Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

Following on from Sarah’s post yesterday on breaking blogs (and she’s really not as bad as she makes out – I think it’s great that she just gets stuck in), I thought a few tips on what to do when something seems to stop working in your WordPress, or at least to share our experiences and how we worked through them.

On Monday I was working on a freshly moved WordPress blog only to find that I could not do anything in the Widgets page. It was quite odd as everything else seemed to be working just fine. So, after a quick Google of the situation “wordpress widgets not working” I found a similar situation and figured that perhaps there was a limitation at the server side of things. After doing a quick backup of the database, I deactivated the plugins, then reactivated each, one by one. Problem resolved. This kind of thing can happen sometimes, and a simple “reset” like this can do the trick.

Another site we look after sometimes would have some posts disappear, seemingly random – that issue came down to having a – in the title. With the set-up of the page links (permalinks) on that site and with the version of WordPress at that time (improvements are constantly being made), the system was adding (or trying to add) a – in between the dashes it already adds – and the dear thing was getting confused. So – now we avoid dashes, as well as ! ? and other such punctuations in the Post or Page title.

Something I find invaluable for looking at any oddities that appear with a Wordpress blog or website is the Inspect Element feature in Chrome and Firefox (I had a quick look for something similar in Explorer but it was not obvious so gave up – sorry about that – I’m sure there must be such an option and hopefully some Explorer fan will share that with us here…).  On the page, in Firefox or Chrome, if you right-click your mouse (or equivalent) you will see a number of options, the last of which is Inspect Element. Now this may start getting a bit geeky for you, but just knowing that we can easily look at such things may be useful. From this information we can see what might be causing any issues. For instance, on one blog we look after, the blog post content was showing up with a yellow background whenever my mouse hovered over it! Very odd. The Inspect Element information told me which plugin was causing this, so we deactivated that and now all is well.

Of course the worst thing is when you blog seems to disappear entirely – the dreaded and infamous white/blue/black screen of death, or whatever melodramatic name we want to give it. Most often it will be a plugin that is just not working happily alongside another and we can easily remove the plugins temporarily. If you want to know more on that, do say, but for now I’ll leave it be in case I start to lose your attention (and if you’ve gone already, you won’t see this anyway and I’m chatting to myself). This of course wants a whole blog post of its own, so…

The main thing to keep in mind is to not panic. Someone else will have had exactly the same thing happen (or something close enough to  be helpful) and will have shared it online to help others. So do a search on your problem – and if your first search does not result in anything helpful, rephrase your question.

You know we’re here and are happy to give a hand, however small, if you need us. Or if you have an issue that you want to ask, just to – pop an email over to hello@blogmistress.com and we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.

Just remember – Don’t Panic!

This week the blogmistress asked me to find an online chat/support facility for one of our clients; of course I was delighted with the chance of playing with more plugins!

I had a look at some pretty good paid plugins but also free like livezilla but the client really didn’t need complicated information or software, just the ability to display himself as being online and available to help his customers.  I think there is a need for these fancy dashboards but sometimes information overload just to answer a simple question isn’t really necessary.

I did think of the skype online status plugin that I wrote about but this would mean potential customers would have to faff around if they didn’t have skype already so after a bit of searching I found this plugin:

Google Talk Chatback Widget – on my site it worked like a dream & looks really slick, so with excitement (yes, sadly I do get a little very giddy about these things) I was straight onto skype to our blogmistress letting her know I was going to install it to the client’s site… sadly it didn’t work, maybe conflicts with other plugins but rather than play around too long I decided to try something out, using a new text widget and copying the code from the google talk chatback page.

My first choice out of both options would be the plugin as it has a nice facility if you are offline the customer is pointed to your contact page, also the buttons that are added to your site look professional (although may need resizing, they are a bit on the large side).  Apart from that both do the same when it comes to using chat.

If your WordPress website is plugtastic (hmm, I made that up but you know what I mean, plugins a go go) and the above doesn’t work just go to the google talk chatback page and use the full code in a text widget, you can customise this to an extent (see more info here) by changing the font, size and colour.  It works and without the faff for you or your potential customers.

If you need help with this just comment

As you know I don’t speak fluent geek just yet (I need lots of practice), so I shall just come right out and say it… have you ever broken your blog? Babs aka Blogmistress must despair of me, as I am always breaking them.

The first time I did it, I resolved that one myself, I called the hosting company in California and asked them to reset my blog to it’s last back up point (it was backed up every 24 hours with this host), and everything was restored, phew! I just wish they were all that easy to fix!

The second time, I learned I needed to back up… and I lost all my content, all my comments etc, my blog still does look a shadow of it’s former self

There really is no excuse not to back up your blog, just have a quick look at how many plugins are available to keep your data safe…

Some will back up your blog and send you an email with the data, so you can give this to your blogmistress to get it restored if like me you can’t do it yourself. If you have a lot of content, think how you will replace that if the worst case scenario happens, you could land up losing the whole lot if you are not careful.

Breaking your blog isn’t limited to the things you can inflict upon it, oh no, there are ways to break it without even realising it!

Try upgrading your Wordpress to the latest version without doing what the Blogmistress tells you and guess what, no blog – just the white wall of death (AKA as white wall of doom or as it’s popularly called in this house OMFG what have I done…).

Upgrading a plugin can also have a detrimental effect along with changing from one theme to another. Although you may like the fact that some plugins make your blog super fabulous and fast, the theme you love may conflict with it and one of them will have to go… you will only find out when your viewings go down or you do some cross browser testing, or your blog just plain stops working

The image for this blog is a cat sitting on a laptop, that was no accident. My laptop is at the dining table, I have had cats knock cans of Pepsi Max into the keyboard and whole blog posts erased when they have tried to cross the laptop when I am not looking. The cats walking across the keyboard I can semi cope with, using the Lazarus form recovery tool in Firefox. The cats have broke at least 3 of my blogs. Watch out for outside influences.

As I type this I notice that I called this the beginners guide to breaking your blog when actually I am quite an expert at it!

What have I missed – any that I have yet to try?

Sarah

Yes, you have plucked up the courage to complete the little box at the end of the post. You have hit submit… What happens next?

If you have a web savvy blogmistress, you may get directed to a thank you page

Comments are the lifeblood of a blog, it encourages a community to form. Where you see comments (like on this blog) you know the advice is good.

So encouraging comments is something I am going to explore over the next few blog posts, and you can download them and try them and see which works for your blog. Remember, not everything works for everyone.

So back to thanking first time commenters, you can download the Comment Redirect plugin here

When installed, after the comment has been made it will redirect the commenter to another page. This can be where you thank them for taking the time to comment, encourage them to come back often and subscribe to your RSS feeds.

This isn’t the place for selling your ebooks or other products, but a welcoming page where your community starts to grow from. You will therefore need to create a New Page and then set that page in the Comment Redirect option under Plugins.

The great thing I like about this plugin is, your regular commenters won’t even notice it, so it won’t interfere with the smooth running of your blog, for your regulars it is business as usual.

As always, if you like this post – tell a few people and let us know how you get on with it

Sarah

Until you’re really familiar with the workings of WordPress, one frustrating issue may be the default title of your links, if you choose to show those in your sidebar, you might want to call them something different, or indeed have several categories.

To change your “blogroll”, from your Dashboard go to Links, Link Categories. Here you can Edit the Blogroll as well as add new link categories.

Do get in touch if you want further guidance or have any questions – we’re happy to help!