Website promotion
Successful implementation (ii)
As was explained earlier, Ryan is a keen writer and already has a blog. Re-locating his blog so that it becomes a vibrant and integral part of the PSD website is certain to draw more investors and customers to the rest of the site. I will be implementing this measure using an excellent application called Textpattern.
What is Textpattern?
A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs. Textpattern is a web application designed to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages.
Built into Textpattern is Textile, a simple syntax for nudging plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content. Ordinarily fussy text amendments such as headers, hyperlinks, image tags and tables are created with one or two simple markers.
Compared to navigating the tag soup of markup, writing and revising with Textile is much more intuitive, being closer to working with ordinary text. Once you’re ready to publish, copy marked up with Textile is automatically converted to valid XHTML, and because Textpattern stores both versions of each article, revising and updating is a snap.
Ryan will be able to produce smashing content and extemely accessible material similtaneously.
Installing Textpattern
There are only two minimum requirements:
- PHP 4.3+
- MySQL 3.23+
The recommended SegPub hosting package has even newer versions of these two plaforms. So the web host actually surpasses PSD's requirements.
Downloading textpattern
The first thing I had to do was download the textpattern files. These were compressed into a .zip or tar.gz format for faster downloading. After they were downloaded I proceeded to extract them into a folder I use to dump files so the are ready to be uploaded.
uploading the textpattern files to the psd site in the blog directory
First I had to create a new directory in the PSD part of my remza.co.uk SegPub account. I did this by using an FTP client to create a new folder called “blog”. I then uploaded the files using the same FTP client. The top-level index.php now resides in “blog” directory, as does the /textpattern/ directory.
Creating the mysql database and username in my.segpub
Next I had to create a MySQL database and user with the appropriate rights using the web host's control panel. Due to the my.segpub control panel being so easy to use this process was very easy. I was able to interact with the database server without any problems at all. Below is a snapshot of me setting the rights for the user: “remza_us4”
After establishing the existence of, a working mysql database, all I had to do was load /blog/textpattern/index.php in a browser, and follow the directions. I was firstly asked which language I would like to use, so I selected “English (GB)”. Then I was asked to input the database's details (shown below).
editing the config.php file
After clicking “next”, textpattern attempted to connect to the database and succeeded in doing so. It then told me the following:
So I followed the command to “Create a file called config.php in the /textpattern/ directory...” by copying the text within the grey area into a text editor and saving the file as config.php. I then uploaded it to the correct directory and clicked “I did it”. I was then asked to enter Ryan's full name, username, password and email address. I did as asked and then clicked “next” and this successfully completed the installation process. Evidence of this is shown below:
Making the blog an integral part of the site
With the installation complete, it was time to edit some of the settings in textpattern, customising the application to suit the needs of Ryan and of the company as a whole.
Adjusting the XHTML and CSS used by textpattern
Below is snapshot of me editing the default xhtml template in the textpattern “presentation” section.
Using this editor I linked the blog's php include files (containing xhtml) to the site wide stylesheet that was already in place. I also linked the JavaScript functions file to the default template so the Accessibility display controls could work too.
Adding the blog to psd's site navigational cycle and site map
Now that Ryan's blog looks like the rest of the site, all I had to do was add it to the navigational cycle which is just a simple unordered list near the top of each xhtml document. Below is a screenshot of me doing this.
I also had to change the “Next page” link on the products.html page so that it too would link to the blog.
Adding the XML RSS/Atom output from the blog to the entire site
With Ryan now able to generate content using his blog and with it able to produce XML to two different flavours (RSS 2.0 and Atom). I thought it worth while to have a link on each page of the PSD website to the feeds outputed. This measure would aid the syndication of the content across the entire site.
This was done by linking to the two feeds within each page's <head></head>. This is seen above. Now when using the latest version of Internet Explorer (IE7) or Mozilla Firefox (2.0) the feed icon will become selectable.
This completes the implementation of the two measures to maximise visitor numbers. On the next page I will be critically assessing the effect that both of these measures have actually had.
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