An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

I just stumbled across this, which is an awesome plugin for Wordpress that really improves the default look & feel of wp-admin.

Unfortunately for me though it doesn’t work too well with the new Write Post screen of the 1.6 Alpha that I am running but for all you sane people out there running stable releases of 1.5 I highly recommend it! Now if something like that was incorporated for 1.6 then that would give the release a big wow factor, as I am not really feeling the love of the new Write Post design.

The movable/collapsible blocks are just a novelty in my opinion and after using the new page for a few weeks it really hasn’t changed how I use the page at all. I did however just find another useful plugin, Speedy Cat that allows you to add categories while creating a new post without leaving the Write Post screen with some of that AJAX magic that we all know and love!

I can see from my logs that I do get a decent amount of traffic but nobody seems to want to comment and seeing how I always like a little validation here & there I thought I would try running some polls to see if I can get my visitors to interact with the site as I know leaving comments can sometimes be a pain.

The first poll is about Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, I really can’t see how Harry Potter is so damned popular, I read the first book way back when and was utterly unimpressed so much so that I had no inclination of reading the next books or seeing the movies. However I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks so vote away!

The poll is using a script from http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy/, which had a few errors upon install with a MySQL insert failing and some weirdness with the answers of the first poll but that all seems to be sorted now.

I am a big fan of letting the experts take care of things like leaving the nightly backups of my site to my web host to do, but it is still a good idea to do your own backups. This gives you extra redundancy in case something really goes wrong, plus a lot of the people using Wordpress probably are with a host that don’t perform regular backups for them.

Hence Wordpress are having a backup week to demonstrate how simple it is to setup your own Wordpress backups and get everyone into the habit, their press release is below with details and who knows I might just have to volunteer to help out.

Press Release

Backing Up is Not Just for Cars

Your WordPress database contains every post, every comment and every link you have on your blog. If your database gets erased or corrupted, you stand to lose everything you have written. There are many reasons why this could happen and not all are things you can control. But what you can do is backup your data. After all, it is important isn’t it?

WordPress Backup
Week July 23-30 aims to help you become more familiar with the process of backing up and protecting your data.

Step-by-step backup instructions will be available in the online manual,
the WordPress Codex, and
support provided online in the WordPress Support Forum to help you through the process.

Guides will be available to help you backup your WordPress site and database for a variety of systems and server software such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk and vDeck. Consider using this Backup Week as an incentive to backup all your valuable documents and software, too.

These guides will assist you in determining:

• When and how to make backups.
• How to make things right after an unexpected data loss befalls your WordPress database.

Making backups is essential because problems inevitably occur and you need to be in a position to take action when disaster strikes. Spending a few minutes to make an easy, convenient backup of your database will allow you to spend even more time being creative and productive with your website.

For more information or to help volunteer on this WordPress Community
Event, see WordPress Backup Week.

I stumbled across WP-Prettypicturizer the other day and it does pretty much what I was intending to do with the original Prettypicturizer script so I downloaded it, hacked my moblogging script to output the right tag to get the image processed by the plugin and voila the previous post is the result. I still have to modify my new changes to work properly if I moblog with a location though but that is trivial and I’m just being lazy.

I really do need to clean the moblogging script up some, improve the Google Maps API stuff and release the code as the results are pretty damn cool.

Arghhhh!!! I just realised that yet again MSIE is not serving up my blog as a website but thinks it is a file to download again, I’m going to have to apply Seth’s hack again so it serves MSIE with a DOCTYPE that it doesn’t spit the dummy on so for the time being MSIE users can’t read this site, oh well most of my hits come from other browsers anyway.

EDIT: Okay all should be well now, although I’m not sure if the theme will validate as XHTML 1.1 just yet, will work on that later.

I just saw this really nifty Prettypicturizer thing that had been modified into a bookmarklet by http://mathibus.com, what it does is take a picture and then create a thumbnail image of it that looks just like a polaroid with a nice handwritting font used for the caption, you can see it in action at http://prettypicturizer.nl.eu.org/.

So guess what I will be doing later tonight? Hack it to work with the file system (not through HTTP) and make it as a function in my moblogging script so the thumbnails become nice little polaroid images, shouldn’t take much hacking to get it up and running so stay tuned!

It would seem that there is no easy way to test another theme within Wordpress with the only way being to activate it and effect your main blog, which if true is a little annoying to say the least! I had a look on the Codex and all they talk about with regards to sandboxing is using static pages locally and then converting that into a template, that just doesn’t fly with me.

Now I know I could easily (well easily enough) set up either a development blog on the server or one locally then do all my changes there but what a friggin pain in the rear…

Okay scratch that, I did some Googling and came across the Theme Preview plugin that does exactly what I want it to so now I can happily work on a new theme without disrupting everyone!

I just assisted my girlfriend convert from using Blogger to Wordpress as she was feeling quite limited with their feature set and was jealous of everything that I could do with my Wordpress install so I quickly set her up with a domain name & a Wordpress install on my A Small Orange hosting.

We found an updated import script that would import both posts and comments from Blogger along with a nice tutorial (I’ll have to get the link from her and post it), so after a bit of hair pulling and assistance from moi she finally got everything transferred across.

However all is not rosy on the otherside apparently, so far she is not at all impressed with the admin interface of Wordpress and has become quite frustrated with it and I think to a lage extend rightly so. I just don’t think Wordpress is ready for the majority of Blogger users to use as the learning curve is a little steep, like for example you shouldn’t need to touch FTP for plugins and themes.

There are other little things as well like why the heck do we have an options section named Presentation that has a Themes tab and a Themes Editor tab? Why is that not simply called Themes?

I’m not sure if there is any interest or not but if anyone is interested in free hosting with a pre-installed Wordpress blog, which would be for the sole use of running the blog plus any plugins you would like then please drop me a note and I will look into it.

I hardly use my own hosting at A Small Orange, so maybe I should look into reselling but offering it for free just for Wordpress for those users that want to get into blogging and not sell their souls to somewhere like Blogger.

In case you haven’t noticed the Google Maps API stuff adds a lot to the load time of the main page of my blog so I had been thinking for a while as to how I could improve it. I have decided that I will keep moblogging to the main page but instead of including the Google Map right there I will instead add a link to a separate page that will show my location.

That will also fix a few other problems I’ve been having with the Javascript and should allow me to start serving XHTML 1.1 Strict again for the main site.