I have yet to play with the multi-site abilities of WordPress 3.0 (porting over WordPress MultiUser main characteristic). I want to see if I can have all of my blogs looked after by one super admin interface, so when the time came to upgrade to WordPress 3.1, or one of the plugins, I could go through the process just once instead of twenty odd times. I’m not sure how the process would work when some plugins are only installed on some sites. If have a plugin that pulls in news abt electronics coupons from various RSS feeds on one site, but that plugin isn’t used elsewhere, what happens? I also think I’ll need to still use an extra plugin and fiddle with some CNAME records, as all the sites except one are on totally different domains, not subdomains or folders of one master site. Anyway, that is all a project for another day – I don’t have the time to dedicate to repairing any potential problems I may cause right now.
Tags: Blog software, computing, Content management systems, WordPress
Installed WordPress 3.0 on main blog. All posts vanished from front page! Changed theme. All OK. Proper post in the morning. Heading to bed. (3)
It is true, if you write online for personal reasons (hopefully you make the extra effort if your published work is for a company), your spelling could have been better, and quite possibly your grammar could be improved as well. I’m definitely not immune to either issue. That said, if I see kids ties, I do know there is most likely an apostrophe homeless this afternoon!
Help is at hand, as although Firefox has a spell checking facility built in, the grammar side isn’t covered. After The Deadline is available as either a Firefox and Chrome add on or a bookmarklet you could use in Internet Explorer. When activated, it can check for grammatical mistakes, and even remind you whether you’ve checked your text over, before hitting publish!
I’ve just checked, and it is also available as a plugin for WordPress and a few other systems.
Tags: After The Deadline, Apostrophe, Bookmarklet, Chrome, Firefox, Grammar, IE, Internet Explorer, Language, Spell checker, Spelling, WordPress
As you may remember, I recently mentioned that the update to the SEO Search Terms plugin recently implemented that any search terms used to find your blog that had not scored a hit in over 30 days would be deleted from the database. This obviously helps minimize the impact of the plugin on database size, but for those of us without huge amounts of search-based traffic, the lost data seemed a shame. The author has replied, and explained that although this feature request will be fulfilled in a future release, a stop gap measure would be to alter the following line
23 $sql = 'DELETE FROM '.$wpdb->prefix.'stt2_meta WHERE date(last_modified) < date(now()-interval 30 day);';
Just in case anyone has already installed this plugin, but hadn't been keeping up to date with the comment's on the plugin's page at the author's site, I wanted to mention it here as well.
Has anyone else upgraded their SearchTerms Tagging 2 plugin to version 1.1 yet? The only change I remember noticing at the time was to automatically delete unused search terms after 30 days. I am not quite sure what the “unused” reference means. If it will delete information about searches that have not been used to find your site in the last month, I hope the author will consider adding an option to turn this off/on. I can understand why on a very high traffic (from search engines at least) blog you would want to control the size of your database, but I also believe that having the ability to check search terms from more than a month ago could remain useful. If I write about dermitage reviews now, and think about doing the same in the summer, it could be useful for me to first check whether many people were searching for related keywords when they found this site.
