Archive for the 'WordPress' Category

Speed up posting to WordPress

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/8/2006
in Blogging, Business blogging, Technology and WordPress
. 5 Comments

via Pat Phelan comes a nifty WordPress plugin which speeds up posting from WordPress blogs.

Called WP-No Ping Wait, the plugin works by waiting until after the post has been posted before alerting the pinging services!

Nice one, thanks Pat.

UPDATE - this plugin has caused issues on a number of sites I manage so I have disabled it until a more stable version comes out.

Too little too late - Google tries to win back Bloggers

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 15/8/2006
in Blogging, Business blogging and WordPress
. 15 Comments

Blogger is Google’s free hosted blogging platform. Blogger’s steady decline as a blogging platform has been well documented by Blogger users.

Via Marshal Kirkpatrick today comes news that Google have launched (in beta, of course!) a newer version of Blogger. This version has lots of shiny bits such as allowing change of colour of your blog using a WYSIWYG interface:
New Blogger format screen

And it also allows drag and drop manipulation of various aspects of the blog:
Drag n drop of the About me

The new version requires users to have a Google account which is a bit of a mixed blessing. It also allows for tagging of posts using the Labels field - in fact this is probably the most useful update to the entire application.

Given Google’s lacklustre commitment to Blogger over the last two years and the very little progress in this update I would say to anyone thinking of starting a blog now to stay from Blogger and use the likes of WordPress.com instead. If you are on Blogger - move to a real blog platform. You know you want to.

UPDATE: - for a more comprehensive review of the update see the Google Operating System blog. And Blogger’s official post about it is here

WordPress updated to 2.0.4

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/7/2006
in WordPress
. 4 Comments

WordPress was updated to version 2.0.4 over the weekend.

This release contains several important security fixes, so it’s highly recommended for all users. We’ve also rolled in a number of bug fixes (over 50!), so it’s a pretty solid release across the board.

WordPress 2.0.4 is available for download here.

WordPress update to v2.03

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/6/2006
in Blogging and WordPress
. 12 Comments

WordPress have announced that version 2.03 has been released. This version contains

  • Small performance enhancements
  • Movable Type / Typepad importer fix
  • Enclosure (podcasting) fix
  • The aforementioned security enhancements (nonces)

I updated this blog a few minutes ago and all seems well! The update was straightforward enough - ftp into the site, delete old files, upload new files, sweat as you remember you should have backed up before you started, and test the site!

The update is available for download here.

If anyone notices any strangeness (over and above the usual) in the site, leave a comment or mail me (tom@tomrafteryit.net).

Automating the backup of your blog

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/5/2006
in Blogging, Technology and WordPress
. 6 Comments

I had a couple of hosting issues a week or so ago which got me to thinking (worrying!) about backing up the content of this blog.

Fortunately WordPress 2.x ships with a backup plugin builtin.

The WordPress backup plugin

Unfortunately, I had failed to get the plugin to work previously and hadn’t persevered. Now, I decided, was the time to fix that before I have any problems again!!! The fix was easy enough, all I had to do was change the permissions on the backup directory to 777 and the backup worked.

The issue I had now was that the backup plugin is manual - you have to remember to go to Manage -> Backup and click the Backup button to do a backup. I’m not disciplined enough to remember to do that every day.

Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin called WP-Cron which comes to the rescue here. It is extremely basic but when activated on the Plugins page, it adds the following options to your Backup screen.

Scheduling WordPress backups

With WP-Cron you can schedule your backup to occur nightly at midnight and have the backup emailed to you at an address of your choosing. Sure, there are lots of other bells and whistles it could have, but for me right now, the ability to get a nightly backup of my blogs is extremely re-assuring.

WordPress 2.0 released

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/12/2005
in Blogging and WordPress
. 0 Comments

The latest version of WordPress - WordPress 2.0 was released this evening - head on over to the WordPress Download site to get your copy.

Well done to Matt, Donncha, and the rest of the team involved in getting this one out the door.

Major reasons to update to WordPress 2.0? Nice Ajaxy back-end interface (not gone on it myself, the Link window is too slow opening, for instance); Akismet - Matt’s anti-comment spam plug-in is built-in; and there is a built-in backup facility which will backup your blog db and email it to you! Very nifty.

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