Using Wordpress Post Slug (Now part of permalinks)
A few days ago I was tryng to install rs-discuss, its a wordpress Forum plugin. After installing the plugin and while setting it up, under Manage > Forum > Configuration options I saw the following line -
“Check your settings under Forum › Configuration. The “forum” page slug should be set to the same name you see listed under “Post slug” when you edit this page.
I was not familiar with the term “post slug” reason being I was using an ASP.NET blog called dasBlog before I started using wordpress and I started using wordpress from version 2.6.1 onwards.
After checking on the internet I found that post slug is the page name used in the permalinks when we write the post. In the older versions of wordpress there was a keyword value pair called post slug that you can use to set the URL of the post. That is exactly what rs-discuss configuration was talking about.
e.g. This is my recent word press post -
If you notice the post slug that is picked by wordpress by default is the title of the blog which is
Top 5 (five) Web Hosting Plans – Linux Web Hosting (PHP PERL MySql Apache Wordpress Blog Hosting)
which if converted by wordpress to make it URL standards compatible will look like following:
top-5-five-web-hosting-plans-%e2%80%93-linux-web-hosting-php-perl-mysql-apache-wordpress-blog-hosting
Now there might be times when some of the terms in your title are not important for search engines or might make the URL of the post very long. In that case you can change the post slug to show a URL which is shorter and easier to remember. Permalinks or post slug does not need to match the title of the post and can be set to any text you or your users might find useful.
In the recent versions of wordpress post slug is a part of the permalinks and can be set using the permalinks edit mode right under the title. And permalinks EDIT will only show up once the post is saved or auto saved by wordpress.
Edit wordpress page slug screenshot
Top 5 (five) Web Hosting Plans – Linux Web Hosting (PHP PERL MySql Apache Wordpress Blog Hosting)
For last few months I have been looking for the best hosting packages available online. Since I was planning to launch a BLOG (and had some other minor web projects in the line) I was researching for some of the best and economical (I had a pretty tight budget) hosting plans available in the market.
Last week, me and some of my blogger / webmaster friends were sitting at Starbucks in downtown toronto and a discussion popped up on the hosting packages we all have been using for the last 2-3 years. Well, it was a pretty useful discussion and we end up deciding the top 5 Linux hosting plans. Again it was all based on our past experience, this might not be the same for other webmasters or bloggers, but this list can definitely be used as a helping guide for both technical and non-technical users.
Some of my research was also done online and out of the following 5 web host packages I have personally used 3 of them and rest are being used by some of my blogger / webmaster friends.
I am creating a feature grid of all the hosting packages we discussed; I am also creating a custom Notes column at the end to enter notes based on our own experiences with that web hosting.
You can click on the text in particular column to visit the associated host website
Google Chrome Browser - Keyboard Shortcuts and Address bar commands
In relation to my earlier post on Google Chrome (can be found here - Google Chrome - First Look ) Here are some not so obvious things you can do with this web browser, this includes some keyboard shortcuts and Address bar commands -
| 1. | Create desktop and Start menu shortcuts to web apps such as Gmail - go to Gmail.com and then select Create application shortcuts… from the Page Control menu (in the top-right corner of your browser - it looks like a page with the corner folded over). Now choose where you want to place your shortcut. This works for other Google apps such as Calendar and Documents, and other services such as Windows Live Hotmail. |
| 2. | Control + Shift + N opens an ‘incognito’ window - sites you view in this window won’t appear in your history and cookies served by sites in this window will be deleted when the window is closed. |
| 3. | You can open a link in an incognito window by right-clicking the link and selecting Open link in incognito window. |
| 4. | Alt + Home loads your Google Chrome home page, with thumbnails of your most visited sites shown in the active tabbed window. |
| 5. | Control + T opens a new tab. You can drag tabs around to change their order or drag a tab out of the window into its own window. |
| 6. | Control + Shift + T opens your most recently closed tab. Press the key combination again to open the tab closed before that one. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you’ve closed. |
| 7. | Jump to different open tabs using Control + 1, Control + 2, Control + 3, etc. Control + 9 takes you to the last tab. |
| 8. | Control + Tab lets you cycle through your open tabs in order. |
| 9. | Control + Shift + Tab cycles through your tabs in the opposite order. |
| 10. | As with Firefox 3, you can drag a link onto a tab to open it in that tab, or drop it between two tabs to open a new tab in that position. |
| 11. | To bookmark a site click the star on the left of the address bar and then select a folder to add it to. |
| 12. | Control +B hides the Google Chrome bookmarks bar. Press Control + B to bring it back again. |
| 13. | Right-click or hold down the back button and you’ll get a drop-down list of sites to go back through. Show Full History, at the bottom of the list, opens a new tab with your full browser history. |
| 14. | Control + H is a faster way to bring up the History page. |
| 15. | You can delete history for chosen days by scrolling to the day you want to delete and clicking Delete history for this day on the right-hand side of the window. |
| 16. | Control + J brings up your Downloads page. |
| 17. | To clear an item from your Downloads page, right-click an entry and select Remove. |
| 18. | Press Control + K or Control + E to search from the address bar. Once pressed, you’ll see a ? symbol appear in the address bar and you can simply enter your search query and hit Return. |
| 19. | Right-click the top of the browser window and select Task manager to see how much memory different tabs and plug-ins are using. Highlight one and click End process to stop it running. |
| 20. | Shift + Escape is a quicker way to bring up the Google Chrome Task manager. |
| 21. | To see what plug-ins are installed, type about:plugins into the address window. |
| 22. | You can also type the following commands into the Google Chrome address window: about:stats, about:network, about:histograms, about:memory, about:cache, about:dns. |
| 23. | Type about:crash to see what a crashed tab looks like. |
| 24. | A three-second diversion: type about:internets. (Only works in Windows XP.) |
| 25. | Edit any web page - right-click a page and select Inspect element. Now edit the HTML source code and hit Return to view the changes. |
| 26. | To make Google Chrome your default browser, click the Tools button (in the right-hand corner of the browser window - a spanner icon). Select Options, click the Basics tab and then click the Make Google Chrome my default browser button. |
| 27. | To delete cookies, go to Tools > Options > Under the Hood. Scroll down to the Security section, and click Show cookies. Now you can click Remove all or remove individual cookies. |
| 28. | To clear more data such as the Google Chrome browsing history and cache, click the Tools icon and select Clear browsing data… |
| 29. | To clear the most visited web sites that appear on your Google Chrome start page, you must clear your browsing history using the method above. |
| 30. | Clearing your Google Chrome browser history will also stop matches from previously browsed sites appearing as suggestions in your address bar. |
Google Chrome - First Look
New browsers are coming out at an amazing pace and though its good for web and internet, its becoming more and more frustrating for web developers to get there code work with all the browsers.
