Archive for the 'WordPress' Category

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.

Any questions for Matt Mullenweg

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/12/2005
in Interviews, Podcasting and WordPress
. 5 Comments

I will be interviewing Matt Mullenweg of founder of WordPress and WordPress.com on Monday. If you have any questions you’d like me to ask Matt, feel free to email them to me (tom@tomrafteryit.net) or leave them here in the comments.

Some WordPress permalinks 404ing

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 9/12/2005
in Blogging and WordPress
. 1 Comment

I was having a strange issue recently on this blog - occassionally a blog post would 404 when the PermaLink was clicked on - the post would appear fine in the blog’s main page but any attempt to view it individually would fail! Deleting the post and re-posting with a new title solved it, so some part of the title seemed to be causing the problem.

This happened twice in the last couple of weeks - both times with podcast interviews posts. This got me thinking - I checked the mp3 filename and in both cases the mp3 filename was the same as the post title (i.e. darren-barefoot-interview.mp3 in a post entitled Darren Barefoot interview). Again, another solution, if you come across this issue is to re-name the mp3 file - this should have less impact than deleting posts and re-posting under a new title.

Finally, being aware of this, come up with a procedure to ensure that your post titles and files don.t share a name and it should no longer be an issue.

Wordpress.com “major drive failure”

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/10/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging, Technology and WordPress
. 4 Comments

I mentioned in a post earlier this morning that I was having problems accessing wordpress.com blogs - wordpress.com is a hosted multi-user version of the blog software I use, WordPress. The site is now available again but suffered a “major disk failure” according to a message on the wordpress.com Dashboard.

data loss message on Wordpress.com

The data loss is presumably because the drive which failed was not in a RAID array and the last backup of the site was a couple of days ago!

This is unforgivable. No matter how small a hosting organisation you are (and Wordpress.com couldn’t be considered small), your users data is sacrosanct. Users will tolerate occasional downtime but not loss of data.

Matt and the rest of the Wordpress.com team, you need to try to resurrect as much of your users data as possible (if you haven’t already done this), put the site on a RAID array, put a disaster recovery plan in place which ensures no data can ever be lost again and then try very hard to rebuild your now shattered reputation.

UPDATE:
MacManX alerted me, in the comments of this post, to the fact that Matt has put up a post about this issue. In the post, Matt explains what happened, how the WordPress.com team responded and that fact that no data was lost:

Donncha was on the ball and switched all the traffic to a recent backup so most things would work while we investigated the hardware failure. This means that an old version of your site was shown for a few hours.

A few minutes ago we restored the up-to-date database and we’re currently syncing it to the backup to get back any posts you might have made during the semi-downtime. Even though we were able to recover everything, we’re looking at ways to make things even more redundant, so if this ever happens again the problems will be measure in seconds or minutes

It is lucky for the Wordpress.com team that no data was lost, this will help people’s confidence in the platform. However, they need to get a RAID solution in place for the database (preferably with multiple RAID containers - 1 for OS, 1 for db and 1 for transaction logs) and a live backup db server in case of a logic board failure on the db server. Only at this level of redundancy will they be able to sleep at night and hand on heart be able to promise data integrity to Wordpress.com users.

Scoble switches to WordPress

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 5/10/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging, Technology and WordPress
. 6 Comments

I see Robert Scoble is switching to WordPress as his blogging engine of choice - way to go Robert! His new WordPress-powered blog will be on the hosted WordPress site WordPress.com at the address http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/.

Although this site uses WordPress, I haven’t tried the hosted version of WordPress so I can’t comment on how different it is from a regular WordPress blog.

The features of WordPress I like the most are the fact that it is open source, it is web standards compliant out of the box, and there are literally hundreds of plug-ins available for it. Just this morning I installed a great plug-in to manage Technorati Tags called Ultimate Tag Warrior!

Other WordPress plug-ins I love are:

So, welcome aboard the best and most extensible blogging engine on the planet Robert - you made the right decision.

Updated to add in the new uri for the Subscribe to Comments plugin

Linknotes plugin

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 8/8/2005
in Blogging, Technology and WordPress
. 16 Comments

Through Craig’s site I came across a plugin which allows you to make links in your blog posts appear like footnotes - the plugin is called Linknotes and was coded by Jeremy Curry.

Installation is a snap (as you’d expect from any WordPress plugin) but usage is a little clunky, compared to normal links (simply click on the Link quicktag in the Write Post page and enter the uri) whereas in the Linknotes plugin you have to format your text appropriately. Someone left a comment on Jeremy’s site to say he had made a Quicktag for the plugin - if I can find out how he did, I’ll post that here as well.

To see how this works - I have rewritten my first paragraph above using the plugin:
Through Craig’s site :”Craig’s site”:http://nuclearmoose.com/archives/2005/08/07/wp-linknotes-this-is-freakin-fantastic/ I came across a plugin which allows you to make links in your blog posts appear like footnotes - the plugin is called Linknotes :”Linknotes”:http://jeremycurry.com/archives/2005/08/07/linknotes/ and was coded by Jeremy Curry.

UPDATE:
I found Podz tutorial on how to make Quicktags here :”here”:http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/quicktags/ and made my own Quicktag for this plugin - now it works really well!

What do people prefer - links within the text or Linknote links?

UPDATE2:
I just got an email from Jeremy, the developer of Linknotes:

Hey,
I just added quicktags to the plugin, and it doesn’t require you to replace, or edit any files. Just download v0.3. Thanks for comments, and I hope you like the plugin!

Good job Jeremy, thanks for responding so quickly. I downloaded v0.3 as advised and while the buttons appear, they don’t appear to function for me :-(

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