TOPIC: AUTOMATTIC
15th October 2007
There appears to be a percolation of plugins that aim to change the appearance of WordPress administration pages from their day-glow blue to something more pleasing; Earthtones is the one that I use for this blog, but I have also been known to use WP Tiger Administration as well. Both options work well, though the latter needs some adjustments to work as well with WordPress 2.3 as it does with the 2.2 line.
One area that they both fail to influence is the appearance of the upload screen. It doesn't help that upload.php, the underlying PHP script, is a dual-purpose animal: used in an iframe in the post editing page and standalone for upload management. Curiously, you can only upload files on the post editing page and not on the upload management screen, a definite quirk. The thing that really stops these admin theme plugins gaining any sort of purchase with upload.php is that it also uses an auxiliary stylesheet, upload.css, that is called after the WordPress function hook has been defined; if it came before this, then the styles in upload.css could be overridden.
While you could edit upload.php and edit the replacement stylesheet, the former activity would require repeating at every WordPress upgrade. I chose to edit upload.css and will keep that is a safe place so that I can replace the file following an upgrade. If upload.php was treated like every other admin script, then this would be unnecessary. A useful suggestion for Automattic, perhaps?
7th October 2007
Here's something that I would really appreciate: a book on code cutting for WordPress customisation and extensions. Having the Codex is all very fine, but having a dead tree compendium that you can peruse at your leisure is a definite bonus. If there was a way to get the Codex on PDF and print it all off for easier reading, that would be progress. Though I believe that a publisher did plan to bring to the market something like what I want, the author and publisher parted company, a pity. It would be great to see something like Apress' Pro Drupal Development for WordPress. What about it, Automattic folks?
6th October 2007
I was ambling around the web and came across a website that, while it appeared to be a blog, isn't one in the vein of that to which we are accustomed. It does, however, have a blogroll and that is where Blogrolling.com comes into this piece. Blogrolls are very much a feature of the blogging (WordPress calls them that anyway) world and act as a repository of useful links relevant to the subject of the blog. I also use them as a bookmarking station for myself and a way to return the favour when someone links to my blog. For a blogroll, you generally need a database sitting behind in the background, or you end up creating a list of links in (X)HTML.
Blogrolling.com offers another option: placing your links at an external website and including them on your webpages, using a piece of code to pull in the information. RSS, JavaScript and PHP are among the methods on offer from Blogrolling.com; I used PHP when I gave the service a whirl on one of my offline blogs and that really does give you a lot of customising power over and above using CSS. That's not to say that there aren't customisation functions on offer from Blogrolling.com, I found a few of these distinctly useful: ordering of links in a blogroll is just one. When it comes to categorising your links, you don't get the category option, but you do get to create as many blogrolls as you want, so there is a workaround; moving links from one blogroll to another is mouse intensive but straightforward. Also, because you are reading each blogroll in turn, you can order the categories as you want them. With WordPress' category approach, ordering categories involves widgets and plugins or getting your hands dirty with some code cutting. All in all, Blogrolling.com seems to offer an intriguing and useful service.
26th September 2007
Primarily because of the WordPress plugins that I use, a few inconsistencies have leaped out of the woodwork that needed to be fixed. Here are the issues that I encountered:
Database errors appearing in web pages
This was a momentary discovery along the upgrade trail, entirely caused by the way in which I was doing things. As usual, I went and copied over the WordPress 2.3 files to my web server, so I saw these errors before I ran the upgrade script. Then, they were banished, confirming that WordPress 2.3 code was trying to access a WordPress 2.2 type database; 2.3 has made some database changes to incorporate tagging.
Dashboard Editor no longer fully functional
The move to JQuery meant that some of the things for which it was looking had changed. They also changed the incoming links provider from Technorati to Google, now that the former is having a tougher time of it. It took a while to track down why I was unable to remove components from the front page of my dashboard as before, but a quick comparison of 2.3 code with its 2.2.3 forbear revealed all. I can make a copy of the updated code available for those who need it.
WordPress Admin Themer
The plugin works as before and does its job so well that you end up applying an old stylesheet (in the blog's theme folder) to the latest release. It only took a spot of tweaking to put everything in order.
I am not complaining about any of these, partly because they were easy to resolve and, in any event, I don't mind a spot of code cutting. However, I can foresee some users being put out by them, hence my sharing my experiences.
Update: Dashboard Editor has since been updated by the author. Even so, I will stick with my own version of the plugin.
21st September 2007
The final release of the next version of WordPress is due out on Monday and because there are sure to be security fixes included, I have been giving the release candidate a go on my offline blogs. Since 2.3 is another major release, I have been doing some preparation. In fact, the WordPress project has a blog entry dedicated to such things for this release. Thankfully, I think that my hillwalking blog should emerge unscathed by this upgrade; I still need to have a go with an offline version of this blog.
