Wordpress is too slow!

Here's a good article on how to speed it up:

Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours

Not clear if memcached helps.

Labels: memcached, wordpress

3D Tag Clouds for Wordpress

3D tag clouds for WordPress are built on Flash so they're interactive, rotating spherical 3d tag clouds.



Wow, these are really cool!

The WordPress plugin is called WP-CUMULUS. Here's the official announcement by Roy Tanck.

You can see a small version of it in the sidebar of Roy Tanck's site, but a larger version can be seen at AdesBlog.

Obviously there are usability issues, but it's novel and could work on sites with relatively sophisticated audiences. Mostly it's just something new to look at. Enjoy it before it gets annoying!

Have you successfully set up a 3D tag cloud on WordPress? Please leave a comment.

Labels: flash, tags, wordpress

Don't upgrade to WordPress 2.7-beta2!!

At first, I was super excited about the new version of WordPress (2.7), because the interface is now MUCH MUCH better than the last one, except for one or two things. Yeah to make posts you no longer have to scroll up and down all over the place. On the negative side, in terms of the interface, WordPress has apparently done away with the distinction between "Save and Continue Editing" and "Publish." Now even though it says "Publish," it means "Save and Continue Editing," which is really annoying.

But anyway, the reason NOT to upgrade, is that it's much slower than the previous version! If you do any significant amount of blogging, it will get very annoying.

What options does this leave? Blogger (as in blogspot-hosted), doesn't work. The comment management functions are completely retarded. Yes, I'm using Blogger for this blog, that's how I know! I've tried Chyrp but theming it is difficult. Well probably not really, but switching themes is not the simple one-click process that WordPress affords.

Actually, I might take another look at Chyrp or roll my own blog...

Labels: blogger, chyrp, wordpress

How to delete a comment in Blogger

Blogger apparently is designed by a bunch of idiots (they're owned by Google--what do you expect?), who came up with the dumbest way of deleting comments. If you thought it might have been impossible to delete a comment on your Blogger blog, you're not the only one who be smacking his head against the wall.

"I can't delete a comment!!" Bang, bang bang.

Well, Blogger doesn't have a list of comments that you can delete from the administration area, where you would expect it. Instead you actually have to go to the post with the spam comment, and then open the link to POST A COMMENT. That's right, you have to open the link to POST a comment.

Now, even then, they make it as hard as they possibly can. Try seaching for 'delete' on that page and you won't find it. Why? Because they're using a camouflaged icon, a little gray trash can under the date of the comment. It's even got a mustache and dark glasses. OK, it doesn't, but still you would never notice it until somebody like me pointed it out to you.

What can I say? Your welcome.

And oh yeah, switch to WordPress as soon as you can.

Labels: blogger, wordpress

How to start a blog (WordPress basics)

Quick and dirty notes for:

BUILDING ONLINE COMMUNITIES WITH DRUPAL, PHPBB, AND WORDPRESS, 2006 Douglass et al.
==================================================================================

Chapter 15 - Starting to Blog and Building Your Community
==============================================
- what is trackback uri??
- allow pings?
- shoudl use excerpt for SEO reasons - used in feeds, etc.
- post slug - part of permanent URI -- used for SEO
- custom fields - use depends on plugin

Categories
---
- can have parents
- slugs

Post Slugs:
Post Slug
This is where WordPress will "clean up" your post title to create a link, if you are using Permalinks. The commas, quotes, apostrophes, and other non-HTML favorable characters are changed and a dash is put between each word. If your title is "My Site - Here's Lookin' at You, Kid", it will be cleaned up to be "my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid" as the title. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to "my-site-lookin-at-you-kid".


There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.

1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
3. Pingbacks do not send any content.

Category slugs:
Category Slug
The Category slug must be unique. The Category Slug is used in the URL. For example, setting a Category Name of "Recipes" and a Category Slug of "food" would show all "Recipes" posts with a URL like example.com/blog/food/.


