I’ve just launched version 2 of my Artiss Draft List plugin for WordPress and if you’ve not tried it, it’s really worth a punt. In a nutshell, it lists on your blog any posts (and/or pages) that you have in draft. This can provide an ideal, and unique, way to promote posts before they are published. Output is in text so will be picked up by Google, adding SEO advantages (see below).

But let’s get back to the plugin. Once installed you have option to use a sidebar widget, use an in-post (or page) shortcode or even just manually call it via PHP. A new templating system allows you to define exactly how the results are output – yes, you can output a list of draft posts, but what about adding an author name, word count or date of last update? All of this is possible.

It’s all cached so takes as little resource as possible and you can even exclude certain posts from being included in the list (this is done in the editor itself). Finally, you can make sure that the list only includes drafts for a particular time period – for instance, any created in the last month.

Scheduled posts are not excluded either – these can be included and can be indicated via an appropriate icon.

So, how does this help SEO? Well, let’s take a live example from my site. I recently had a product review post in draft. Searching for that product in Google, gave the following result (click to see a larger view)…

As you can see all the top results in Google are for my site – even though the review hasn’t been published. Instead the fact that the text is in the list of drafts within the sidebar has already attracted attention to my site and getting me listed. Of course, this is quite an obscure product so don’t expect top billing in Google for anything as a result. But it does help with your SEO and it give your readers a helpful insight as to what to expect soon.

Download Artiss Draft List from WordPress.org.

I recently came across John O’Nolan, a UK based core member of WordPress specialising in the UI, because of a plugin that he’s released, named UI Labs. This offers experimental WordPress admin UI features and is a great way for John to try out and get feedback for his ideas. I have it installed and am already benefiting from coloured tabs on my post and page screens, easily indicating the post types.

If you’re a WP developer I’d recommend following his Twitter feed.

Available on SlideShare are a couple of excellent presentations of his – again, if you’re “into” WordPress, these are excellent (and non-techie).

The first is titled “Designing WordPress” and was given at Heart & Sole 2011. Heart & Sole is a UK event in which professionals working in Web design and development get together to to interact, share experiences and learn together.

And there’s a matching video of the presentation, courtesy of Vimeo…

The second (and most recent) presentation is titled “Taking Control of WordPress: How to Build a Better Blog” and was given at TBU 11, another UK event but this time for travel bloggers.

Draft version of the new site design

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on a revised version of the site. More than just a theme change, this has been a review at every site component. I’m now nearing the end of this work and will launch the new site design soon. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to provide details of some of the things that have changed – bear in mind that I have a list of 70 changes that I made (many of them individually wide ranging) and 17 things that I didn’t.

Theme

First up is the theme. It’s darker and much more professional. Images have been reduced to save bandwidth (yours and mine!) and new fonts are used. A new “social bar” in the sidebar provides quick access to the sites Twitter and RSS feeds along with the PayPal donation option.

I’ve also implemented “margin reduction”. The site uses a new width, designed to fit perfectly horizontally on screens with a resolution of 1024 pixels or higher. This is in combination with a reduction in blank margins, fitting more information on the screen.

A new drop-down menu has been introduced, including quick access to blog categories and the most popular WordPress plugin pages.

Oh, and XHTML validation has been fixed

A screenshot can be found to the right of the new design – this isn’t the final

Performance

Performance changes have been critical. The site now has a YSlow A Rating (that made me very happy!) with improved caching and compression. I also copy external scripts (e.g. those provided by Google, Twitter and Facebook) to my own server, so they can be compressed and delivered quicker. Numerous plugins were removed after investigation into what was hogging resources the most.

A bizarre change, but bandwidth has been reduced by changing the 404 error page. Originally showing a large image, this now contains an embedded YouTube video. The 404 page is visited every time an invalid page is visited, so a reduction in this page size can make big savings.

Plugins

For those of you who are interested in my WordPress plugin work, 2 big changes have been made.

First up, I’m now using Mantis Bug Tracker to record bugs and enhancements. As part of this I’ve written some code to integrate the results of this directly into the plugin pages on the site – at the bottom of each it will list any bugs or enhancements for that plugin.

Secondly, I’ve added a forum for plugin discussion. Using comments tended to get a bit crowded after a while so comments on plugin pages are now closed (but viewable for historic reasons!) – instead there’s now a link to the forum.

Comments

Speaking of comments – the commenting system has been much improved with a better layout (for those WordPress geeks, I’m now using the automated comment features that WordPress offers, rather than the manual method that was implemented before).

I also now show how many comments are awaiting approval.

Reviews

Any reviews on the site included hidden Google “microcode” – information that Google can pick up and integrate into search results. This was present before but how now been improved.

Anything Else?

Tonnes more, but I’m now going to list them all – when the new site designed launches, I’m sure you’ll find them