Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

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

This post is to all those out there in the big wide world of WordPress that code plugins…

How do you name them?

The other day I was reading and loving Joe’s post about the Hottie McFoxy dashboard plugin, but it turns out if you read the post that it isn’t actually called a hottie mcfoxy dashboard plugin at all, it has a rather dull name that I can’t recall for love nor money. Which got me thinking about how I search for plugins and what I actually find for my efforts.

Looking for – a diary of blog posts scheduled and what I get is this…. pre-date-future-post not what I was looking for at all, but I am sure it does whatever it does very nicely, it’s just doesn’t help me… what I was really looking for was Calendar by Kieran O Shea . It did not cross my mind it would be called a calendar. A Calendar goes on the wall doesn’t it? What about a schedule? Err, nope. Not that either. In fact the list of plugins under schedule blogs seems to have  nothing at all to do with scheduling blogs!

I like to do my follow Fridays for twitter in a blog, so I was looking for the holy grail of plugins – I was looking for a fabled plugin that does something that really will make my life easier, the plugin that hyperlinks twitter names. Could I find it? I could find that Grail quicker! I stumbled across the actual plugin by accident after searching through a pile of plugins that pulled my tweets into the blogs, sent my blogs to twitter and all sorts of things, it was more luck than judgment that I found the easy twitter link plugin!

So back to my original question… how do you name a plugin? Do you give thought to non technical minded people looking for your excellently coded piece of WordPress perfection? or is it something else?

Sarah

March the 1st has been designated ‘make a donation for your plugin’ day, or buy a coffee for your coder day

The idea came from V S Ellis who mentioned it on his blog and in some forums.

Many of us use plugins and often the developers or coders provide extra help to get it just perfect for your needs, this is a way of saying thank you. Without them our WordPress blogs would look a lot different!

I shall be buying a few coffees for the people who have taken the time to create the plugins that I love.

If you take a look at V S Ellis’s blog, you’ll see he suggests the following hashtags/tweets

“I just donated to insert plugin name” #wppdd

Alternate ($ amount optional of course):

“I just donated to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

“I just donated $x to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

If you don’t know who your plugin creators are, just leave us a comment with the name of your plugin and we’ll tell you who coded it.

Sarah

There are some fun and pretty functions, add-ons, extras that I do like the look of, but when I’ve come to add these to this WordPress website and blog, I’ve stopped to consider just what you might want. And suggest you should do the same when you do your website and/or blog.

One particular toy is a Flash tag cloud, which takes tags that have been applied to each blog post – for this post, for instance, I’ve used the tags “WordPress”, “Design” and “non-essentials” – and puts them into a “cloud” that moves about and can be played with – with the tags that have been used more often having a stronger font/size.  Adding Flash to this enables a pretty, gently moving cloud of the tabs, so:

Which is very lovely and fun, but…  it’s going to take your attention away from what I’d like you to be reading, learning, knowing – which is, of course, what you want you are here to read, learn, know!  Getting side-tracked by cool tools is not what you’re here for (well, not too much) and is wasting your valuable time.   So I’ll stick with the simple tag listing (still called a cloud) that comes as a standard widget option – boring but it isn’t distracting you while still being useful!

Edit: another thing is that some of your readers/visitors may not be able to see your pretty things anyway.  For instance, I cannot see this tag cloud, despite upgrading Flash and checking on other browsers than my favourite Firefox.  So another good reason to keep it simple.

Today I merrily set about the latest upgrade to WordPress – just from 2.8.1 to 2.8.2 – and learned a valuable lesson or two (in good time for the next upgrade to 2.8.3 which was hot on its heels!)

Part way through the upgrade, using the WP-Automatic-Upgrade plugin (which is no longer necessary, but we’ll deal with that later) – everything went white – the screen was blank.  And the website too – the infamous “white wall” that is referred to in such instances.

Now I know that a compatibility issue with the plugins can be the most likely cause of problems – that’s generally the first thing to look at.  So using my trusty FireFTP to connect, I renamed the plugins folder to explugins, creating a new one of the original name, with nothing in it (this is a quick way to disable all plugins if you cannot get to the WP control panel).  Still no joy!  So then I thought I’d see what the server logs might have to say about it all – only to find that I’d used up all of the diskspace! Aha!  Now this is a website that includes a shop, so indeed needs it’s space and I’d been a bit thorough in my server housekeeping, it seems.

The immediate action was to increase the space available, which of course did not resolve the WordPress upgrade issue – that would have been too easy!  What had happened is some of the files had been upgraded/uploaded, and some had not.  The only thing for it was to manually upload the new version of WordPress – downloading, upzipping and then replacing all the files (except those in the wp-content folder, of course – that’s where all the theme stuff is kept and I did not fancy re-doing all of that again!).

Now – all upgrades will include the following as standard, instead of thinking that I am immune from such mini-disasters!

Always, before you action your WordPress upgrade, go to your plugins, select them all, choose the “deactivate” option and Apply.

Then you can upgrade your WordPress, hopefully with no hiccups (that’s a whole other blog post!), and when done you can pop back to your Plugins section and activate each, one by one.

And