One Link SERPs Effect

As of today, Nov.26, 2012, searching Google for abstract art (no quotes) puts wwwARTbyLENA.com to the position #117 *).
I am going to test how placing just one link from a Blogger-based site can change the position. There are no other SEO actions performed on Lena's site at the moment.

Here is the "One Link":


Original art by Canadian artist Lena Karpinsky:
http://www.artbylena.com/original-art/abstract-art.html

And some "unique content" for this blog post, written in "Fast ESL Mode" :-)

Some people believe that term "abstract art" mean the same as "modern art" or "contemporary art". Therefore we see phrases like "abstract flowers". What they really want to say is "this is not a realism".
Abstraction is something that can exist only in our mind. Abstract paintings are non-objective. They are just splashes of colors, lights and shades, geometric compositions, and so on. When we look at such artwork, those color splashes are transformed into the images and feelings by our brain. And because our brain is a wonderful thing, we can see how amazing non-objective art is.

*) Checked using http://www.allorank.com/check-position, thanks AlloRank!

► Update Nov.28, 2012
AlloRank reports position #81, which looks like a great improvement, but unfortunately it is not, because during my experiment, I found that that nice tool produces highly unreliable results. I will continue watching it for a few more days, but will not make any conclusion and will look for a better rank checking tool.

2 Great Articles on Custom Post Types in WordPress

By Justin Tadlock:
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress

In WordPress 3.0, we’ll have the capability to easily create and manage content via custom post types. Not only that, but you won’t have to rely on a plugin to do this for you. It can be done via your theme’s functions.php file with a few lines of code.

By Richard Shepherd:
http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/create-your-first-wordpress-custom-post-type

...I think the great thing about WordPress is we can use it in the way we feel it should be used. There might be a different or better way, but there is no wrong way to do something (unless it doesn’t work!).

► Both articles provide a great introduction to the custom post types, with detailed PHP code examples. Custom types allow to associate additional information (fields) with a specific group of WordPress posts, and distinguish those posts from others in the admin interface. Having them, it's possible to extend WordPress to a powerful dabatase application.

Thesis 2.0 multisite CSS (thesis_do=css)

Note: this is a quick patch to Thesis 2.0.1, not optimized, not approved by the Thesis authors and not tested thoroughly.

Problem:

In the WPMU environment, Thesis CSS link looks like:

...?thesis_do=css&ref=...

instead of "normal" link to a .css file

Details:

The code responsible for that resides in the lib/core/skin/box.php, in class class thesis_stylesheets_link :

'url' => !is_multisite() ? THESIS_USER_SKIN_URL . '/css.css' : site_url("?thesis_do=css&ref=". THESIS_MS_CSS_VAL . time()),

Note that the time() call at the end makes this link not cacheable.

The patch:

1. In the box.php:

public function html() {
global $wpdb;
$styles = $links = array();
$styles['layout'] = array(

'url' => THESIS_USER_SKIN_URL . '/css' . (is_multisite() ? $wpdb->blogid : '') . '.css',

2. In lib/core/skin/css.php

public function write($skin, $custom) {
global $wpdb;
$css = $this->reset() . $this->update(apply_filters('thesis_css', $skin), $custom);
$css = strip_tags($css);
if (is_multisite()) {
update_option('thesis_raw_css', $css);
wp_cache_flush();
$lid = @fopen(THESIS_USER_SKIN . '/css' . $wpdb->blogid . '.css', 'w');
@fwrite($lid, trim($css));
@fclose($lid); 
}