Enginero.com `en-jin-neer-o`

We all do it in one way or another. For some it just pays the bills, for others it keeps them motivated, but regardless of the reason, we all work. My last work week involved devoting countless hours to debugging and fixing a problem that should never have happened if my former colleague hadn’t been so worthless, but I digress…

This is the first time since starting the blog that I have gone this long without posting. Granted “this long” is only 4 days, but it feels like a long time considering I usually write a post about every day. Unfortunately, I was just too tired in the evenings to post and what little free time I did have was spent reading. This series of events leads me to why I’m writing tonight. When confronted with a shortened free timespan decision of whether to read other blogs and financial related sites or post to my blog, I chose to read.

I can’t tell you why I made that decision with any real certainty, but I tend to hope it is because I feel the need to quench my own thirst for knowledge before devoting time to talking about it. On the contrary, every night I felt an urge to post. I also felt a little guilty for not posting. I imagine that these feelings came from instinct. Once something becomes a habit, we are compelled to continue even when we have no pressure to do so.

So, I’d like to pose these questions to all of you…

1. Do you feel compelled to post to your blog even when you feel like there is something else that you would enjoy doing more?
2. Do you treat your blog like a job that comes with its’ own set of responsibilities?
3. Do you ever feel guilty for not posting every day? If so, do you worry that your posts will become “watered down” as you will inevitably end up struggling to find compelling things to discuss?

As a full time web developer and part time, hobby, blogger it interests me that I feel the urge to treat the blog as another responsibility. I don’t know why this is, but I look forward to hearing about your thoughts and experiences on the topic if you don’t mind commenting on it.

OK, so I admit it. I didn’t like the Commission Junction hosting company ads. Yes, I have used each of the companies before and yes they were worthwhile, but I just didn’t care for the flashy animated images. It distracted me, so maybe it distracted you as well.

Anyway, I got to thinking about what to put in that sidebar spot and I decided to start linking the top referring blogs for the previous month. They are the blogs that sent the most traffic this way during the month. Since the blogs that link here will almost always be of a similar topic to mine, I think it’s a good fit. I also like the fact that I can thank those bloggers by letting others know about their blogs like they have done for me.

With that in mind, here are the few guidelines that I have chosen for the Top Referrer linkage:

1. The blog must be in the Top (currently 3, maybe more later) referrers for the previous month.
2. The referrals can not come from a carnival listing. I decided this because if I’m submitting my own article to a carnival, it’s not the same as a blog owner choosing to call out my blog on their own.

   Reader Update: Ken emailed about this post to let me know that it would probably be worthwhile to actually explain what a blog carnival is, so there would be no confusion here. I think it’s a good example of how easy it is to forget that not everyone is a blogger who is going to understand the “lingo”. So, for anyone who hasn’t heard of a blog carnival before or don’t know what it is, please check out the Wikipedia information about them.

3. The blog does not have to be in my blogroll or have me in theirs. However, blogs that link to mine in their blogroll are, of course, more likely to be in the top referrer list.

That’s really the only guidelines I can think of right now that I think would be worthwhile. I’m hoping this turns out to be a win/win all the way around.

Do you have any other suggestions for Top Referrer guidelines?

I’m finding that whenever I make a development based update to the blog, it gives me motivation to post about it. I guess it could be that I’m compelled to share my new found knowledge on how the developers have used PHP to build the content management system that is WordPress. At any rate, I like to think that with me making this information available online, it is there to help someone else down the road.

Today’s Task:
Today I wanted to customize my theme a bit more by redoing the code that handles the
<title> of the pages. Prior to my changes, my titles appeared like this:

Home Page: Enginero.com
Post (single) Page: Enginero.com >> Blog Archive >> Post Title
Category Page: Enginero.com >> CategoryName

… and so on.

I didn’t really care for the “»” spacing characters and I wanted to change the output a bit.

Making the changes:
If you are not at all familiar with HTML or PHP, I will try to make this explanation make some sense to you, but if you need help, feel free to post a comment. Keep in mind that HTML codes are encased in less than < and greater than > symbols. So, when I say “title tag”, you are looking for <title>Title Here</title>.

1. You’ll need to locate your header.php file. You can do this by using the Wordpress theme editor or as I do it, by downloading the file itself from your web server and editing it locally.
2. Next, you need to find the place in the file where the titles of your posts are being set. The exisitng code will be placed between two <title> tags. ex: <title>bloginfo(’name’)</title>
3. Now you are ready to make your changes. For my changes, I wanted to use a colon “:” as my spacing character and I also wanted to make some wording changes.

   &nbsp

   Examples (I wanted my new titles to look like this:):

   • Home Page: Enginero.com : My Blog Description
   • Post (single) Page: Enginero.com : Post Title
   • Category Page: Enginero.com : Category : CategoryName

   To accomplish this, I replced the old code that was building my titles and wrote this new code:

   <title>
   <?php 
   bloginfo(’name’);
   if (is_home()) { 
   	echo ": ";
   	bloginfo(’description’);
   }
   elseif (is_single() || is_page()) {
   	echo ": ";
   	single_post_title();
   }
   elseif (is_category()) { 
   	echo ": ";
   	echo "Category : ";
   	single_cat_title(); 
   }
   elseif (is_search()) { 
   	echo "Search Results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s);
   }
   else { 
   	wp_title(’:',true);
   }
   ?>
   </title>
   

I would imagine that you can study the code above for a minute and guess how it works. Since WordPress uses a pretty good naming convention for its’ native functions, the code “reads” pretty easily. I hope you get some use out of the code I wrote above and if you need help making changes and adding your own personal touch, feel free to post your question in a comment.

Last WebDev Tip: WebDev Tip: Hide your email address in a link

I don’t know why, but for some reason I continue to be compelled to start doing monthly net worth updates on the blog. It has certainly become pretty commonplace for personal finance blogs to have net worth info, yet I keep going back and forth over it. The way I see it, posting net worth information would allow others to provide commentary that could be really beneficial. However, my wife is not really thrilled with the idea that our finances would be posted online.

So, what’s a guy to do?
As I see it, I have a few different options here:

1. I can continue to not post net worth info. I guess this would be the easy thing to do. There’s no rule book for personal finance blogs, so there’s no rule saying that a PF blog stinks because it doesn’t have monthly net worth updates. On the contrary, I simply think it would be neat to add it.
2. I can add the net worth information. This will require some pretty lengthy discussions with my wife on how I can be reasonably sure that having the information online doesn’t make us any more vulnerable to fraud or identity theft than we already are. However, at the end of the day, if she just isn’t comfortable with it, then I definitely won’t be adding it.
3. I can develop a more general net worth update process. Using a more generalized set of criteria and information outlay, I could still pass along topical information without actually talking numbers. My initial thoughts were that I could post the percentages of net worth change and then wax poetic on why that change happened and what could be done to correct or continue that event.

In the end, I just keep coming back to thinking how it would be a nice addition to the blog and how it could certainly prove beneficial. What do you think?

Are net worth updates on a blog all they’re cracked up to be? Do you enjoy seeing the info and reading about it or is it just a post you tend to skip while strolling through the blogosphere?