I got tired of my Bella theme, so I started to get a new look together but had got to stop and run off to the city to see Sex and the City which left me no time to finish up. This explains why my site didn’t look so great all day.
At least now things are lining up the way they are supposed to. Some may find the white out look a little plain but for now I just wanted to clean out the Bella elements and get rid of the rounded corners–they were fun but it’s time for something new.
However I owe other folks a lot of work and can’t spend too much time on this right now.
Category: Technical Blog
That is Odd
My “older posts| newer posts” navigation seems to be kaput.Needless to say perhaps I was too creative with a customized Loop or 2. I started my Shopping in Brooklyn (Brooklyn♥) and used a custom query to have only that category show on that page and not in my main blog post page or anywhere else and it seems I broke my WordPress a little. I don’t have the time right now to properly obsess over it to fix it.
What I’m up to right now:
I’m unusually busy getting a staging level website design together for Lee Lee’s Valise and finishing up 2 other projects for other clients (thankfully, they are being laidback about it). I just yesterday made live a site I’d been working on for weeks and weeks. I haven’t worked that hard on one site since I overhauled my dad’s.
I just used the wordtube plugin to try to set up a site that Lisa from Lee Lee’s valise might be able to use to webscast with…right now all I’ve got loaded are image files and I’m not so sure wordtube makes for a good slideshow display. It uses Jeroen ‘s W. media player. I bought 3 licenses around 2 years ago from him and don’t even use 2 of them on any live sites anymore! Anyway, obviously wordtube is much more suitable for playlists of swfs and flvs so it’s still on my list of good plugins to have.Also it’s very easy to use and I like that. I didn’t have to think too hard to set it up at all and it didn’t interfere with everything else or my design. You probably wouldn’t be all that amazed to hear that this is kind of rare.
Who am I kidding?
There was no way I could not just go run off and figure out how to fix my Loop! I’d read about this somewhere(probably many places) that using query_posts isn’t the best way to go about what I was trying to do.
This works : < ?php query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-230"); ? >
This doesn’t : < ?php query_posts('cat=-230');? >
Wp Auto Upgrade, not good for big plugins.
I am so glad that wp 2.5.1 has the ability to automatically upgrade plugins because it saves a lot of time and is very neat and tidy. Unfortunately, some of the bigger plugins like cforms or wp-shopping cart tend to mess up if auto-upgraded.
By bigger and big I mean complicated, multi folder/directory plugins with lots of data and whathaveyou.
With the WP-Shopping cart the auto upgrade ended up costing me a day’s labor.
I lost all my product page thumbnail images. How? I don’t know since the uploaded images for products aren’t in the Plugin folder but in the Uploads folder. Therefore they couldn’t have gotten over written. But the linkage to them was messed up.
Although, given the history of wonkiness this plugin has had this might have happened anyway even if I had uploaded the latest version manually…
Mainly, the largest problem for the auto upgrader is this plugin comes in an extra folder “wp-ecommerce”. The folder you want uploaded is “wp-shopping-cart”. WP’s plugin auto upgrader can’t read the readme.txt which of course says do not upload the wp-ecommerce folder, just the wp-shopping-cart folder. So after an auto upgrade the E-Commerce tab in your admin dashboard is there but your products and the shopping cart,widgets and all are not on your site. Your purchase log is gone and there are permalinks leading places that seem not to exist.Before you freak out and lose your cool, don’t get too scared: everything is still in your database.But you will probably have to redo all your product images.The latest version is so much better so don’t let this stop you from upgrading.
Things new to the latest version are:
A Latest Products widget which shows product thumbnails in your sidebar and is invaluable.
Permalinks!
I never thought they’d give us permalinks, did you? Now the plugin is miles closer to SEO. If only there weren’t a tables layout and a load of < br > s that aren’t closed…
The ability to edit the Category link which shows in the sidebar to whatever you want it to say.The Categories list is no longer called Categories but “Product Groups” and so the widget is no longer called “Products and Brands” but Product Groups. This is one of the better improvements. I can well put up with a days work to have a better functioning free shopping cart,can’t you?
Fixing product images:
You may not have this problem but I did: Product thumbnails not getting displayed in the product pages or in the Latest Product widget.
I found that uploading a seperate thumbnail when editing a product solved the issue of the missing pic in the products page but I had to view the source of the sidebar widget to see why my thumbs weren’t being displayed there. It was just a matter of uploading a new thumb via FTP to the uploads/wpsc/thumbnail folder with the same name as was described in the link in the source…
I haven’t got a clue as to why the newest version of this amazing plugin does this with product images. The good news is that it is fixable.
With cforms from deliciousdays I lost my forms because the upgrade didn’t actually upgrade. I’m not sure what it did but the results were I had to do it myself and then redo my forms. Now I am wiser and have backed up my forms. Most likely what happened was some kind of time out during the FTP process that caused things to go awry.
Any time one upgrades one should take care to save a copy of the old version if they have made any code edits. Oftentimes it’s hard to keep track especially if you run a lot of plugins.The auto upgrade function can’t save your carefully thought out edits. But then, if you are the kind of WordPress user that makes carefully thought out code edits you don’t need me to tell you this as you are very clever and need no hand-holding and are probably writing a plugin as I write this..
For all you lazy bloggers out there:
A pre publishing checklist that builds muscle tone for your blog/website
Ok, I’m lazy,too.
Now that that’s out of the way don’t be too lazy when writing out your posts.
I know, more stuff to do when it’s hard enough just writing the darned thing. Still, taking just a few seconds more on each article can pay off. Other publishing tools exist but I use WordPress so this post will probably only be relevant to other WordPress users.
Tags.
Did you pick out some tags? I used to write a new category each time I wrote a new post. Now I use only a few categories for my site’s main topics. But when I write a new article I select a few tags to relate directly to what I have just written. This helps cut out sidebar category bloat and clutter. Additionally, it is very easy to create an archives template for your categories and tags to show every single last one.Then you can use the sidebar to display only the important categories. Also,when writing tags make sure you don’t double up on existing tags by adding a capitolized tag when you have a lowercase one already.
Doing this can ensure you don’t penalized for duplicate content.
Category descriptions.
I’m at fault here,too.
I never take the time to write out a brief description of my categories.This is why when you hover over my categories the title attribute says “View all posts under”. Writing out your own category descriptions can help in removing the bloggy feel from your website. This site is mainly a blog so it’s not so bad for me. If you don’t want your site to be bloggy (maybe you use WordPress as a content mangement sytem) writing category descriptions is a small move in that direction.
Incidentally, I am using Robert Felty’s Collapsing Category plugin for the website I’m working on right now. Not having categories decriptions led to 67 errors in validation for the site. The plugin doesn’t display the title attribute in quotes and the WC3 validator hated this. I spent an hour trying to fix it in the plugin code and then saw the “if empty” bit and a lightbulb went off. I went and made up some descriptions and the more I added the less errors I got. Bingo.
Photos.
Having a well placed image in your post is fabulous. Wonder why magazines have so many pictures in them? Of course you don’t. People like to look at pictures. People don’t like to read. Ideally, the photo you select was taken by you or is a graphic that you made. If photography is not your thing and neither PhotoShop or even Microsoft Paint seem worth the time there are many stock photo and clip art sources on the internets. Nothing is more bland and boring than a page full of text without images. If you have a picture for folks to look at they may not read everything you have to say but they will at least look at the picture.
The post title shouldn’t be an afterthought.
I’m hardly being original when I tell you a good post title counts.Succinct and pithy is good. Spend a little time thinking about it before you slap any old title up there.