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Version 26 “Beta”.
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 06/25/08 at 10:06:13 pmHere it is - Markus Langenfeld.com Version 26.
Well, not quite. I have a load of stuff I want to get on here still and a few colors and small details are slated to change over the next few days… When I get time. Some of the features yet to be ported from the mighty version 25 include my Twitter integration, and some sort of RSS thing on the sidebar.
I’m content with the design but more importantly I’m loving the ’skeleton’ of the new layout as it will allow for new expansion options that I didn’t have with the prior design. You will notice some new additions to my little corner of the internet including an Advertise page that will be online shortly.
Version 25 had a good run at just 3 months shy of a year (all-time-record FTW), this will be a refreshing change of pace.
My relationship with WordPress runs deep.
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 05/07/08 at 12:05:16 pm
The end of April marked 3 years of using WordPress to power my personal web presence.
Before this website and the domain we’re using today, I went through a few different phases with various blogging platforms, domains, and names for my blogs. I first started blogging with Blogger.com in 2002, this was back when Pyra Labs was still running the show and the concept of blogging was new and kind of ridiculous. I remember when the founders of Blogger.com were guests on TechTV’s The Screen Savers and they were trying to explain the concept behind a service that allows people to write whatever they want and openly share it with the world. I knew then that blogging would add a whole new dimension to the information age, the personal diary was no longer a notebook hidden in a dresser drawer.
By editing and customizing the premade Blogger templates I dove head first into learning basic HTML and CSS skills and working with proprietary “Blogger Code” as I called it, which I now know isn’t proprietary at all. I bet you wouldn’t believe that I first got into web development with Flash 4.0 and I actually had a good grasp on the fundamentals of Flash animation and actionscript before I knew what I was doing with basic programming. After working with Blogger I made the plunge into MovableType, my first hosted platform that I had to install myself which back then wasn’t just a few clicks of the mouse like it is today. I used MovableType for a while before I basically let my blog go and eventually the domain expired. I guess I was busy with school or perhaps I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to offer on my website and why I had it in the first place.
I purchased MarkLangenfeld.com and started using WordPress 1.4 in 2005. WordPress wasn’t nearly as popular back then as it is today and most of my blogger friends and programming mentors were using Textpattern or MovableType at the time so I was pretty much on my own. WordPress and I have become good friends over the years, like most bloggers I have my own arsenal of different plugins and things that make this website work. In fact I was recently discussing with a friend of mine that one of the big problems keeping me from changing my layout around again is the amount of modifications and hacks that I have running now, it would be a huge undertaking. Even with that in mind I think that the flexibility and reliability of WordPress is totally unmatched by any other platform and I’m looking forward to using it another 3 or more years to come.
I did it! I made it! I’m on WordPress 2.5
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 03/31/08 at 03:03:58 pm
It feels like WordPress 2.5 came way sooner then expected. I didn’t put upgrading my WordPress install onto my to-do list for this weekend but I decided it would be a good idea to start upgrading the websites at 3am on a Saturday night, I mean what better time?
Here on Markus Land the upgrade went without a hitch, I’d like to thank my Savant-like web development skills but in reality I just lucked out. I also upgraded the install on my mother’s website and unfortunately she wasn’t so lucky. What she doesn’t know is that her website had a nice brokenness to it for a good hour before I could figure out the problem, and then the next morning we discovered another issue with the WordPress dashboard that turned out to be a glitch specific to her K2 theme.
Once I got everything updated I spent a little time exploring the brand new interface which at first was a bit of a shock with everything moved around but overall I’m really digging the minimal Happy Cog redesign. Besides the revamped dashboard, some of the changes I noticed right away include the tag management interface, semi-automatic plug-in upgrading, redesigned visual post editor, media buttons, and of course the gallery functionality. When you look at all of the new features of 2.5 it’s almost overwhelming, I’m not going to bother listing them all - I’ll just direct you folks to the Official Release on the WordPress Development Blog.
Tweetin’ Twitterific.
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 12/15/07 at 10:12:00 pmI got ambitious tonight and decided to start a little project I’ve been thinking about doing for a while and that’s adding Twitter to my website. I actually joined Twitter when it was launched and I didn’t find much value in the service, at first it seemed somewhat pointless and I ended up closing the account shortly after registering. Since then, Twitter has really exploded in popularity and there are more and more websites that are able to integrate with Twitter, MyBlogLog being one such website. So, tonight I decided to give it another shot.
I’ve been thinking about a way to add Twitter to the blog, where I could put the “badge” and what info I wanted it to display. I decided that the top near the navigation was a good spot for it, I’ve actually seen a couple other blogs with similar placement and I thought that it looked good up there. I still have a couple bugs to work out; I’m having some troubles making the little Twitter logo link to my Twitter page without it pulling the gray background from the previous div styling. I want to make it clear that I really hate the navigation bar on this layout, it looks decent but the way it’s coded is ridiculous. Some of you may remember that I originally wanted the navigation off to the right when this design was created, I guess I’m glad I was never able to pull it off now that I’m adding this Twitter thing.
Anyways, eventually you may be able to click the Twitter logo and you will go to my page with all of the ‘tweets’, for now you can take a look by Clicking Here.
For those interested, to pull of what I’ve done so far in terms of displaying my Twitter updates on the blog I’m using the SimpleTwitter plug-in for WordPress found Here and a little CSS magic. I think this will be fun having little blurbs and updates on the website. We’ll see how often I’ll have a chance to update it 
It’s all for the greater good.
