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Blog Adjustments and New Plugins

Blog Adjustments and New Plugins

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VirusHead Blog changes and updates:

  • WP-EMail – You can email any post now. There’s a link at the bottom of each post that will open a pop-up window, and there’s a tally on the sidebar of the most emailed posts. At the moment, there is only one. I sent myself the Green Day post to test the system. It’s like butter.
  • Simple Tagging: I decided to go with the Simple Tagging Plugin rather than continue to use Ultimate Tag Warrior – Simple Tagging is easier for me to use, and it has a lot of features that I really like. The Technorati tags link directly to the tag page at the – guess what – Technorati site, and the others link internally to a page of all the posts with the chosen tag. The extra features I like (and I’m not using all of them) are the ability to list a specified number of related posts, the little menu of suggested tags, and the auto-complete type-ahead dropdown menu to add tags. I never used the heavy Yahoo tag suggestions in UTW. I prefer to do my own indexing regardless of the popularity of key phrases.
  • Bad Behavior – I’ve installed this plugin as a first line of defense against spambots. Akismet is already installed to pick up most of the rest. Some people were having trouble every once in a while with seeing the verification image used by Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam. I love Peter’s plug-in, especially since you can add your own words as verifiers; I made up words for fun every once in a while. Still, it’s not worth it if anyone has trouble. I’ll see how well the Bad Behavior/Akismet combination works out. At the moment, Bad Behavior has blocked 3659 access attempts in the last 7 days. The total can be, and is, displayed in the footer.
  • Recent Comments List – updated to version 1.9.

You can see all the plugins that I’m using at any given time (care of WP-Plugin List) here.

To Do:

  • Create a separate page with Simple Tagging tag cloud. I don’t really want it on the sidebar. I’ve read the documentation, but the page template they refer to simply doesn’t appear and I’m a little stymied. I’ll do a little more research on that. Done 5/27 – but I still need to play with the format.
  • Consolidate some of the tags – there are far too many and there is a lot of topic overlap. I still have some hundred or posts that don’t have tags at all.
  • Now that this design is well and truly complete, I’m getting tired of it. It would be a real pain to change it now. I’m not using the WP widgets yet – everything has been hand-inserted except for the features that originally came with the SeaBeast theme. I would like it very much if I could figure out how to put the two sidebars on the left while keeping them SEO-friendly. I just prefer to read text that is on the right-hand side of the page.
  • Experiment a little bit with web-friendly fonts. Is there a better one than I’m using?
  • Figure out how to make the font a little smaller in the footer display of Bad Behavior. Never mind. I just adjusted the code in the plugin.
Geeking Out

Geeking Out

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Here at VirusHead, I have a different host than at work. If any of you use WordPress at Yahoo Small Business, this post will interest you. If not – really – skip it.

I had to spend almost two days addressing the problems of upgrading WordPress at Yahoo Small Business hosting. Even now, I can’t really update any of the plugins that came with the Yahoo installation because of some funky permissions thing they do.

The first time I tried to upgrade, I could no longer access the blog at all. All that came up was a blank screen in the browser. I couldn’t find a solution. I gave up. I backed up the database with MyPhpAdmin, and recreated the blog at Yahoo.

I was only able to upgrade thanks to the resources at the WordPress codex and users’ forum and some very helpful advice from the comment left here by Ray on the previous post,. WordPress has upgrading instructions here, with common installation problems here.

I’m not sure I would recommend that you even try to upgrade unless you’re really comfortable with the things on the following list. Yes, it’s very much out of date, and so are the plugins. It might make more sense just to have more people giving Yahoo some feedback on servicing their WordPress client offer. Believe me, I would rather have done a one-click update like I do on my own host!

I’ve documented all the bits and pieces. In case you really need to do this, here’s how.

