You may have noticed a few changes at Mandersoconsulting.com recently, one of them being that I’ve redone my site! I’m pretty excited about the new pages, as well as the blog layout. I think everything is now easier to find, and I’m showing off my abilities.

That said, I took the opportunity to redo my WordPress install as well, as it was getting a little cumbersome. For one thing, I was having major difficulties getting any outside writing applications to play nice with it, such as Marsedit or any of the WordPress iOS applications. I had tried different settings on the rpc-xml file, without success. So I felt that since I was giving the site an overhaul, I’d do the same to the WordPress installation.

Once the blog was setup, and all the posts were imported, I needed to install some plugins for additional functionality:

Akismet: One of, if not The best spam filters for WordPress blog posts around. I can’t tell you how many spam replies it catches for my blog, and it works on at least hundreds of thousands of WordPress installations. It’s definitely worth the free sticker for personal blogs, and $5 for business blogs.

All in One SEO Pack: This is a great plugin to help with SEO on your blog. It gives you additional control over what information gets sent to the search engine spiders, including additional details of the blog post, and additional keywords. It’s donation-ware, but I’m going to send some money over. I think it’s a great WordPress resource.

Twitter Tools (w/ Bit.ly URLs, Exclude Category and Hashtags): Used to send your blog posts directly to Twitter, and includes the ability to shrink the URLs automatically. The setup for this is very easy, by the way.

& WordPress Importer: If you’ve exported all your blogs data correctly, then WordPress Importer will import that data quickly, without the hassle of digging through MySQL databases or retyping posts.

Update: On Red-Sweater forums (The creators of MarsEdit) is a thread titled “Blog posting strategy with Marsedit” that explains how to add the All in One SEO additional custom fields. Another great resource!

That’s what I’m using so far. What about you?

This post on this blog totally saved my bacon.  I”ve been screwing with verifying my blog with the Google Webmaster tools for longer than I”d like to admit, and had it working at one point, then lost it.  Now it’s logged for posterity.

To clarify the post: Login to the dashboard of your site, click appearance, and click edit, and select header.php.  I added the meta tag from google directly underneath the head profile… tag.  Google saw it, and is pleased, finally.