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 11/03/07 at 10:11:27 pmI’ve been making a few significant changes around the blog over the last few weeks in an effort to further optimize my search engine friendliness.
With some help from Chris on Friday I made a change to the way the URL is handled on the website to where it now displays “www” in the address. I found out that apparently this is a big deal since search engines tend to treat www and non www URL’s as separate websites. Essentially, this means that http://www.marklangenfeld.com could have one page ranking and http://marklangenfeld.com has another. Since I’m used to typing in “http://” before my URL’s with no “www” (I know, I’m weird) the website to me has been known without the www and that’s how I initially set it up. The problem is many of the various blogs and websites that link here put the www into the address. I’m thinking that some of these inconsistencies may have something to do with my PR dropping recently.
I’ve also been paying more attention to the title tags and Meta descriptions since the launch of V25. I picked up a couple neat plug-ins to add to my arsenal including Optimal Title and Head META Description which work well together in cleaning up the permalink titles and automatically creating Meta descriptions for my content. SEO Title Tag was my single plug-in of choice until I upgraded to WordPress 2.3. It’s an amazing plug-in but up until just recently it wasn’t compatible with the latest WordPress release.
I’ll be tinkering with things more in the coming weeks to try and reclaim what’s left of my Google existence, I guess right now I’m just trying to not kill it off completely.
Here’s what I’ve been up to.
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 10/18/07 at 03:10:06 pmI’ve been (finally) putting some real time into the brand new company website. I’m really excited about this because I believe the company could not just use but NEEDS a modern web presence with a solid ground for expandability. The company has been exponentially taking on new projects and goals. We are launching a lot of new services and we need a website that can express the new developments.
I normally don’t blog about work but I wanted to write about my plans behind this project. It’s not just the design that is being overhauled; it’s the way the content is put together and the ease of updating everything.
I’m going to run the entire website off of WordPress but I want it to be completely transparent. The design isn’t going to look or feel like a blog when I’m done with it. WordPress will only act as the backbone, the CMS behind the scenes. All of the content will be movable and changeable with just a few clicks of the mouse. Ideally I’d like it to be so easy to edit that any of the staff would be able to update the content and I think despite me using it outside of its primary purpose, WordPress will easily deliver.
I put the screenshot up there but I really don’t have much to show off just yet. I’d like to make this into a small series of posts and actually jot down some real project notes with the various hacks and plug-ins that will be used to pull this off. We’ll see what happens.
Version 25 - There, It’s done.
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/15/07 at 09:09:10 pmAnother weekend dedicated to another website layout… This one is a little different though, I actually spent almost 3 weeks planning and designing this template and the new features I wanted to add to the website. I think I have put more work into this version then I have in a long time in my website. I really wanted to perfect it so that I’d feel good with it being around for a long time to come.
You will notice a couple new features. One of which is I have switched from Categories to tags, so you will see a new tag cloud on the sidebar which will offer some fresh links into the buried content. I actually upgraded to WordPress 2.3 Beta 3 to get the built-in tag support that 2.3 has to offer. I really don’t like running a beta as my live blogging platform but it appears overall stable and the final release will be in a couple weeks so I figured it would be safe enough to do what I needed to get done.
You will also notice the brand new Asides posts on the sidebar which will basically act as a link blog or mini blog. I’m using a semi modified plug-in called MiniPosts2 to get this working the way I wanted. I will try to post little tidbits in there often to keep the front page fresh with interesting stuff that I come across.
The blogroll is gone, the Asides has completely replaced the blogroll. I’m going to try to link to everyone I had in my blogroll so that they still have a permanent link somewhere on the website.
Popular Entries is another new feature, again on the sidebar. The popular entries is a plug-in I’m using called popularity contest by Alex King. It appears to do a great job digging up the articles and reviews that get a lot of traffic; I thought it would be a good addition.
The last addition I wanted to bring up is the Share This link under each post which is another Alex King plug-in that supports the Share Icon Project, this will be nice for many of the reviews that are getting posted here that people might want to share or submit to social bookmarking websites.
All of the new features and things needed a new design to play with. The new layout is fairly basic and clean… Just the way I like it.
I’m really happy with the new layout and how it all turned out, I’m hoping to stick with it for a while, I guess we will see how long it lasts but I’m shooting for at least into next year before I try doing this crap again. Ugh…
More Changes. RSS Goodness.
Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 01/22/07 at 02:01:13 pmI’ve got that itch again, the itch to move and completely change things around my website. I can’t help it, I’m never fully happy with it, even now.. There are things I want different. That’s half the fun though, making something and fine-tuning it just the way you want it, and then doing it all over again.
I did however make one permanent change, which pertains to my RSS feed. I have moved all of my RSS to Feedburner for tracking and optimization purposes. I found a wicked nice WordPress plug in over at OrderedList that automatically forwards the WP feeds to Feedburner, and the current feed subscribers are forwarded also.
I put a small selection of syndication buttons back on the side bar, they may be moved around but I think I plan to keep them. I would like to focus on streamlining RSS and SEO on the site, rather then changing the design every 5 minutes. I think this will help, maybe.
Expect everything you see here to be changed a few more times, until the itch wares off and I have to catch up on the work I should be doing.
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