While browsing my feeds, I noticed an interesting post over at JohnCow explaining how to make money online with missing pages. The author noticed that a lot of traffic was ending up on his error page (almost 26,000 people to be exact) and felt that there had to be a better way to use this page so there wasn’t so much wasted traffic.

In the authors example, the idea is to redirect all traffic that hits his 404 page to his “make money” page, which contains affiliate links and other ways to get paid. While this example probably wouldn’t apply to most of us, I do think that it might be a good idea to redirect these bloggers to a more important page on your blog, such as your homepage.

In order to do so, you simply need to do a quick edit to your 404.php page (which most themes should have). Before attempting, make sure you have a backup copy of your 404.php page in case something goes wrong. You’ll want to add this code to the top of your 404.php page:

<?php
header ('Location: http://yourhomepageurl/’ );
?>

You’ll of course want to manually enter your homepage URL. If you have a favorite post you’d like to promote, you could instead add the URL to that post.

If you’d prefer not to redirect your 404 page, you can always customize it to help the potential reader to find what they were looking for.

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.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of writing a post explaining how to install/update WordPress via Fantastico for awhile now. While Fantastico is extremely easy to use, learning the process can take a little while. Now that most web hosts have CPanel and Fantastico available to their users, most people should have access to what is basically a two-click install.

If you’ve been wondering how to do this, today Easy WordPress published a post explaining how to upgrade WordPress via Fantastico. The post goes into great detail and includes screen shots, so you shouldn’t run into any problems. Gobala is also offering support for people still learning the installing process and provides some situation where you wouldn’t want to use Fantastico to update your software.

One problem not covered in the post is that Fantastico often takes way to long to be updated. If you find this is the case, you may want to look into using either WordPress Automatic Upgrade (which I often use), or the Instant Upgrade plugin. These plugins can be used immediately upon a new WordPress software release.

If you prefer to upgrade manually, I recommend you check out this upgrading WordPress guide on WordPress Max.

Due to the small number of WordPress blogs that have multiple authors, very few WordPress themes seem to come with a custom author page. This means whenever someone goes to the author page, WordPress will by default use your archives.php file, or if that isn’t available, then use your index.php file. This generally doesn’t make for a very nice author page because it just displays that authors posts in the same format as your archives.

In order to create an author page, you will want to make a copy of your archives.php file and name it author.php, then upload it to your site via FTP. Now go into your theme and edit the author.php page you just created. From here, it will vary a little bit depending on your theme, but we basically have to redo the post loop for this page. A typical archive page will call the header, then finish with calling the sidebar and footer. We will be changing the code in between. Here is the code that a standard theme would use between the header and sidebar/footer calls:

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
<!-- This sets the $curauth variable -->
<?php
if(isset($_GET['author_name'])) :
$curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name);
else :
$curauth = get_userdata(intval($author));
endif;
?>
<h3>About: <?php echo $curauth->display_name; ?></h3>
<p><strong>Website:</strong> <a href=”<?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?>”><?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?></a></p>
<p><strong>Profile:</strong> <?php echo $curauth->user_description; ?></p>
<h3>Posts by <?php echo $curauth->display_name; ?>:</h3>
<ul>
<!– The Loop –>
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<li>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>”>
<?php the_title(); ?></a>
</li>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p><?php _e(’No posts by this author.’); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
<!– End Loop –>
</ul>
</div>

This will display the author’s nickname, their website, and whatever is in the description field, as well as a bulleted list of all their posts. Once set up, you can control everything from within your Users panel of your WordPress dashboard. To see a list of other arguments you can get, I recommend checking out the official WordPress Author template.

As an added bonus, if you want your authors name link to point towards the authors page, you can do so with the following code:
<?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>

I had a reader request for some help with their blogroll recently. The WordPress blogroll has gone through many changes over the past year, and a lot of the WordPress themes authors out there didn’t update their themes with the new code used to call the blogroll.

The old code still works, but it doesn’t let you take advantage of the new blogroll capabilities.  If you have set up your blogroll with different categories, but noticed that all of them display under a single category, it is probably because your blog’s theme is still using the original code that didn’t allow for much configuration. You’ll probably find something like this:

<?php get_links()' ?>

or

<?php get_links_list()' ?>

If you want a more configurable code, you will want to use something like the following:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=1&before=<li>&title_before=<h2>&title_after=</h2>&category_before=</n>&category_before=</n>&after=</li>&orderby=url'); ?>

This code will display your blogroll, but will let you have separate lists for your different blogroll categories. I’ve customized it to display the category title as a Header 2 and use bullet points to display the content, but you can do a variety of things. For more customization options, you’ll want to check out the WordPress List Bookmarks page and adjust the code as needed.

If you are setting up a WordPress blog to work with a variety of authors, it is probably a good idea to also set up the author display to actually be a link to the bloggers website.

For whatever reason, many themes are created to simply display the author’s name using text by default instead of converting it to a link to the author’s website. Fortunately, this is an easy change to make with a minimal amount of coding adjustments required.

Here is what you need to do. When editing your theme, you’ll want to look for the following code:

<?php the_author() ?>

Remove that code and replace it with the following:

<?php the_author_link(); ?>

Now test it out! It will automatically display a link to the author’s site, as specified in the users profile.