Posts tagged with "WordPress"

This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donncha's blog and awarding the article a (Gold) Star in Google Reader.

But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to 'Friends/Ex Colleagues'.

I compromised by posting an article on my blog referring to Donncha's article so he sees the pingback and gets the credit for spotting the video. So Donncha's happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy.

Well - not exactly because I had to write some additional words on my article to justify its existence. This is exactly the situation that Google Shared Items is for. > These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information > quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about.

I just want to display a RSS feed on my blog for articles like this that I find interesting, amusing or thought provoking. This is trivial to implement in WordPress so I simply grab the feed URL for 'Shared Items' from Google Reader and create an RSS widget to display 'What I am currently reading' on the sidebar in this blog.

Unfortunately, that didn't work. The feed and article names were displayed but the formatting of the links was broken on WordPress 2.1. Curiously, I tried the same configuration on a test blog on hosted Wordpress and it worked fine.

A little research revealed that the WordPress RSS widget does not appear to support Atom 1.0 format (which is precisely the format used by Google Shared Items).

No problem. Just create a Feedburner feed and see if that works. This should automatically, dynamically and intelligently convert the feed format into a format the recipient can digest. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Sigh. Give up in disgust and make a note to ask in the WordPress/Reader forums.

Only you can't give up. You want this to work and this is now a challenge.

Read the Feedburner FAQ which implies that SmartBurner is what you need. This automatically, converts the original feed format for the consumer on the fly. However, SmartBurner is enabled by default so I wonder why it isn't working.

Examine the configuration of SmartBurner. By default, the output feed preserves the format of the original feed (Atom 1.0 in this case). However, it is easy to force conversion to different format (RSS 2.0) by setting the 'Content-Type'.

Revisit the WordPress RSS widget. Success !

So, after all that time and effort, I sincerely hope you both enjoy my 'Google Shared Items' feed.

Thankfully, Scoble has finally found the Disable Snap button on his WP dashboard. Only another 641,000 WordPress blogs to go.

If you don't know what I am talking about, just explore Jonathan Lewis' excellent Wordpress blog and see how long you last before exploding. [Hint: hover over a hyperlink]

If you can't be bothered, look here although a screenshot can't do justice to the mind numbing effect and irritation factor.

Tom Raftery also notes the presence of the dreaded Snap preview and asks for opinions. In fact, this post started out as a comment on Tom's blog but I think this now merits a full-blown rant.

Hi Tom I dislike those Snap previews immensely.

In fact, I absolutely hate, despise and loathe them with a vengeance.

WordPress.com added Snap functionality for all users (default=TRUE). To be fair, following lots of user feedback (surprisingly not all of it positive), WordPress made Snap a configurable option so users could disable the damned distracting Adware popups.

Judging by the number of WP blogs still displaying them, it appears the default is still enabled.

I think WordPress and Snap are great friends in the Web 2.0 sense but no disclosure about money changing hands was ever made.

I would pay WordPress good money to disable Snap. Permanently. Maybe a new business model presents itself.

Andy

Another thing on my todo list was to learn PHP and write a WordPress plugin to randomly select quotes stored in the database to rotate the tagline.

An admin interface to create, modify and delete quotes was planned for Version 2.1 (beta) due Q4 2008.

Fortunately for me though, a helpful person called Zombie Robot (pseudonym ?) has already produced wp-quotes (and another kind person tweaked it to work properly for taglines).

All that remains is the interesting part - performance tuning. No - wait. Existing users have already identified this modification as efficiently fetching a single, random record. Horribly database specific of course but worth having when you have 2.4 million quotes.

36c36
< $sql = "select * from " . WP_QUOTES_TABLE . " where visible='yes'
< order by rand() limit 1";
---
> $sql = "select * from " . WP_QUOTES_TABLE . " where visible='yes'";

Bluehost have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.5 so I ignored this warning and clicked Upgrade

Click on Upgrade only if
- no files, languages, themes have been modified
- you haven't added mods to this installation of WordPress

After all, the whole point of hosting a blog is to add plugins and modify themes.

I find it slightly odd that Bluehost have no blog or other means of communicating the availability of these upgrades.

Let's see if posting still works.

Feedburner - WordPress.com provides users with statistics about feed subscriptions. At best, these metrics were questionable and I used to provide two RSS feeds (WordPress and Feedburner) so the metrics didn't capture all feed activity anyway. As there is no equivalent functionality in WordPress 2.0.4 out of the box, I resurrected my Feedburner account and installed this WordPress plugin which automatically routes any subscribers to the WordPress RSS feed through Feedburner.

Sitemap - I started from zero when I created this site so I could try my hand at organic gardening. The only search engine I submitted to was Google. When I was trying to encourage Google to index the new site, I discovered that a sitemap could accelerate the process. This WordPress plugin generates a sitemap which tells the Google crawler about the site structure and recently updated pages. The sitemap automatically gets updated after each post and helps to reduce network traffic.

