This is a test of the emergency broadcast system … yet again.
Tag - wordpress
The big G is getting helpful. Now Google is letting you know when your blog could stand some updating:
No, it doesn’t email angry missives with whiny you-haven’t-updated-your-blog-in-two-weeks messages. Instead, it just tells you when there’s an update available for the software that powers your site.
In my case, that’s invariably WordPress, and my portfolio site, johnkoetsier.com, needed some work. I don’t touch it very often … maybe once every couple of months … so sometimes it’s a version or two behind the current WordPress standard.
I think Google sends the update based on what it knows from Google Webmaster Tools. I’ve set up all my sites there, and sure enough, when I go check it out … there’s a message in my inbox that looks strikingly familiar:
I’ve had this site get infected before – there’s nothing like an older version of WordPress with known issues to draw the hackers/crackers – so I appreciated the warning.
And, of course, updated the site.
It’s 9:43 on Saturday morning and I’m at WordCamp Whistler right now. Tons of cool people here, and I want to be able to remember and connect with them, so here goes:
- Fran Chelico
Nice Moo cards! - Caroline MacGillivray of beautynight
Founder of a charity doing makeovers for abused/neglected women - Karen Hamilton, of tinybites
Very tiny, and very dynamic! - Morten Rand-Hendrikson of Pink & Yellow
Morten does production for TSN’s Sportsnet as well as freelance web development. He’s also speaking today, and is married to … - Angela Chih of Dabbler.ca
Married to Morten, and a producer for CBC.ca, and an online videographer. - Jeremy Latham, of Latham Communications
Free-lance web development - Kenya, a Master’s student from Brazil … WITH NO WEBSITE! Ghastly.
- Lorelle VanFossen is speaking now
- Rebecca Bollwit, better known as Miss 604
Rebecca is live-blogging the wordcamp here. For those who are not from Vancouver … 604 is our local telephone area code. - Kathy at MommyMotivation.me and DesperatelySeekingWordpress
- Dale Mugford of BraveNewCode
- Martin Wong and Saleh of SmartNet
An Alberta and BC ISP - Andrew Smith, of SOMENICE
A freelance developer who lives here in Whistler – lucky guy! - John Biehler of JohnBiehler.com
- Kris Krug
Photographer, blogger, designer, developer.
UPDATE:
I had to cut this post short … I got very sick partly through the day and had to leave WCW09 just after noon. That was a real disappointment, as I had been enjoying the day immensely, but hey … what can you do?
I had to drive home from Whistler (3 hours) and stopped twice for not-quite-rest breaks. Not fun at all!
If there’s anyone else who was there and wants to be on this list, just add a comment and I’ll add you to the body of the post.
It’s hard to imagine, but WordPress is now over 5 years old.
A French blogger, Ozh, posted images of WordPress’s admin interface on his blog in December. I just saw it now, but wanted to see the images in a single presentation deck so that you can flip through them and see the differences at a glance.
So I grabbed the images, combined them into one PDF, uploaded it to SlideShare, and voila:
5 years – hard to believe. I saw WordPress when it was at the very first version, in 2003, and first used it at the second version in, in 2004.
I had been blogging much earlier, actually, before the word “blog” was invented. As far back as 1999, although I prefer my 2001 version, which was built on a content management system that I cobbled together myself using PHP … using not a single graphic:
But I’m not really a developer, and WordPress has been the best tool for blogging.
Thanks, Matt!
[ update: WordPress downloads are working again ]
This is where Twitter comes in handy … proof that it’s not just me.
WordPress downloads are not working right now – when you click on the download link, you simply get an empty page. I first thought it must be a problem on my end, but when I quickly tried Safari as well as Firefox, I was fairly sure there was a real problem.
Then, checking Twitter search confirmed it. Here are the 10 most recent tweets about downloading WordPress:
[cetsEmbedRSS id=’http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=wordpress+download’ itemcount=’10’ itemauthor=’1′ itemdate=’1′ itemcontent=’1′]
That’s a live feed … and, thankfully, evidence that I am not finally leaving the twisted shreds of my sanity behind, or suddently growing stupid.
