XML Sitemaps or Google Site maps are xml files that list the URLs of your site and metadata (of the URL). This metadata includes the date the URL was updated, how often changes and its importance compared to other URLs in the site. All this information makes “life easier” for the web crawlers of search engine, as well as making sure that all the links are crawled. The sitemap doesn’t guarantee that the search engine will index you site, but it will increase the probability of it. This file is different from the sitemap page of websites, which is a list of pages (represented by its title) so the visitor is able to find them instead of going through every menu option. For more about XML sitemaps you can visit sitemap.org and about the navigational sitemaps (i.e footer of dell.com) check this link here.

For WordPress there is a plug-in that generates the sitemap of your website or blog: the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It’s called Google Sitemaps because it was first introduced by Google.

When your blog was hosted on WordPress.com you didn’t need to install this plugin because they will take care of this. However when you migrate your blog or site to hosted solution, you have more freedom and power over your site, and “with more power comes more responsibility”. So we are responsible to generate the xml file so its reported to the search engines. Thankfully this plugin does all the hard work.

Once installed you proceed to generate the sitemap of your website by going to XML-Sitemap option in the Settings menu. Then you will have a screen where you can build the sitemap and configure the plug-in in various forms. The default settings work fine since it will report the sitemap to MSN, Ask and Google. For Yahoo you will need to have Yahoo account and generate a API key that will permit the plug in access the services. You can get the key from here.

You can also use the webmaster tools by Google to manually upload the sitemap. Using the webmaster tools permits you to check for URL that are not found and learn more of how Google is indexing your website.

When I moved the webmaster tools told me that my URL were not found, however when I clicked on them there was no problem. After some time I figure out that the problem was that I changed the permalink structure of the blog. I set it up back to the original structure (from wordpress.com)

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

and the next day I checked everything was OK. If you get a bunch of not found URL in the Google Webmaster tools, check your permalinks that might be the problem.

This post is part of the “G to the Square WordPress Chronicles”, for more chronicles click here.

You just moved from wordpress.com to a self hosted blog using wordpress, you found your dream theme and you are blogging. The wordpress.com stats are running without a problem, the only thing is that you suddenly haven’t registered any visits for some time (see image bellow). Zero is the worst thing you can see for boosting your confidence.

Zero Stats flatline

If the visits have been zero for a long time there are to things you can do, setup up your Google Analytics account and install the plug-in in WordPress. That will give you a second source for stats.

To fix the Zero problem in the wordpress.com stats, go the the theme editor and check the footer.php file. If you don’t see the

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

line just before the </body> html tag, then put it. That should fix your problem Zero problem.

This post is part of the “G to the Square WordPress Chronicles”, for more chronicles click here.

The “WordPress Chronicles” are posts on experiencing and dealing with WordPress. I have to say that is fun, some things don’t always work, however is always straight forward. On the other hand Drupal is just a mountain of menus over menus and constant scrolling up and down. So after every post on working with WordPress, you will se a sentence stating that this is part of the WordPress Chronicles with a link to the category.

Today I was cleaning up my categories and found that a post about Microsoft Junk Mail Prevention Program, I get the following errors

Warning: pack() [function.pack]: Type H: illegal hex digit in [your blog path]/wp-content/plugins/wp-recaptcha/recaptchalib.php on line 242
Warning: pack() [function.pack]: Type H: illegal hex digit in [your blog path]/wp-content/plugins/wp-recaptcha/recaptchalib.php on line 242

Apparently the problem is with the Mail Hide obfuscation functionality in the reCaptcha plugin. After a search, I found out that this is a result of a bad public or private key. In my case I had them both in “illegal form”; most likely, there was a space at the end of the key. Which makes me ponder if a simple trim couldn’t be called on the key variable. I don’t think that the keys include white spaces or people will type them, once in a while a space will sneak on us. A good design take cares of those things.

The Compositio WordPress theme was design by Design Disease and brought to you, thanks to Smashing Magazine. Now that my blog is self hosted I decided to install the WP-reCaptcha plugin as a antispam measure for the comments. The plugin worked well with other themes, so that is how I new the problem was with the theme. Tried to fixed by myself, looking at the comments left in the plugins home page, however I couldn’t. So, I left a comment and Blaenk Denum was kind enough to help. Apparently is a common problem when the reCaptcha box doesn’t appear bellow the comments textbox.

The solution is to put

<?php do_action(‘comment_form’, $post->ID); ?>

in the comments.php file just before line 70 (or before </form> tag) for the Compsitio Theme, as stated by Bleank. For the other themes look for the </form> tag  and paste the code just before.

The code we insert, is call to a Action Hook. Based on the Theme Development guidelines there are some Plugin Api Action Hooks that should be included on all themes. These actions hook need to be present in the theme, for the Plugins to display information directly in the header, footer, sidebar, or in the page body. In the case of the comments the following is stated:

comment_form

Goes in comments.php and comments-popup.php, directly before the comment form’s closing tag (</form>). Example plugin use: display a comment preview.

Usage: <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?>

For the case of the Compsitio theme, this line of code was only missing in the comments.php and was present in the comments-popup.php.