Upgraded to 2.3 this morning. Considering the back end changes to table structures it went very well and successfully imported my tags from UTW. A couple of plugin’s are borked due to the changes and I needed to tweak the template a bit but we’re there now.
So glad i did this first thing as Halo 3 has just been delivered. Expect some impressions and screens later today.
I’ll be doing some site tweaks over the next few days, might even get most done today while waiting for Sky. I hate waiting. Anyway, tweaks? Where?
Well, if all goes well the feeds should now be re-directing to Feedburner. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but never really found the time. I’m tempted to splice in Digg and del.icio.us links but that will probably be in a separate full fat feed. Aplogies for the one or two that pick up the blog via the feeds – things may be a bit screwy or old posts will be re-posted.
In fact that full feed would end up looking like my tumblelog. Which itself has a feed. More and more I’m thinking of moving to something solely like that rather than having the blog and a separate aggregator elsewhere. I’ve seen some posts recently on turning WordPress into a tumblelog – I may hack some more this week than I anticipated.
So that should remove some duplication. I’m also going to reign in the different websites I post/use/talk on. First to go is Twitter. Account was deleted this morning, blog plugins removed, Twitterrific removed. If blogs are all about boring and mundane topics then what does that make Twitter? It may just be that the service isn’t for me but it was just another website I was subscribed to that held my content and everyone else’s rather boring twitters, including the new fad of twitting when they had blog posted. Nothing like a bit of self promotion. There will be a few others dropped over the coming days (Linked In and a couple of other similar sites – that’s why I never responded to your invite Roy – I knew I would get round to removing myself).
It’s been niggling me since my account was defrauded that there’s probably too much info on the web about me. Annoyingly thanks to Google and other search providers it can be difficult to remove once it’s been spidered. So thats probably the main reason for removing. Paranoia is spreading.
Speaking of identity theft, I see on the latest electoral roll that there is a tick box to remove yourself from the edited electoral roll. This is the roll that is bought by companies. Great idea I thought and another small step in protecting identities. Pity the letter all my personal details came in regarding the electoral roll was not delivered to us but put through the wrong door. Fools. Irony. Someone, somewhere is having a laugh.
I’ve finally got round to implementing my own site theme. Although I’m not entirely happy with it and it still needs some tweaking on certain pages it had been unchanged for two weeks on the test site and with time looking to be limited over the next month or so I thought it was time to take the plunge.
The main idea behind the theme was to keep things simple, increase white space and drop the graphics. I’m far preferring sites with little or no graphics on them so that was my main aim. At the same time I wanted the theme to be a little wider than most others to take advantage of my desktops and also those of most of my visitors (thanks Mint). Cross browser compatibility was also important as more than 50% of the real visitors to the site are on IE and around 10% on Safari so I wanted to make sure it looked much the same across all platforms (thanks Parallels). It mostly does with some tweaking still to do to suit IE6.
I’ve also dropped the number of plugins I have installed and load times have been greatly reduced. The about page probably takes the most time although a misbehaving last.fm plugin has been disabled which helps. I’ve also created a tumblelog site which is acting as a ‘lifelog’ pulling together a number of feeds. I’ve been very impressed with Tumblr and with new functionality being added frequently and paid for features in the pipeline I can’t see me dropping it. Indeed I’ll probably register a new domain just for the lifelog.
So there you are, hope you like it. I can’t promise it will stay for long as I can be pretty fickle about what I like and dislike but it will do for now and at least meets some of the objectives I set out with. Now I just need to resist the temptation to constantly change.
If you use WordPress and your on version 2.11 you MUST upgrade as soon as possible. A hacker managed to insert a security exploit into the 2.11 files. Although this only happened in the last 3-4 days it makes sense to move to 2.12…NOW. The dev blog has all the details.
The 2.1 upgrade contained a lot of fixes and changes. One that I hated was the feeds no longer displayed full text if you used the ‘more’ tag. Bah. I hate feeds that are truncated or contain excerpts. Defeats the purpose of feeds in my opinion and…well…it just sucks. Thankfully there’s a plugin – where would we be without plugin authors filling the gaps?
Another plugin I’ve recently added is the Dunstan Style Error Page. This generates a far more helpful error page for those links that might no longer exist or typo’s on blogs elsewhere.
Searching in WordPress is fairly weak but the Search Everything plugin allows you to turn on searching for comments, pages, metadata and even attachments. Hopefully this will be added to WordPress core as it’s been an asked for feature for a long time.
Final new addition here is the DoFollow plugin. It’s not new but I installed it after reading Dougal Campbells post on why he had only just installed it. Made total sense so it’s here now too. Again this really should be an option in the core.
There’s been a lot of bashing of WordPress recently but I still think it’s a great platform with an active community around it. Contributers will come and go but hopefully a more active and aggressive release schedule will see some features being more frequently released.
Just out and installed with ease. Login page looking nice – not sure on other changes under the hood.
I’ve installed a couple of new WordPress plugins that are very useful so I thought it was worth sharing the goodies.
The first one is best applied to WordPress 2.0.5 and above and is called Clutter Free. It’s role in life is to allow an author to disable unused components of the create post screen in WordPress, so giving a faster loading and clutter free page. Works a treat and gets rid of a lot of unused functionality…for me at least.
Second is Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP. Certainly a mouthful but is saving me from more spam, this time via the old comment form I used to employ. Over the last few days I’d received over 200 comments via the Contact form linked to at the top of the site. It was making it difficult to pull out good comment from spam. This new plugin seems to have done the trick and since implementing last night has seen two good comments succeed in reaching me and 25 spam comments being removed. Joy. Hopefully others can get mileage out of them too.
A new update to WordPress is available today with over 50 fixes, mostly bugs. This is a small step towards the bigger upgrade that will be 2.1. As usual take a backup before proceeding of both files and the database. Today’s update was the first time I had to depend on the backup after I messed up during the update of a directory (so that’s what replace means).
I also took the opportunity to move to a new theme – Unsleepable. I liked the simplicity and while I was at it I reduced the posts displayed down to a more manageable number. I don’t have much design skills but this may be my last off the shelf theme in that I might start to hack my own css together in future. Maybe.
Lots of little things going on at the moment, best summarised with a list. Yep – not in a posting mood at the moment.
Latest WordPress update is now available for download. More than 50 bugs and security fixes in this release so well worth doing. The update process is fairly painless especially if you are already doing nightly backups.
Source code for K2 has now moved to Google Code – visit kaytwo project to get latest code. There’s also a page at the wiki showing plugins that K2 supports. Time to upgrade…again.