During the many Save and Continue Editing page reloads, your post title is not permanently set in stone. You can change it at any time during the editing process. However, once you hit Publish the title is cleaned up and turned into a post slug, if you are using permalinks.


take look at RSS Link List Plug-in for wordperss

SEO
---
when search engine crawls category pages, it will get excerpt of your posts rather than full content. if you provided the excerpts, then you're in good shape for keyword density

Go for SEO-friendly permalinks -- i would take out the dates, etc. and move the keywords closer to the front of hte URL. the thing is that if you change your permalink structure apparently it changes your old posts too and then you'll have broken links so you have to install a plugin that will handle that with a 301 redirect

apprently howeer the 301 redirect does not transfer your PR. but maybe it saves the existence of the old page with its old PR. i suppose that's how it works.


http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/

(personally I recommend /%category%/%postname%/)

redirect_canonical

apparently this is now in core. but how do you use it?
http://www.htaccesselite.com/canonical-url-improvements-wordpress-vt296.html

http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/changeset/1218?new_path=trunk%2Fwp-includes%2Fcanonical.php

the thing is that i don't see any redirects though. i tried changing permalink on a wpmu localhsot intallation, and i get a 404 if i change the url.


add_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');

how do you use it???

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/wp-includes/canonical.php

Fixing URL redirects

Edit wp-includes/canonical.php

Insert this after the 4th row ("function redirect_canonical(...) {"):

$do_redirect = false;

This will set do_redirect always be false, whatever the caller tries to do.

This should take care of most problems, but not all.

http://blinkenshell.org/wiki/Howto/Webpage/Wordpress

Fixing the trailing slash problem

Save the plugin found here to your WordPress plugin directory, like this:

cd ~/public_html/blog/wp-includes/plugins

wget http://flipjarg.blinkenshell.org/share/slashFix.txt

mv slashFix.txt slashFix.php

Open slashFix.php and change line 22 to use your Blinkenshell login name:

$user = "YOUR_USERNAME";

Now just go to your WordPress panel and activate the plugin.


yeah using category/postslug is a good way to do it becuase you get the category in there which is an importnat keyword (unless it's 'uncategorized')

wonder if being on localhost has anything do with redirect_canonical not working

the good thing is that if whatever you do doesn't work you can easily reverse it without consequences.

Labels: blog, blogger, blogging, wordpress

Schedule posts in Blogger and Wordpress

You can post to a future date now using Blogger. You have to use draft.blogger.com though. It's not yet available through the regular Blogger interface.

Here's how you do it:

When you're writing a blog post, select 'Post Options' at the bottom of the blog post. That will expand and give you the option of adding a published date. Put the date sometime in the future, and when you click 'Publish Post,' it will hold that post until the future date and publish it at that time.

Read all about it.

Of course, Wordpress has supported this for some time.

If you want to schedule a future blog posting date in Wordpress, follow these steps for each post:

In the right sidebar of the regular page for writing blog posts, in the 'Post Status' box, set it to 'published.'

Then, in the 'Post Timestamp' box, select 'Edit timestamp.'

Change the date to whatever you want.

Click the Publish button, as you normally would, and you're done!

Labels: blogger, posts, scheduling, wordpress

Moving a Wordpress installation

Here's a simple guide/checklist that can save you some headaches when you're moving your Wordpress (2.3.1) installation from one server/domain (including localhost) to another.

First, change your database settings, if necessary, in wp-config.php.

Second, edit the .htaccess file in the Wordpress directory, if necessary.

Third, the base URL for the blog is set in the options table of the Wordpress database. To change it, use sql commands:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value="http://mysite.com/blog" WHERE option_id=1;
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value="http://mysite.com/blog" WHERE option_id=40;

If the blog home page turns up blank and all the blog pages blank, then make sure the theme is set correctly in the database:
- 49, 50 in wp_options

If you're using "pretty" permalinks, make sure that mod_rewrite is enabled on your server.

Labels: wordpress