Five times in the past 3-4 weeks I’ve written and published a post on this blog only to come back a day later and see it not actually published and live. What’s going on?
The question in my mind is: am I actually publishing the post or just hitting Save? As you can see … the two buttons are side-by-side in the WordPress screen where you write posts.
Although I can’t be sure, I don’t think so. I never click Save, because WP auto-saves posts every few minutes. And I’m pretty sure I can’t have made that mistake so many times.
So I’m wondering if there’s a bug in WordPress … and if anyone else has noticed it. I think there is, and I think I might even know where/when it is. I say where/when, because my guess is that the problem might be occuring when two things happen at the same time: WordPress auto-saves a post, and simultaneously, I click Publish.
I wonder if anyone else has seen this issue. To help me find out, I’m now going to very deliberately click PUBLISH.
Check out
http://scoblerizer.wordpress.com/ versus
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/.
That’s Just another little reminder from the universe that URIs were never designed for humans. And that identify theft is all-too-easy online.
It’s somewhat amusing … whoever started the scoble-like blog started blogging on April 13, 2006 with a classic “I’m blogging at last” post, and apparently ended that all-too-brief flirtation just two days later, on April 17.
Someone probably warned him/her that identify theft, even in the blogging world, is a bad idea.
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed if you’ve been reading my blog lately, I’ve been in Nashville attending the NAESP conference. Great city, great conference, and this is a great opportunity to check out the new WordPress gallery feature.
Some of my Nashville photos, after the link … click on any to see larger versions (and again to get a full-size version.) Oddly, the multi-file upload feature promised in WordPress 2.5 did not work.
Well, I went minimalist for a while but, since I am perennially unable to keep a WordPress theme for longer than a month or so, I’ve up and switched.
This is Silhouette by Brian Gardner, and it’s actually still fairly minimalist … but a lot easier on the eyes.
The only problem I see so far is that this theme does not seem to display my tags … I’ll have to monkey around with the code a little to see what I need to do to make that happen.
I have to say, I really like this theme. Might even stick to it for a couple of months this time!
[ update ]Categories deleted; tags inserted.
I’ve finally, finally, finally invested some time and energy in this, my new blog … and it feels good.
The idea is that Sparkplug 9 is the focus of my digital life. It’s the hub connecting all the spokes of my online interactions.
- Sites
So the latest sites I’ve found useful and interesting are in Links, courtesy of delicious. - Photos
Photos that I’ve considered good enough to upload to Flickr are in Photos. - Books
The recent inhabitants of my bookshelf, nicely organized and maintained thanks to Shelfari, are in Books. - News updates
Nonsense that reflects my momentary state of mind is in Ephemera, thanks to Twitter. - Videos
Videos and little screenshot movies I’ve uploaded to YouTube stream into Videos.
And they all – plus anything that doesn’t quite fit into any of the above categories – make up my online footprint.
Overall I’m pretty happy with how it all fits. It’s all very web 2.0 to be able to link bits and pieces from many different sites. Ideally, YouTube would have a better way to stream your videos onto your site … I’m not sure that having them all appear in one video player is the best option. But overall: not bad.
The beauty of it all is that it’s so easy with WordPress, the blogging software I use. Most major web 2.0 companies supply WordPress plugins to add their functionality to your site. And if they don’t some enterprising and generous plugin writer has, and is sharing the fruits of his labor.
Online identity is a complex thing … we worry about who owns it, we look for different ways to analyze it, we want to control it, and we worry about who will find it.
As for me, I’m just going to worry about creating it. Or, more accurately, living it. I’ll let the chips fall where they may … since the only worse than having a negative online identity is having no digital footprint at all.
Just wanted to send a very happy shout-out to Techie Buzz, who make the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. Very simply, it’s wonderful.
Upgrade WordPress is, frankly, a pain in the you-know-what. There are updates frequently – usually for good cause, such as security. Sometimes they come as often as twice a month. Sometimes an update needs to be updated … several days after being released. This means doing a back-up, breaking out the FTP app, updating files, crossing fingers that you’re not over-writing anything you don’t want to be, and generally a half an hour of pure PITA.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade, on the other hand, is as simple as clicking a few links and downloading a few files. In fact, I was finished in a matter of about 3 minutes – no nail-biting required.