  • First, update your plug-ins (Akismet will update itself in the upgrade).
  • Use the WordPress backup plugin to do a backup of your WordPress directory. Download it for safekeeping. You can also use your friendly ftp program to download the entire WordPress directory onto your hard drive, too. You’ll need this if – after all – you change your mind about upgrading.
  • Use MyPHPAdmin to export a back up your WordPress SQL database, too. Make several versions if you are unfamiliar with this. Make sure that use the right character set for export. If the upgrade fails, you’ll need this.
  • Go to the WordPress dashboard and disable all your plugins.
  • VERY IMPORTANT: From your WordPress backup on the hard drive, open the current wp-config.php file in the main directory. Delete the line “Define(’WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager” and then save the file. Also save a copy of it under another name, like wp-configorig.php. You’ll need this file later.
  • Edit wp-config.php file in the main WordPress directory that you downloaded and change DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD with your yroot user and yroot password (the username and password you set up to administrate your databases. Ftp the new wp-config file.
  • Now run upgrade.php by browsing to http://YOURSITE.com/YOURBLOG/wp-admin/upgrade.php. It should succeed, in theory.
  • However, before you go any further, look at your blog and make sure it’s there. If you get a blank page, then you’ve put the wrong yroot user and password in the config file. Make sure it’s right and try again.
  • You may have to play with the permissions settings in MyPhpAdmin. Make sure that you have any needed permissions. Customer Care can help you with this part if you run into trouble.
  • If none of this is working for you, you’ll have to download the latest version of WordPress, ftp it up, and then run upgrade again.
  • Assuming that your blog is up, check to make sure that your category links and other links are displaying. If you see an error like [Unknown column ‘link_count’ in ‘where clause’], you’ve got to detour at this point (a web search on the exact phrase of that error will give you a sense of how many blogs are affected). If you’re upgrading from the version at Yahoo, there has been a major change in the way categories are indexed. I haven’t been able to find the perfect fix for this if the upgrade doesn’t do it, but there are two suggestions. The first didn’t work for me in MyPhpAdmin on Yahoo – perhaps because of yet more permissions issues, or maybe an older version of MySql – but you could try it because it’s probably the better fix:
    Run this SQL query:
    ALTER TABLE --database--.wp_categories ADD COLUMN link_count BIGINT(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER category_count,
    ADD COLUMN posts_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER link_count,
    ADD COLUMN links_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER posts_private;
  • The second suggestion did work on Yahoo, but I hope it doesn’t mess anything up:
    First, save your home copy of wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php under another name, like you did with the wp-config file. Then, edit the original file and delete where it says
    // We are up-to-date. Nothing to do.
    if ( $wp_db_version == $wp_current_db_version )
    return;
    Ftp it up and run upgrade.php again. Then upload the original version of the file to restore it.
  • Now, go get the wp-configorigin.php you saved earlier. Rename it back to wp-config.php and ftp it up.
  • In your blog template, replace the current call for your blogroll with < ?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>. Some of the older tags have been depreciated.
  • Enable your plug-ins one by one to make sure they are compatible. If something breaks the blog, use ftp or the online file management at Yahoo to delete the applicable folder from the wp-content/plugins.

Another problem that surfaced: The bottom navigation on the index page disappeared. Some think that it has to do with plugins as well. I’m not running a “sticky post” plugin, which seems to be the primary problem for others. There is also a thought that there might be an incompatibility between the upgraded Akismet plugin and the Yahoo hosting. In my case, I finally figured out that I needed to remove a hand-coded call to the FAlbum plugin (which isn’t enabled) on the Index page.

I still have minor problems. Do not attempt to use the newer version of the WP Cache plugin or the Yahoo version of the Customizable Permalinks Plugin! Keep them disabled or they will break the blog, and you’ll have to go back and do a lot of this again. You’re pretty much stuck with the versions of third-party plugins that Yahoo gave you. If they included them, it’s probably because they have set it up in some special way – if you update the plugin, it probably won’t work anymore. If you know workarounds, please comment.

Playing with WordPress Plugins

Playing with WordPress Plugins

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I’ve been playing with a variety of plugins for WordPress. I’ll be nice and not list the plugins that I don’t like. These are the new plugins that I’m actually using:

  • The most useful one is Google Sitemaps (Arne Brachhold). It creates an automatically-updating Google-compliant sitemap of your blog with a built-in configuration page for your administration panel. Excellent!
  • The WordPress Akismet comment spam filter works really well, but I wanted something at the gate too. Even scanning the hundreds of daily attempted posts was depressing. Peter Keung’s Custom Anti-Spam plugin is a simple word image generator that has stopped the spambots cold, at least for now. The image isn’t very difficult to read, unlike some, and you can customize the pool of words to display – which is kind of fun. And of course, I’ve still got Akismet for backup if that fails.
  • I am very fond of the Kill Preview plugin (Owen Winkler). It seemed a simple thing, but there seemed to be no way to turn off the preview when you’re writing a post. This did the trick.
  • Mullet (Jonathan Broom) produces the “long-tail” listing of post titles at the bottom of the page. It lists only posts that aren’t already on the page – much better than just having the “Previous” link – and you have to love it just for the name.
  • Sociable (Peter Harkins) automatically adds links to popular “social bookmarking” sites. Mine doesn’t have Technorati listed yet, but it looks like it will be added soon. You can change the configuration to include as many (or as few) as you want. Hover with the mouse if you’re not familiar with the icons. It’s such a viral thing that I can’t resist. I have it on the single post pages, so you’ll see it if you look at comments, but I decided not to have it on the regular blog home page. That would be a little too much, I think.
  • I have installed and tested, but not actually started using, Anthony Girasoli‘s Get Recent Posts plugin. It lists the most recent posts, by content or excerpt, but for only one specific catagory. I’m thinking about using it to make a dedicated page for the JW posts.

There are some other plugins that I’ve already been using, of course. Here are my faves:

  • Recent Comments List (Jared Bangs) is on my sidebar. It lists recent comments in descending order, arranged by post title. It shows the name of the commenter, and links to the comment.
  • One year ago (Borja Fernandez) shows titles of your posts from… um… one year ago, although you can change it to X years or posts ago.
  • Ultimate Tag Warrior (Christine Davis) is what I’m using for the tags at the end of each post, as well as the tag cloud at the bottom of the page. It has a lot of options, and I like it, but I still haven’t figured out how to make a tags page that would list all the linked tags.
  • WP-Amazon (Rich Manalang) makes it easy to search for and add items from Amazon to my posts. I do that occasionally, sometimes more for the image than anything else. Configure it with your Amazon associates id. Who knows? You might earn yourself a free book or two.
  • WordPress Database Backup (Scott Merrill) is a convenient way to backup the blog and download it. I’m not entirely comfortable with database administration, and this gives me peace of mind.

Comments? Criticisms? Suggestions?