Developing OTFA

We have found space to celebrate our newly minted top 100 ranking on the Googleplex for the word ‘Argyll’. At 80 we have halved our rank in just over a week. We like that. We also like the new google map we have implemented on the front page – well, it has been said that sometimes communities in Argyll are hard to find, so here’s the distributed-SEO-area-affect solution. Not only do we get blogs about the communities, but we get geo-positioning, global google coverage and (no doubt) not a little kudos for doing this in around 35 minutes flat!

Also resolved (finally) was the registration problem. We haven’t said much about this here, but that is only because there hasn’t been much to say. The problem was that if a visitor wanted to register for a blog, they were redirected to the WordPress login page, and thence to the overall signup page, which meant, they were two pages away from the blog they wanted to register with, and no way to log in to that blog unless the site admin was on hand. This really was too perplexing for words, and something that needed time.

Time was found on the tail-ends of the Outage to implement Nathan Kinkade’s excellent perBlogRegistration plugin which allows new folk to register with the blog of their choice, access it and not have to worry about that whole applying to be part of the gang thing. All well and good, but it didn’t solve the redirect to the Admin Login page, so with a simple if/else statement we reproduced the troublesome wp_register function and all was well with the WPMU world ForArgyll lives in.

(Well mostly. We’ve still got to get the front page all shiny, and then there’s our picture gallery site, the business directory … and did I say we have finished off implementinga nifty two-column job for LifeStories, with the second col. inhabited by a submission form for new stories? We also changed the colour — somehow the yellow was making the coding impossible!)