The special feature in the new release is tagging, and it is good to see that it has had no impact on legacy set-ups. Though I had the same reservations about 2.2 with its inclusion of sidebar widgets, the backward compatibility was enough to see me through without any hiccups. Tagging is not something that I see myself using, with categories fulfilling much the same type of role; I am unconvinced by the idea of tag clouds, the type of thing that it powers. However, there are some useful extras here, and the filtering of posts by edit status is one of these. Having pending review as a publishing status sounds like a tweak that I might use to allow myself a cooling-off period before I publish a post for all the world to see. Revisiting something with a fresher pair of eyes might stop typographical howlers from emerging into public view...
Update: Another 2.3 feature discovered! I have picked up on multiple category widgets by virtue of the fact that category styling disappeared with the upgrade of the offline version of this blog to 2.3 RC1. Adding "-1" to the relevant CSS class definitions soon sorted things out. It does support the idea of testing before implementation, even if no other unexpected changes were spotted. I still am not sure why anyone would have multiple category listings, though.
18th September 2007
It was on this date several months ago that I moved my hillwalking blog into the world of WordPress. It's a self-hosted WordPress instance and has been for all that time. Because of the move, I was taken into the world of MySQL, one that intrudes still to this day. Most of the time for the migration was spent setting up a theme to fit in with the rest of the website, of which it forms an essential part. The matter of importing all the old posts took up time too, especially when it came to fixing glitches with the XML import. Still, it was all done within a weekend, and my website hasn't looked back since. More people now have a reason to visit, and the blog may even have surpassed the photo gallery as the site's main attraction. I kept up the old blog for a while but have dispensed with that by now; I was keeping both blogs synchronised and that became a tiring manoeuvre. Another upshot of the whole experience is that I have become more aware of the UK outdoor scene and learnt a thing or two too. It might even have encouraged me to go from day tripping to multi-day backpacking, a real-world change that is well removed from the world of technology.
7th September 2007
A little while back, I took to using the wonders of .htaccess directives to make my WordPress deployments more secure. It does work but has the disadvantage that desktop blog editors like Windows Live Writer, Word 2007 and w.bloggar cannot be used to update your blog. Though I must have a look at getting around this, I am sticking with using WordPress itself to do the editing for now (Dean Lee's port of FckEditor for WordPress is working out very well, spurious codes notwithstanding).
26th July 2007
Because the standard WordPress post editor got broken on this blog, my mind turned to replacing it, especially when I spied plugins for adding FCKEditor to the thing. Dean Lee's is the one that I am using, and it seems to work well so far too. As this is FCKEditor, there are more editing options than those offered by the WordPress standard and that's even with the advanced options made visible with the Alt+V/Alt+Shift+V keyboard shortcuts; the former is for IE and the latter for Firefox. We'll see how it goes from here...
14th June 2007
WordPress.com has retired its Feed Stats feature. While there might have been problems with it for some, I do find it a strange decision not to spend some time on it. After all, given the existence of Google Reader and its kind, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that more people read blogs with RSS readers than by going to the sites themselves. In fact, I peruse blogs more often with Google Reader than by visiting the websites themselves. It's enough to make me wonder if I could use Feedburner with this blog.
To follow on from this, I am beginning to wonder if that Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, seems to be a quirky company that makes decisions that are questioned by its customers. After all, they did remove the post preview functionality from blog post editing screens, and that has generated numerous comments. On self-hosted WordPress, you can add a plug-in to correct this, but that option is not open to WordPress.com users. The answer that I got to a theme change request earlier this year adds to the impression, as does seeing a company having staff apparently work from home all over the world.
Automattic seems an unconventional beast alright; could that lead to their undoing? Though it is king of the hill with blogging world for now, there is nothing to say that will last forever.
25th May 2007
Furthering my excursions into things related to Google, I have been giving Google Analytics a whirl for my hillwalking and photo gallery website. Aside from the fact that it is updated once a day, it could have enabled me to eject WordPress plug-ins like Popularity Contest and FireStats getting the chop. As it happens, I also have a Google Analytics plugin installed, but a little editing of the blog template that I have developed would get rid of that too.
That’s enough about WordPress plug-ins; let’s return to Google Analytics. It has all the usual stuff: who’s visiting, from where are they coming, what are they using to see your site, etc. In addition, it captures if they are coming back, how long they are staying on the site and how deep they are going. Bounce rate is another term that features heavily: it is when a user only goes to one page and then leaves. With a blog, this unfortunately seems to come out as a high figure and that is ironic given that the blog was meant to promote the online photo gallery; it has very much taken on a life all of its own. There’s more to the information from Google Analytics, and it’s all useful stuff, of which I plan to make good use to improve how my site works.