One of Smashing Magazine’s first and most well received posts was a sort of WordPress theme gallery, similar to the galleries I manage and update here at Hack WordPress.  Now it looks like they’ve gone back to their roots with another post dedicated to WordPress themes.

This post is titled 100 Excellent Free WordPress themes, and it doesn’t disappoint!  There are a number of really incredible themes here, including a few that I hadn’t run across yet.  This weekend I plan to go through their post and update the appropriate galleries here on this site.  In the meantime, I recommend you click over and check it out!

We all know that duplicate content can be a problem. People copy your work, re-post it on their website, then you both are penalized for duplicate content! Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about that, but did you know that often blogs have duplicate content within their own blog? The biggest culprit for duplicate internal content is your archives page, which is usually used for categories and monthly archives. Unless you only display partial posts in your archives, you’ll want to make sure Google doesn’t index it. If you aren’t handy with Robots.txt, you can instead use this code to easily tell Google not to index your archive.php page.

<?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex"><?php } ?>

You’ll want to grab that code and paste it anywhere in the header of your theme above the closing of the head tag. That way, Google will not index these, and search engines won’t refer traffic to your archive pages instead of your single post pages.

Do you have a Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar)? As a loyal fan of the WordPress software that runs each of my weblogs, I feel that it is important to support WordPress in any way that I can. Because this blog focuses on WordPress, that is especially true here.

You may remember that last October Automattic, the company behind WordPress, purchased Gravatar. In the time since then, they have revamped the infrastructure of Gravatar to drastically speed things up, integrated it into the WordPress.com platform, and then updated the Gravatar WordPress plugin to function better with self-hosted WordPress blogs.

If you don’t already have a Gravatar, I recommend you first sign up with Gravatar for a free account using whatever e-mail address you normally use to leave comments. Once confirmed, it will then prompt you to upload the avatar you want to use. You’ll need to use the e-mail address used for your Gravatar in the e-mail address field of the comment form (all in lower case) when leaving a comment for the Gravatar to display properly next to each comment.

Now that Automattic is backing it, and WordPress.com blogs have integrated them, I think that over time Gravatar will continue to grow and the service will continue to get better. It is with that belief that I decided to add individual Gravatars to the comments on this blog (I also revamped the comments section to better support it). I would also like to see other self-hosted WordPress blogs begin to support Gravatars as well (many currently either support MyBlogLog avatars, or no avatars at all), so what I decided to do is update this post with an outbound link to your blog if your blog supports Gravatars.

Here is what you need to do to get an inbound link to your homepage:

1. Update your blog to display the commentators Gravatar with their comment. This can easily be done by installing one of the many Gravatar plugins (including the official Gravatar WordPress plugin) and then calling the plugin somewhere in your comments.php file. Depending on the theme, it will usually go in the commentblock section. If your blog already supports Gravatars, skip to step 2!
2. Leave a comment below with a link to your blog.

It is really that easy! I will then confirm your blog displays Gravatars with the comments and update this post with a link to your blog’s homepage, giving you a quality inbound link and hopefully some additional traffic. I’d like to turn this post into a showcase of WordPress.org blogs that support Gravatar! [Continue Reading...]

Back in early November I wrote about a great WordPress help sheet released by WPCandy that primarily focused on a bunch of PHP snippets for WordPress developers. You can download the PDF and have quick and easy access to these code snippets when you need it.

Today I noticed that Michael has followed this up with yet another great free PDF designed to be a more advanced WordPress help sheet. This one is similar to the WordPress code compilation that I created awhile ago, but his help sheet covers a few more advanced code snippets while still mixing in a lot of basic code that theme developers might use.

If you spend any amount of time working with WordPress themes, I recommend you click over and grab a copy of this PDF so that you have it when you need it!