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Interview with Joen Asmussen: Design Wrangler at Automattic
You may not know Joen Asmussen by name, but I’m sure you’ve definitely seen and even used his creation if you’re into working with WordPress sites. Joen is the main creator of the default theme of WordPress 3.6, Twenty Thirteen. I fell in love with the theme so much, that in addition to using the theme since WordPress 3.6’s alpha stages on my personal blog, I use a modified version of it on this site.
Joen lives in Denmark and works remotely for Automattic. Joen has also been involved with the development of the new admin interface (MP6) from WP 3.8 onwards. In this interview, we talk about how Joen started as a designer, his experience working with Automattic, and much more.
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Giveaway: 5 Pro Licenses of FormGet – Powerful Contact Form Builder
If you haven’t heard about it already, FormGet is a feature rich and extremely flexible online form builder app that lets you build anything from a modest ‘contact us’ form to a powerful lead generator and payments collector.
Now, I don’t get to see often a bunch of talented Indian guys coming up with such a powerful online solution, so when the people behind FormGet asked me if I’d be looking to host a giveaway, I didn’t say no. There’s a completely free version of FormGet available (with limited, but sufficient, number of entries per month) that you can give it a try first before entering with a hope to win. 🙂
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How to Change Permalink Structure and Setup Redirects in WordPress
Last month, I changed the month and year based permalink structure of TechTage to a simpler one based on just the post name. When I initially changed the structure from WordPress settings, I was quick to notice that old links were not working any more. With a quick .htaccess tweak, I was able to fix that and so far all my old URLs are 301 redirecting to the current ones. This was a lot easier to achieve than I had anticipated, and I’m going to show how you can do it too in this post.
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How to Quickly Remove Pages from Google’s Index and Lift a Panda Penalty
As you probably already know, I didn’t start TechTage from the scratch. Instead, I revamped my beloved smartphone and general tech blog and just got a new domain for it. As I didn’t post smartphone stuff or general tech news etc. anymore, soon enough Google was having troubles determining what the site was actually about.
I later came to realise that due to this, and because of the fact that the old site used to contain posts that I wouldn’t say were low-quality, but they certainly were short and lacked depth. I didn’t need those posts anymore (as most were time-sensitive anyway), but I didn’t want to remove them completely either. On the other hand, Authorship wasn’t doing its magic on SERPs for this site and it was ranking horribly. So, I decided to no-index around 1,100 old posts. It wasn’t easy, and WordPress didn’t have a built in mechanism or a plugin which could make the job easier for me. So, I figured a way out myself.
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17 Ways to Optimize and Speed Up WordPress Sites
WordPress, as a platform, is extremely well coded. However, some people mess their WordPress installations up by installing tons of low-quality plugins, choosing an awful web host, and filling their site with heaps of garbage.
Even if you don’t do something as stupid as these with your site, there’s still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to speeding up your WordPress site. I optimize around 8-10 WordPress sites in an average month, and there are a few techniques I always leverage to optimize and speed up WordPress sites.