Archive for the 'blogs' Category

WordPress 2.3, K2 RC2 crashing Safari 2 resolved

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 8/10/2007
in Blogging, Browsers, WordPress and blogs
. 3 Comments

Since I updated this blog to WordPress 2.3 and K2 RC2, I have been having reports that the blog crashes Safari (but only Safari 2, not Safari 3).

Today I think I sorted the problem.

I switched the blog from using the native Wordpress’ Widgets to manage the sidebar to using K2’s Sidebar Manager and now the crashing seems to have stopped.

I’m not sure why the WordPress Widgets was causing the blog to crash Safari 2 but if you are having this problem, try switching to using the K2 Sidebar Manager.

It worked for me.

Monster threaten legal action and ask me to blame someone else!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 2/10/2007
in Blogging, Referrer Spam and blogs
. 32 Comments

I was going to hold off on blogging this but since Damien has already mentioned it I thought I’d add my experience.

I received two emails directly from Monster’s Business Development Manager John Burns today. In the emails John said

i want you to delete my name from your blog that is open to the public….

He went on to add

You are putting my name at risk and my character on your blog, remove it ASAP or i will proceed with the legal advice i was given.

You have already damaged my name and caused great embarresment to me.

Please take this very seriously.

John Burns
Business Development Manager

I received several other emails from John where he tried to recall the spam he sent out yesterday but as Michele noted, that only works with Microsoft Exchange within an organisation.

To make matters even worse, incredibly, in the recall efforts John once again exposed everyone’s email addresses by not using the bcc field.

The real kicker for me though was when John left me a voicemail on the one hand threatening me with legal action, and then on the other hand asking me to

take down what you have put up about me, remove my name and replace it with somebody else’s immediately… I will definitely be taking this forward

Remove his name and replace it with somebody else’s? Just who’s name would John have me use instead?

I’m sorry but does this guy have no sense of responsibility for his actions at all. Not once, at any point did he apologise for spamming me, not once did he apologise for harvesting the data from the it@cork members’ directory and then he asks me to put someone else in the frame while he threatens me with legal action? Unbelievable.

I’m sure John is a nice guy but if he had only put his hands up, accepted he was wrong and asked how he could right what he had done, this would never have become the growing embarrassment it is to Monster’s already poor reputation.

UPDATE - Daithi has created an hilarious re-mix of the voicemail - check it out

WordPress/FeedBurner lose my subscribers

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/10/2007
in Blogging, RSS, blogs and feeds
. 15 Comments

my feedburner feed stats

Really odd but since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 the number of subscribers to my blog has roughly halved. Today it is reading 632. It hasn’t been below 1,000 in at least 6 months never mind down at the 600 mark.

I realise that this is likely due to my moving to the newer FeedBurner (FeedSmith) plugin which required me to setup a new feed in FeedBurner but as you can see from the screenshot above, the old feed is reading 0 subscribers!

I put a 301 re-direct on the old feedburner plugin’s feed from this blog but what I am curious about is that the Subscribe address for this blog (tomrafteryit.net/feed) hasn’t changed at all. Do people subscribe directly to the FeedBurner feed address?

WordPress 2.3 upgrade breaks RSS feed

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2007
in Blogging, RSS, WordPress and blogs
. 3 Comments

Sean McNamara alerted me via the comments on this blog that my RSS feed was broken (thanks a million Sean). I sorted that out this morning so it should be good again and Google Reader is certainly having no problem seeing my posts now.

So what happened? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure (!) but I think it had more to do with my FeedBurner account than WordPress, per se.

The sequence of events was along the lines of

Then I saw Sean’s comment. Uh oh! I went over to Google Reader and sure enough no posts for the last couple of days were present, d’oh!

I checked back my FeedBurner Plugin config and while all seemed ok, when I checked the “create a FeedBurner feed for …” link, it looks like that the updated plugin created a new feed for the blog.

This meant I had to head over to the FeedBurner site and set up the new feed from scratch - a considerable annoyance. All my stats on my old feed are no longer associated with the new one.

Strictly, this wasn’t a WordPress issue, more of a left-field issue associated with upgrading the FeedBurner plugin. However, the lack of support by WordPress for older plugins is the only reason I upgraded - triggering the loss of my RSS feed.

WordPress 2.3 gotchas (or got me’s!)

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/9/2007
in Blogging, WordPress and blogs
. 2 Comments

Phew!

Finally done with that install - ouch! I wouldn’t want to go through that again in a hurry.

I hit several speed bumps in my upgrading of this blog from WordPress 2.2 to 2.3 - many of those could have been avoided if I had followed the instructions on the Extended Upgrade page instead of the Upgrade page!

Specifically, if you are upgrading, not only should you also upgrade all plugins before starting the blog update, but you should then disable all plugins before uploading WordPress 2.3.

I use the K2 theme on this site, so I checked it out, and sure enough there is a new version of K2 (K2 RC1) available for WordPress 2.3 as well. If you plan on upgrading to RC1, be aware that Michael Heilemann says in the release notes:

Because so many things have been upgraded since v0.9.6, a lot of the code hasn’t actually seen as much usage as the v0.9.6 code, and thus you should hold off until RC2 with upgrading if you like your stability over your ‘bling’

I decided to try out the widget functionality which comes with K2 RC1 but I came a cropper on a bug in the code and so reverted to using the less functional, but fully operational WordPress Widgets.

One of the biggest advances in WordPress 2.3 is the inclusion of Tags. This is fantastic news for anyone who hasn’t used tags up to now as it provides a simple way for them to begin. However, I was using a plugin (Ultimate Tag Warrior) for my tagging and this no longer works with WordPress 2.3.

WordPress 2.3 has the ability to Import existing Tags though (Manage -> Import -> Ultimate Tag Warrior) meaning all my tagging up to now hasn’t been in vain!

Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) had two great features:

  1. UTW presented you with a drop-down of all your previous tags when writing a post so you could easily chose one you had previously. This is missing from 2.3
  2. UTW had a Suggest option whereby it would scan the text of your post and suggest appropriate tags

Christine Davis, the author of UTW has already released plugins to fill in this missing functionality!

Other features added in this release of WordPress are highlighted here.

Donncha in Photo exhibition

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/9/2007
in Blogging, blogs and cork
. 1 Comment

Mallow Camera Club are holding an exhibition of photographs in Mallow Town Library for charity for the next three weeks and fellow blogger, photo blogger and WordPress lead developer, Donncha O’Caoimh will have one of his photos in the exhibition for sale - well done Donncha.

Head along if you get a chance, it is for a good cause.

Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!