Google’s chrome (Developer’s version is called Chromium) is another new addition to the growing list of browsers and with Microsoft’s IE8 on its way, it will be interesting to see the usage stats.
(And stats on receding hair lines of web developers while working with a growing list of web browsers)
Google released a comic interpretation of key engineering decisions for Google Chrome browser, by Scott McCloud that can be found here. Interestingly The Register have created (through its readers) a somewhat different and humorous Google Chrome Comic…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/google_chrome_comic_funnies/
Google Chrome feature list -
- Google Chrome is based on, built from the ground up with, open source application framework webkit; it is intended to be next-generation built for handling Web applications rather than Web pages. It includes Google Gears built-in. If you look at developers version of the webkit you can find code for all the different Google Gears.
- Each browser tab gets its own process rather than tabs sharing processes .This will resolve the multiple browser freeze or crash issue and make browsing faster.The rationale behind it is the same as that found in modern operating systems process isolation systems.
- Each tab has its own URL box, effectively making each tab a browser window
- Clicking on the Star icon on browser tab bookmarks the site automatically
- No about:blank pages. The Chrome’s defaults to a page featuring the four most used search engines and the user’s nine most visited Web pages.
- Similar to IE 8, Chrome has an “Incognito” mode to erase browser history when the browser is closed—something Firefox 3 didn’t include.
- Chrome can be customized so that the toolbar and URL box are hidden and only the webpage is shown on the screen.
- Chrome features browser extensions allowing it to make hybrid apps similar to Adobe AIR
- An Opera-like dashboard start page and auto-completion.
- On the security front, Google Chrome detects that the website you’re trying to access will securely transmit data using SSL the background color of the address bar changes to gold & also the ‘https’ in the URL appears in green for websites with SSL-secured connections established.
- Chrome sandboxes Webpages, preventing drive-by downloads and installations. It continuously makes contact with Google to update a list of known malware sites in order to warn the user.
- Chrome does include Safari’s Javascript Console and also Includes the Inspect element found in Firebug extension of Firefox browser. Flash runs perfectly fine on chrome.
coolwebdeveloper.com - Google Chrome
The interface is clean and unobtrusive, without unnecessary clutter. Chrome adapted many of the best things in different browsers and does without many of the unnecessary things. It’s amazingly complete for a beta but of course it lacks essentials like feed reading or ad blocking, which will certainly be available when the plugin/extension system is in place. The incognito mode is great. This mode, a feature which has also recently been announced for Internet Explorer 8, has colloquially been come to be known as “porn mode”, though as Google states there are numerous valid reasons to use it that have nothing to do with browsing porn. For example, if you’re using a shared machine, accessing your email using an incognito window would certainly be wise.
Web page rendering is slow as compared to both Firefox and IE. Chrome engine performs very well and is amazingly fast for web applications.
“Chrome is actually extremely fast when it comes to rendering Google’s websites. Maps, Gmail, Analytics Google Docs”
Google chose to use the open-source WebKit as the basis for Chrome. Strangely, only a Windows version of Chrome is currently available, even though WebKit is the basis for the Safari browser on the Mac operating system.
Some bugs that I noticed –
You can only scroll down and not scroll up with a mouse wheel.
Doesn’t warn you when you are closing multiple tabs (which I did accidentally and had to re-open all tabs) and there is no option to enable this.
I am a big fan of changing / controlling the background color of the web browser. As I do a lot of reading on internet using my tablet PC – I usually change background color to use System Colors in Firefox (and default system background color to Gray), its really very soothing for the eyes. Well, I was really disappointed there as I did not find any out of the box way to change the background color of Google Chrome browser or use a System Colors option. I am sure this is a very handy feature for a lot of my developer friends out there. Well, I downloaded a copy of the Google chromium developer edition and was able to do it on my own but Google should think of packaging this feature straight out of the box.
For developers - Google Chromium source code can be downloaded here - http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/getting-started. This page also includes a list of instructions to compile code in windows Visual Studio 2005.