After my recent move from the community of WordPress.com, once again I truly feel like a Blog in Isolation. There are a few features I missed from WordPress.com:

• Dashboard - I can still check the WordPress blog, Top Blogs and Top Posts independently.
• Forums - While I can still participate, I don't really feel like a member of that WordPress community any longer.
• Comments - signed up for coComment that tracks all comments (not just those on WordPress.com)
• Tag surfer - can create Technorati feed(s) to replicate this but this was a nice, dynamic feature.
• New WordPress themes - If I like them, I simply download and experiment on this blog.
• Latest WordPress posts - an occasional diversion. No real equivalent (unless I login to my placeholder WP account)
• Avatars - Not bothered but favicon is your friend.

The Barthelme theme for WordPress is close to absolute perfection.

My only minor reservation is that elements of the sidebar (Pages, Categories, Recent Comments) and the title of the Next/Previous posts appear in UPPER case.

This is one of my pet hates as it looks like SHOUTING which is RUDE and, IMHO (sic), is completely at odds with the minimalist, understated feel of the theme.

However, a quick edit in 'style.css' to change two occurrences of 'text-transform: none;' to 'text-uppercase: none;' fixed that.

My life is now complete. All that remains is to add 'CSS' to my CV.

The migration from andyc.wordpress.com is now complete. All articles have been migrated. All comments have been lovingly preserved. All the internal links have been fixed (by hand) in a long and painstaking process. Robots and spiders are crawling all over the new site.

The only omission was a handful of WordPress images. I realised that I was a little hasty in deleting my old WordPress blog otherwise I could have easily retrieved these files too. Or a simple 'wget' of the complete site would have done the job.

Time for a checkpoint, I think. Activate the WP-DB Backup plugin and take a full backup of the MySQL database. Export the complete blog (posts and comments) to XML. As for Charlie - well that's yours truly for not taking a checkpoint earlier.

I decided I didn't like the format of the ' Related Posts' plugin and uninstalled it. However, when I reversed the database changes, I inadvertently deleted two key WP tables instead of column attributes. This idiotic error broke my blog. Totally.

So I was forced to delete my shiny, new WordPress installation and database, and repeat the whole migration process again (including the time consuming and painstaking change to all internal links) from my local WordPress installation. Lucky I took that copy otherwise I would have been really stuck.

Still, I am getting pretty good at the migration from hosted to hosting WordPress now and, finally, I understand the importance of backups.

Choose domain name which is taken. Choose another domain name.

Sign-up with Dreamhost despite recent bad press. All the other hosting providers look similar and all have supporters and critics and, to be fair, Dreamhost were quickest (and most helpful) to reply to a simple technical enquiry.

Payment processing takes a long, long time which is a little disconcerting.

Install WordPress 2.0.4 using One-Click installation. Shortly receive email stating 'Blog creation failed. Please try again later' which is worrying.

Repeat installation of WordPress which is successful.

Export existing blog from WordPress.com into XML.

Import XML into a local installation of WordPress 2.1 alpha (includes all comments).

Import XML into new blog. Everything imported successfully apart from the comments.

Install TechSailor plugin. Delete some posts with comments and repeat complete import. Existing posts are skipped and import includes comments for some posts but not others.

Delete complete WordPress installation, recreate mySQL database and empty blog.

Install TechSailor again. Import XML which works fast and without error. All posts, all comments, all categories are present. In fact, everything is intact.

Change theme to the stunning Barthelme which was the main reason for all this effort.

Upgrade Barthelme to the latest version (1.2.2).

Notice that the 'About' page wasn't imported and recreate.

Change permalink format to include name/date as used on WordPress.com.

Install widget support and configure sidebar widgets.

Activate Akismet plug-in (needs WordPress API key).

Install Google Analytics tracking code.

Stake my claim on Technorati.

Respond to amusing comment accusing me of blatant plagiarism.

Delete WordPress blog. Suddenly realise I didn't put up a closing redirect entry. Oh well.

Put kettle on.

After two months and two days, the music has stopped, the theme rotation carousel has travelled full circle and finally come to a halt.

WordPress.com offers a total of 40 themes (37 when I started) and I have experimented and laboriously captured screenshots of every single one.

I have tried out all the WP themes as they became available but it was interesting to live with each theme for a day or so.

My personal favourites were:

Andreas04 - I don't normally like three column themes but this was an notable exception. Light - simple, effective theme. If only it was a little wider.

Regulus - still probably my favourite (just) which rather negates the point of the whole pointless exercise. The header image clinches it. You never forget your first love.

Rubric - great looking theme with focus on the text but I feel Lorelle has made this theme her own.

Sandbox - a building block for DIY enthusiasts.

White As Milk - clean, minimalist look but narrow text.

And my hall of shame:

Banana Smoothie - not for everyone but undeniably very distinctive. Flower Power - not sure why this theme only uses half the screen.

Sweet Blossoms - too much colour, not enough screen.

I guess my perfect theme would be a two column, minimalist theme with an emphasis on the article text. In fact, Scott's Wallick's plaintxt theme is pretty close to perfection.

I guess I always could shell out 15 USD and build it myself on WordPress using the recently launched custom CSS.

Alternatively, I could just pay up and get my own hosted WordPress blog with complete control over everything.

So, review the Flickr set and cast your vote now.

RSS readers - don't sneer from the sidelines but tell us all what RSS reader you use and why.