Following on from the previous post that mentioned the comment referrer plugin, I wanted to give another shout out to the creator of the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 plugin. Thanks to his work, I can tell that I have not recently had anyone arrive at this blog after searching for “acne pills“, however “tewksbury floods 2007″, “linkedin problems”, “funny double barrelled names” and “alreader2 english” are all search terms that have drawn people to this blog in large numbers. I think the surname one must be from image searches, as that particular post is mostly pictures of people who got married and both kept their unusual names. Alreader2 is a reference to a e-book reader I used on my TyTnII (not long until we can get the screen fixed now 
), and the other two speak for themselves really. I need to check how many days the plugin checks back for its report on “recent search terms”, as it doesn’t seem to be an option you can alter yet. That said, the author has been very quick to respond to bug reports and feature suggestions in the past…
One of the WordPress plugins that I have been meaning to write about is Comment Referrers by Donncha O Caoimh. Very lightweight, and single purpose, it simply adds a line to e-mails that you receive when new comments are made on a post at your site. If the browser sent a referral URL upon arriving at the page, it is copied in. So if someone has been searching Google for “WordPress Astana ExPat”, I can figure this out if they leave a comment. This can be useful for tailoring your reply to their the visitor’s specific needs, or at the other end of the scale, it is normally very simple to see if someone has simply left a comment to gain a backlink. It also works as a simple way of keeping tabs on which sites or search engines are sending you traffic. www.neckacne.net has never apparently sent me traffic, for example, though this isn’t totally surprising, as the topics we cover rarely cross over. I might go and install the plugin on my Glycolic Acid site, see if that is more of a match…
Am I really the only person having problems with WordPress’ gallery function? Since around v2.5, when I upload a batch of photos, add the captions etc, and save changes, around one in three times, no gallery link appears at the top, between From URL and Media Library. The last post had this happen, and after waiting 19 minutes, it suddenly appeared when I rechecked again. This gap in time makes me think that maybe there is some sort of processing problem, and that my host was throttling me, however a quick check in CPanel reports that
No CPU limiting factors (throttling) have been placed on your account in the past 24 hours
So, where to go from here? Carry on ignoring it, swearing occasionally at the randomness of this? I could try checking out the plugins currently active, and consider applying the equivalent of a lipozene course for the blog, slimming down the code in use to achieve a slimmer site. However, this testing will be made a little more difficult, or at least long winded, as the gallery link appearing (meaning the photos uploaded have been successfully assigned to the particular post concerned) often does work. So if I simply disable on plugin at a time, I could easily arrive at a false positive and assume one plugin the culprit, whereas the site was just behaving as expected somewhat randomly for a while.
I think this will end up being added to the long term To Do list for ChrisMerriman.com , along with sorting out the character encoding used in the SQL tables – the issue that prevents Cyrillic characters from being displayed.
I have just installed WordPress 2.9.1 RC (release candidate) as I want to continue scheduling posts, and it was also an opportunity to try out the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.
The database was backed up first (though the automatic e-mailing of this every three days isn’t yet working, I’ve noticed), and I’ll schedule the next post for a few minutes in advance to check if the issues I was previously encountering have been vanquished. I also need to find the information on resetting file ownerships in Windows 7, as I can now access Anna’s pictures on the portable hard drive when not at home. I’ll check our home PC via LogMeIn later. The evening draws on here, and Anna will need her bath soon. As she is still only 10 months old, we’re not planning to keep her up for the arrival of the New Year. The last day has seen the temperatures drop again – yesterday we saw it rise to -2C, almost enough to ruin ski vacations, with some snow melting, however today fresh snow has fallen, and the temperatures was back towards -20C again. I’m glad it isn’t dropping really low once more, as the fireworks that many people let off past midnight each year are well worth standing in the snow for.
Upgraded all my blogs to WordPress 2.9 last night, and took the opportunity to also update a handful of plugins on each site. Only one problem so far – scheduled posts are missed. That is to say that any posts I’ve written, and published with a date in the future are not made live once the correct time has passed.
Trimming my ping list down to just pingomatic did not help, neither did temporarily disabling all plugins active on this blog. Turns out I’m not alone in finding errors with posts that are scheduled – see this WordPress support thread. There are two options until a fix, and hopefully 2.9.1 is released – either goto the Edit page that lists all posts, and click the Quick Edit option for the missed post (then change the post status to Published), OR use the MIA plugin mentioned in that support thread. I’ve not tried the plugin myself, though others have reported success. For now, as I only have 3 posts scheduled to publish in the near future, I’ve used the Quick Edit route instead (editing the post directly does not allow you to change the status to Published, you’ll need to do it from the Quick Edit option within the Edit page for all posts.)
I’m a little bit surprised that this problem wasn’t detected with beta and RC1 testers, unless some last minute code changes were implemented?
[edit]
OK, looks like you might need to register at that site to download the plugin, and I was unable to leave a comment there as Comment Guardian apparently thought it was spammy. It also reported that Javascript or cookies weren’t enabled, which surprised me.
Anyway, I was trying to leave the following…
Until WordPress 2.9.1 is hopefully released, I imagine you’ll be getting a fair amount of new traffic to this post
Scheduled posts seem to be a problem for many 2.9 users.
Weird, my comment was detected as spam by Comment Guardian the first time, wonder if this one will get through? In case it makes any difference, I used RoboForm 2 Go to fill in the Name/Mail/Site boxes the first time – entered them manually this time around.
Search Terms That Led To This Post
