Tag Archives: Wordpress

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Themes that Play Nice

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I’ve spent the day updating the software that drives the blog. It is now up to date, and running the latest version of WordPress, version 2.0.2. Thankfully the upgrade went really smoothly, it taking more time to actually back up the existing configuration than do the update.

At the same time, I thought I’d try and change the theme which we were using, this proved to be a lot more tedious and frustrating, mainly because the various themes I tried, and the Flickr photo albums didn’t play nicely together. I’ve tried various themes, and also both FAlbum and Flickr Photo Album, and neither of the album plugins seem to get on with certain themes, in particular wp-andreas09 which looks really good with the rest of the blog, but places the FAlbum content level with the bottom of whichever sidebar is longest. It misbehaves in a similar way with Flickr Photo Album, except the first part of the photo page is correctly placed, with the rest of the content on the page in a similar location to FAlbum.

Currently I’m running with the Tiga theme, which doesn’t do as many pretty things with fonts and colours as some of the other themes, but does come with integration with FAlbum out of the box.

I guess what I’ll have to do at some point is to sit down with one of the non-working themes, and compare it with the integration in Tiga, to try and fathom out what is going wrong.

Computers/Technology

Ecto – First Impressions

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One of the things I’ve been trying out over this holiday, is using something other than the built in editor to edit blog postings, mainly from the point of view that offline editing allows me to make better use of some of the tools on the Mac to make writing the posts easier – chief among those being the built in spelling checker.

After comparing the options, I decided to go for Ecto, some of the things that swayed my decision where the glowing reviews, particularly a detailed review that a friend of Howards produced, the impressive feature list, plus the fact that there is a PC version too.

So far, aside from this posting the only published posting on the blog that uses Ecto is the New Year posting. There have been a couple of annoyances, which I suspect may be as much to do with the way I have been doing things before, and I may be able to work around with the configuration settings.

I had to spend a little time getting the preview window set up so that the preview looks like the finished posting, which was primarily copying chunks of the style-sheets from the web site into the Ecto configuration screens, it was slightly tedious, but is all done now. There is still one hiccup currently, although the main preview window looks fine, the font size in the front page preview pane is still too small, which is annoying, but I can live with it.

The actual posting turned out to be a bit more complicated, particularly with regards to doing the picture. Recently I’ve been using the WordPress Javascript Quicktags to put pictures into postings, and taking pictures straight from Flickr – although usually just by cutting and pasting the link from the relevant page on Flickr. For a start, Ecto doesn’t have Flickr support built right in, but that is pretty easy to get around by pasting in the image link. However getting the drop shadow quick tag to work is again going to require a bit of fiddling I think – for the New Year post I actually ended up wrapping it in the quick-tag in the web based editor first.

There also seems to be a bit of a bug in that it is failing to set the post categories correctly for any edits that are posted, so I’ll have to take a look at that. Again probably a configuration issue somewhere.

Having said that, it is really nice having a spelling checker on my posts – hopefully weird and whacky spelling on the blog will be a thing of the past now – and Ecto seems configurable enough that I should be able to get it working with Flickr in the way I want too. Once I’ve made a few more posts I’ll write something a bit more detailed.

Computers/Technology

The Upgrade Dilema

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So as of Boxing Day, version 2.0 of WordPress, the platform on which we host this site was released.

The big question from my point of view is whether to upgrade right now, or wait and see what happens. I have the time at the moment, since I’ve got a few days off work between Christmas and New Year – but then do I want to spend that time messing around trying to get the blog to work?

So far I’ve been keeping an eye on the blogs for feedback from other WordPress users, particularly those with slightly more complicated sites as although we’re pretty well using the default theme here, there are a lot of plug-ins and tweaks running, and from previous experience plug-ins and tweaks are where the problems occur – people with standard builds are usually okay.

So far I’ve seen quite a few of the ‘upgrade went fine’, ‘simplest upgrade ever’ type posts, however what has guided my decision for the moment is this posting from Tech Cruch who have had days of hassle getting things to work properly, and this post on the Optiniche Blog advising that if you’re happy with 1.5.2, which I am, to wait and see with version 2.0. So, on that basis, I’m opting for the wait and see – maybe when 2.1 comes around I’ll upgrade then!

General

Big Site Updates

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You may have noticed over the past couple of days that the website is looking somewhat different. The primary reason for the change was as a result of a pretty nasty bout of trackback spam that occured over the first few days of the week with every single posting that allowed trackbacks being hit with multiple occurences plugging gambling sites.

Anyway, I’d been hearing good things about a couple of WordPress plugins, one called Spam Karma, that brought together a number of spam busting techniques, and the other, called Bad Behavior, took a different tack, in that it monitors the web requests, and identifies which are real people looking at the pages, and which are the automated spam bots that scan the internet looking for likely targets. Having spent a load of time removing the rubbish, I decided to check out the plugins.

This led to another problem, in that I hadn’t yet got round to upgrading WordPress from 1.2.2, as a result of the fairly heavy customisations I had made. So as of Wednesday I cleared the website down to nothing, and rebuilt it in WordPress 1.5.1.2, adding Bad Behavior and Spam Karma, hence the new look.

Thus far, the new version seems great, and a definite improvement. Plus I haven’t had to do any more clearing up thanks to Bad Behavior and Spam Karma.

Incidentally, if you want an indication of the size of the spam problem, the stats for both plugins are shown right at the very bottom of the page. As you can see, nothing has got through to Spam Karma yet, but that is because of the effectiveness of Bad Behavior, blocking hundreds of bots a day!