WordPress 2.5 is Out – But I Just Finally got my Blog Looking Halfway Decent
WordPress 2.5 was supposed to be out March 10, 2008, but the official, stable version was finally just released yesterday. I won’t be upgrading quite yet!
The main reason is that I just finally got my blog looking halfway decent, got my plug-ins working like I want them to, and it seems like only yesterday that I upgraded to version 2.3.3! I’m just not ready to go through it all again.
The other reason is that I’m not a “first release” kind of person. I usually let other people get the “first edition” of something and watch to see how it works out before I dive in. This release does look pretty flawless, though, from the blogs and articles I’ve been reading about it.
I’ve been following along in the forums and it seems that the bugs they did have during the beta release and the RC releases were taken care of. I really haven’t seen any major problems from my “watching from afar” so far. The biggest problems seem to be with a few plug-ins that weren’t really written to span new versions of WordPress.
I’m planning to do an upgrade on a different blog, just to get all the bugs out and see what’s involved. Then I’ll do the big job of upgrading sherryness.com and highfructosehigh.com – and by that time I should have it down. Seems like the safe way to play it.
And with as little time as I have for my own, personal blogs (I’m too busy fixing up everyone else’s), doing it quick and “right the first time” is a very big deal to me!
Transferring Your WordPress Blog From One Host To Another
OR: The Bastids Stole My Widgets!
I took all the precautions and steps for a smooth transition when I transferred sherryness.com from one host to another, today, to make sure my WordPress stuff stayed in-tact.
I exported my old posts/settings and backed up everything from the server before I changed the name servers on my registrar.
The name propogated, I uploaded my exported XML file with my old posts/settings, and uploaded all the necessary schtuff to my new site as far as images and such.
A few tweaks here and there and – voila! Beautiful transition. But where are my stinking widgets?
I hand-coded from scratch a hole mess of widgets for my side bar and THEY ARE GONE! I can re-write them, but geeze, oy, and ug. Who knew they would just disappear in the transition?
Fortunately my execphp survived the transition (that’s what allows you to make php-capable widgets), and at least that plug-in is activated. I’ll have to re-write my widgets this weekend, maybe Sunday, after I finish some work for my newest client.
In the meantime, my sidebar is ugly as sin – ’cause the bastids stole my widgets!
Okay, I’m About To Get All ‘Captcha’ On Your Ass
The comment spam I’ve been having to manage is getting ridiculous. I hate to do it, but I think I’m gonna have to go “Captcha” on ya’ll. (Why “captcha” makes me want to type in slang is beyond me, but whuddeva….)
Also, pay no attention to the weirdness that is going on on the navigation bar (that column on the left). I’m wanting to get a bit more stylized, so I’m trying to learn to work with widgets and such.
Of course, I have to do it myself and not use template or cookie cutters, so it’s gonna look weird until I figure it out. I did use “spiffy” for the rounded corners thing on the bottom though. I always use “spiffy” for rounded corners. ‘Cause that is just tedium to do it all yourself.
I love “Spiffy.” I’ll post a link later, but right now I gotta run. I think it’s actually hit 40 degrees outside! If so, that’s the first time that’s happened since sometime in November. Love it!
(I’m Not Your) Freak-On-A-Leash
A lot of the web design business I get is from people seeking web design on Craig’s List. And a lot of them say something similar, but that drives me completely bat-shit. And that is this:
“I’ve already thought this all out, and I know what I want it to look like, so most of the work is done – thus it shouldn’t take too long to put together.”
aye-gudda-aye-gudda-WHAT?????
Did you really think it all out? You know what you want and how you want it to look? How unusual. And thus that solves all of the puzzle about how to make it do/look the way you want?
You’ve thought about how PHP and MySQL work together? And how they fit into html and xhtml? And CSS? And how CSS demands STRICT xhtml? And how the javascript and Flash and dHTML you want in there affects the CSS, xhtml, html, PHP and MySQL, not to mention your SEO endeavors and the layout?
No? You didn’t think all of that through and solve for that? I DIDN’T THINK SO! That is the HARD part. Duh. Web designers/developers are not simply TYPING MONKEYS.
We do the architecture and construction, we are the one’s who make it work – who make it happen. And that requires a tremendous amount of thought, skill, research, coding, design work, and (at times) trial and error.
It most definitely takes TIME. And it is most definitely NOT EASY. (And that is why we get the big bucks…)
Knowing how you want it to look and what you want it to do is not the hard part.
MAKING it look how you want it to look and DO what you want it to do – that is the hard part.
I might be a freak. But I’m not your typing-monkey-freak-on-a-leash. Get a clue.
By the way, I won’t touch jobs like this with a ten-foot-pole. It’s only a Pandora’s box of conflict and heartache and probably very little compensation.
Oy, what we freelancers go through…..
