Category Archives: wordpress

Pardon the dust

I had a semi-catastrophic upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, and in my frantic attempts to bring back my blog I managed to overwrite my images folder. So there are now many posts with images on this site that aren’t working. The posts I’m most concerned about are all my Amethyst recaps, since I spent a lot of time on them and based on my blog statistics, those are the posts that people tend to stumble across and spend a lot of time reading. So I’ll be working to restore the images on those posts and bring back some of the site functionality that went away during my WordPress upgrade crisis!

Bloglines and WordPress 2.02

It really seems like there’s something going on with bloglines not picking up on feeds after people upgrade to WordPress 2.02. My feeds don’t work, and when I looked over some of the other blogs I follow that also run WordPress, I’m getting similar bloglines error messages when logging in to see if there are any updates from Comics Worth Reading, Rose Read, Etc, Polite Dissent, and Stefan. I’ve searched the wordpress support forums, and I haven’t found anything concrete about this problem, so I’m assuming that this is a problem on the Bloglines end. After semi-breaking my site yesterday while noodling around trying out different settings and rewrite rules for the feeds, I’m not even going to attempt to do anything about this problem for now. I did drop a note to Bloglines customer support, but I haven’t heard anything yet.

Update: It looks like everything is working just fine now. That’s great, I must have super blog mojo or something, that the problem would be fixed shortly after I blogged about it 🙂

Upgrading

I just upgaded to wordpress 2.0. It looks pretty nifty so far. I was going to hold off for a little while, but I got an invitation to test measuremap. I figured if I was going to be messing with templates to configure my blog for the statistics tracking, I might as well upgrade beforehand. The admin interface seems like it is much improved.

I did somehow manage to destroy the blix theme I was using for the site. I wanted to switch to a new theme anyway, I guess I’ll work on that over the weekend.

WordPress StatTraq

StatTraq is a statistics plugin your WordPress blog. I installed it recently and it seems to pick up and display a little bit more data than the statistics my host provides. Of course, I am completely overwhelmed by referral spam, but if you are interested in tracking visitors to your site, it is worth installing.

testing out new theme

I’ve spent a bunch of time this weekend working on adapting some themes for wordpress. I finally upgraded my sister’s blog to wordpress 1.5, and I adapted the China Red theme for her.

I was messing around with the Blix theme for my site, and I really like it, except I seem to have lost my link categories! The pattern at the top is from squidfingers.

I wish I was better at graphic design/css, I think I can manage ok when adapting other people’s work, but I’d like to be able to come up with something totally original at some point. Some of the tools that I was using while working on themes: the wellstyled color generator, and the del.icio.us new color bookmarking feature which came in handy for keeping track of little swatches of color.

comment moderation

Comment moderation seems to keep randomly kicking in for a few comments here and there, and I’m not sure why. So if you submit a comment and it doesn’t appear on the site right away, I’ll post your comment as soon as I’m aware of it. This is really strange, because I don’t have comment moderation on as a default option. Perhaps my blog has gremlins. Other than this, WordPress 1.5 is a joy and delight 🙂

some wordpress plugins I use on this site

The Spaminator. Catches a ton of spam. I’ve only noticed one false positive so far out of hundreds of spam comments.

The dofollow plugin. Because I am really fairly good about getting rid of spam comments that slip through (and I expect less and less to appear due to the Spaminator), I like that this plugin will remove the default nofollow tag added to urls in the comments in version 1.5 of wordpress. I think the nofollow thing is a bit lame in any case.

I just installed this contact form plugin.

I really like the way it is so easy to use plugins in wordpress!

Here are some pages where you can find plugins to customize your wordpress blog:

http://wiki.wordpress.org/Plugin
http://www.unknowngenius.com/wp-plugins/

movin on up

I’m going to be upgrading to WordPress 1.5, I don’t think there should be any glitches but if there are, I apologise in advance!

Everythings seems ok, except I wasn’t able to port over my old css. Hmmmm.

I think I’ve managed to customize the kubrick theme a little bit, the image at the top is from Citrus Moon