-'. With a 2 line robots.txt file you can block most everything that needs to be blocked.

Akismet recently passed the 100,000,000 mark on spam messages blocked. Based on the assumption that you spend 1 second per spam message that hits your blog, they estimate that they have save blog authors 27,777 hours by blocking these postings.

Of course as I'm writing this the count just keeps increasing. In fact, the counter is almost to 102 million, with 1.1 million blocked just today. What shocked me is that 94% of all messages are spam, although it really shouldn't be shocking.

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I've started working on a new blog called DailyFont.com. The intent is to have a new font posted every day (future dated posts are great for this), but I'm not sure I can get a new one up every day.

What I think is the best part of using blog software to create a font library is that the visitors can subscribe to the RSS feed and get a new font in their inbox every day. It seems a great idea for font collectors - a group that I am definately part of.

DailyFont isn't quite to the point of competing with some of the really big font sites with thousands of fonts. Heck, there's only 11 fonts online as I'm typing this post. But give it time. It'll get there.

Sometimes a multipage posting can get out of hand, especially since WordPress just lists page numbers '1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5'. Enter the Jump-To plugin by UrbanGiraffe. It allows you to add a drop down box with the names of pages, allowing your visitor to jump to whichever page they select.

I've started a new blog at HackPhoto.com where I plan on writing about photography, Photoshop, and the like. It just goes to prove I cannot limit myself to one project at a time.

Well, I was just about to start work on another WordPress site. It appears, however, that the 3rd - and hopefully final - release candidate for WordPress 2.0 is out and ready to download with promises on their forum of the final release later this week. So I suppose I need to remove 1.5.2 from the site I'm working on and upload v2.0 RC3 instead. Hopefully the upgrade from RC3 to the final isn't too tough.

In reading through the WordPress forums, one thing I've noticed missing is a proper Atom 1.0 feed. Honestly, I don't know how important that is to me, so I may just not worry about it.

I've started using a plugin for WordPress called SimpleTags to handle tagging for Technorati. It's pretty slick. For inline tags throw a <tag> around the word and it becomes a tag on publishing. If you don't want to tag inline, you can add <tags> around a comma separated list and they'll become tags.