YouTube Videos In WordPress Blogs Disappear if You Edit the Post
I was having the hardest time trying to insert YouTube videos into my blog up until recently. I would type the post, and then switch over to the “Code” tab and insert the YouTube code, then save the post and all was fine. But if I wanted to edit the text of my post, as I almost always do, the video would always disappear from the post after making my changes. I knew I had put it there; I remember inserting the code! But where did it go?
Then I remembered that, for some reason, WordPress tends to think it “knows better” than you do when it comes to code! I was fighting with it a few weeks ago because it kept removing the line breaks I was adding in the “Code” section! And what I had figured out was that, if you add or change something to the “Visual” tab AFTER changing or inserting something in the “Code” tab, you are likely to lose some of the Code changes.
Why does it do this? I don’t really know. WordPress is genius, I do admit that. And what it knows about code could blow me out of the water any day, I am sure. But sometimes I DO want to be able to add an extra line break here and there or insert a YouTube video or something. I do believe this is a true glitch that needs to be fixed.
Anyway, while I don’t know why it does this, I did figure out a workaround for it. Just make your code changes the very last thing you do before you hit “publish.” This sounds simple, but it can be kind of a pain sometimes.
The greatest difficulty I’ve come across in working around this glitch is mainly one of inconvenience. Say you made a blog post yesterday and inserted a video. Then today you notice a typo in your post and want to fix it. Unless you saved the embed code from YouTube in a text file on your hard drive or something, you’re going to have to go back to YouTube and get the code again and come back to WordPress so that you can add the code to the Code tab again after making your editorial changes on the Visual tab.
If you have any questions about inserting a YouTube video into a WordPress blog entry, just use the contact form (link is over on the left) to contact me. I’ll help as much as I can!
Workaholic and Insomniac is Not a Good Combination
Filed under: Art, Bizarre, blogging, just life, Web Design, Word Press
Waiting to hear back from fellow bloggers – and it’s after 1o p.m. central. Any NORMAL person would realize that work has stopped for the day and no answer will be forthcoming until TOMORROW. But not me….
I don’t stop. Someday, sometime, maybe I’ll take a vacation. But not now… there is too much going on! Some of my sites:
and many more
See SherryDedman.com for my portfolio of designed sites for other people.
Or see my Content Producer’s Page on Associated Content for copy writing, articles, research papers, commentary, etc.
No, as a matter of fact, I don’t sleep……
Tips To Make Your WordPress Upgrade A Bit Smoother
This is what it feels like when your upgrade fails!
When you have WordPress installed on your server already, and a new version comes out, there are pretty easy, intuitive instructions for implementing the upgrade. The instructions basically consist of deleting the old WordPress application off the server and uploading the new one and going through the extremely short, easy “install” process afterwards.
They also give you the nice tip, “If you’ve tweaked any of your themes, be sure to back them up before deleting them off your server, so you can put them back up after the upgrade.” Sure! No problem! Thanks for the tip; I’ll do that!
And I did do that (last night). But there are a couple of tips they didn’t offer that I really could have used. Mainly because I trusted the process a bit too much and didnt’ think it through. But still, it would have been nice to have done a few certain things to make my evening a lot less frustrating.
First, don’t just back up the changes you made to your themes. Back up your wp-config file with your server information on it. Otherwise you have to log into your server account and track down the database name and the username and password you set up for that db.
Next, if you usually tell your admin log-in for WordPress to “remember me,” and thus might have forgotten your password because you haven’t been using it regularly, take care of that while you still have admin access before the upgrade.
Go in and change your password to something new and write it down. Because once you delete the old application and install the new one, you’re going to need to sign in. It won’t “remember” you after an upgrade. And that blank username and password field can look very daunting. Especially if you used a now-defunct e-mail address when you originally signed up, like I did. And thus could not get your password reset e-mailed to you right away! In fact, you might go in and make sure your e-mail address is up to date as well, while you are at it!
And last but not least, make a note of what theme you were using, the location on the server where you had everything installed originally and the hierarchy of those folders as to how they pertain to your backed up themes and images.
These are all things that would have made my life so much easier, especially because in the middle of all of this I wound up having some technical difficulties as well with my computer. So these preventable problems just made it even worse when the unpreventable problems cropped up.
So, lesson learned. I thought I would pass on these tips to spare others the crying and heartbreak I experienced last night as I went in circles for hours on end to do an upgrade that should have taken 45 minutes at the most!
Inserting A Photo Into A Word Press Blog
Filed under: blogging, just life, Web Design, Word Press
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “baseline” alignment.
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “top” alignment.
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “middle” alignment.
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “bottom” alignment.
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “TextTop” alignment.
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “Absolute Middle” alignment.
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “Absolute Bottom” alignment.
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Don’t mind me. I’m just testing how to insert a photo into a word press blog. I’m going to experiment with alignment with the text and things. Not much to see here beyond a few photos! This is “Left” alignment. Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
Stop removing my line breaks!