Nice. Very nice.
Frankly, it’s something that Matt Wullenberg should consider putting into the standard WordPress install. It would make the process of maintaining a WordPress installation much, much easier.
Of course, that might have a negative effect on WordPress.com …
I just installed delicious for WordPress, a beautifully widget-ized plugin that displays your most recently saved links.
The least I can do it send Rick, the creator, a couple of visitors …
Whoa.I now have all three of my former blogs (bizhack, art-n-artifice, and fishcrackers) imported into this uber-blog.The toughest one was bizhack, which had over 1400 posts and a 4.3 MB export file … 2.3 MBs over the WordPress import limit.WordPress import hackI had to use David Seah’s wordpress import hack to get it imported … which was interesting consider it was created for WordPress 2.1 and the current version (which I’m using) is 2.3.If you’re doing this, be aware that you’ll need to search around a bit for the correct file locations.
I guess the title says it all … Akismet, which is a comment spam identification and deletion tool, is under the active menu, Manage, not under Comments.Odd.On a related note, I’m getting something like 5000 comment spam attempts a week, of which about 1 makes it through onto the site.Two things that implies:
- Akismet is stunningly amazingly incredibly good. There are no words.
- A huge amount of web traffic is spambots looking for places to implant their evil input. I wonder what percentage? 1%? 3%?
- Bonus implication: the success rate for comment spam is approaching zero … for blog/forum owners who know about Akismet.
Just noticed tonight while checking Scoble’s take on the new Apple products that he’s only got 5 posts on his home page now.
Not enough, Scoble – you run more posts than that that in a single day sometimes. Having to click to a new page just to see what else was posted today is not optimal.. . .. . .I just went recently went down to 10 posts/page from 20, and it really sped up load times. But I don’t think I’ve ever done 10 posts in one day.
The worst righteousness is self-righteousness. I know this from personal experience, since today, in recompense, I had to eat a wacking plateful of humble pie.
This morning I sent a fairly energetic letter to David Sifry. It wasn’t rude, but it was intense. The perceived problem? For the last 3 days, Technorati has not been indexing my content. I was not happy about it – especially since Technorati has been fixing its problems lately.
However, Technorati was not at fault
Three days ago, I added a RSS feeds link to my blog’s top-level navigation. Unfortunately, I named it simply “feeds.” When WordPress creates a page, it gives that page a URL that is exactly the same as the title of the page … unless a page already exists with that name.
Well, in WordPress, one does. But it’s not a user-created page … it’s the default location of your RSS feeds when you have full-text URLs turned on – as I do. So my new page was the exact location of WordPress’ RSS feeds. And it took precedence.
So when Technorati was trying to index my site, it did. It indexed exactly what it should have indexed: a page with nothing on it but but some subscribe to my feed information.
David Sifry to the rescue
So here David – CEO of an important corporation – gets this not-nasty but not-very-happy email. And here David goes and checks my site. Checks source on my site. Discovers the issue, which is that the place WordPress stores feeds at has been over-written by my new page. Emails me back – nicely.
I’d send you a longer message, but I’m extremely busy right now and wanted to get back to you quickly. Did you know that your feeds don’t currently point to your content?
http://www.sparkplug9.com/bizhack/index.php/feed/rss/
http://www.sparkplug9.com/bizhack/index.php/feed/atom/These are the feeds that you point to in the of your blog, and since they are broken, Technorati isn’t indexing your blog.
When you fix it, please ping again, and things should work fine. For example, if you are using feedburner, then put this in your element:
< link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/bizhack” / >and take out the other ones. Then re-ping.
(I also had to delete the feeds page – just changing its title does not change its URL – and create it again with a new name: get fed. But Dave’s comments were the clue I needed.)
I feel about 2 inches tall. Thanks, Dave, and sorry for the trouble.
Humble pie is very much like Fisherman’s Friend – tastes awful … but it’s probably good for you.