13 posts tagged “wordpress”

Wow, Vox took 75 minutes to come up with the compose screen [and it took an extra 120 for it to come up again because I had a tiny edit to make]. I had wanted to send a private, friends-only post tonight, but after clicking ‘Create’ once every few minutes and fiddling around with cookies, the inspiration has well passed. Looks like we only had this site back for three days before it died again, and no one at Vox seems to give a damn.
   I’d love to insert the earlier screen shot I took of the empty compose screen, but according to Vox right now, I have nothing in my photo library.
   Once upon a time, whenever Blogger fell down, I came here, because it was more stable. Now, Blogger is more reliable, though it is deleting even legitimate blogs—I’ve been battling them since July when they began blocking my friend Vincent Wright’s blog. (They have now deleted it, along with four-and-a-half years of work.)
   So, if anyone has suggestions for a Vox alternative, I’m more open to hearing it than I ever did. I know I can set up a Wordpress blog, but even that platform is buggy as heck and consumes more and more memory with each incarnation. (Again, I’d love to show you a screen shot of one of the bugs, but see above.) And I’d need a lot of plug-ins to get the sites running the way I want.
   Another down side is that I have enough URLs already, and introducing yet another one so friends can keep up with my meanderings doesn’t sit well with me.
   Also, I’ve come to like the community we have here—Linda-Joy, Jaklumen, Robin, M., Jenn, and the many others—and the groups I have built up.
   Am I really asking that much when I just want the technology to function as the makers claim?
   But right now, importing all my Blogger posts at jackyan.com/blog into Wordpress, as well as whatever I can from Vox, might not be a bad idea, if I had the time.

PS.: As the compose screen took 75, then 120, minutes to come up today (once to compose, once to edit), I am seriously considering giving up on Vox. I am trialling Tumblr right now, so if you miss me here, try me there: jackyan.tumblr.com. (I signed up there a long time ago but only made three posts in January 2008.) Down side: no confidential setting for friends.

I have written to the creator of the WP-Cufón plug-in for Wordpress about this bug, which caused some missing characters at the Lucire website today:

No ligatures in WP-Cufón

According to Mashable, people must upgrade their Wordpress installations as an attack is under way. I believe we only have a couple of sites that would be potentially at risk: Lucire has already been sorted, but the Your Wellington blog is still processing in the background as I type.
   People say how easy this automatic upgrading is, but I have found it very difficult. I have done several of these upgrades now, and this is all I see:

Wordpress upgrading

I have to give props to the developers of the Mimbo skin for Wordpress—it’s a very good one that takes into account the needs of bloggers. Below is one of the sites we’ve been building—it’s not ready for prime-time yet, as it doesn’t have enough entries or contributors at this point. Mimbo needed little customization and we were able to make it look more distinctive than the out-of-the-box version.
   Prior to that, we were trying a German skin called Overstand, which was quite good in appearance, but not as easy to use. That might have been down to the language barrier. Mimbo seems to use the Wordpress features better and from what I could tell of the coding, is more logically structured.

Your Wellington screen shot

You’d think that I learned my lesson the first time I tried to upgrade Wordpress using its innocent little button that read, ‘Upgrade to 2.8.1’. But, I figured, what if I messed up, and the program was OK? I’d feel bad about rubbishing the software, right?
   So tonight I pressed the button again on another blog we are working on.
   I am doing nothing wrong. The program is stuffed. This is all that happens:

The Wordpress upgrade button

PS.: Last time, I let Wordpress run for about 15 minutes before giving up, and this stuffed everything up. This time, I estimate I let Wordpress stay on the blank screen above for around 35 minutes. I then clicked the ‘Dashboard’ button and Wordpress claimed that it had performed the upgrade, and I needed to click one more button to upgrade the database. Surprisingly, that has worked.
   So: this does not take a few minutes as some users claim, and there is certainly no progress bar. The entire process takes over half an hour, during which time one should not touch that particular tab on one’s browser. After that is done (you won’t know when: you’ll have to guess, but that is better than reading erroneous instructions), click ‘Dashboard’.
   For those who are having issues, please give the above a try. However, I can’t believe one has to rely on guesswork and I still reckon Wordpress should have tested its update program a lot more.

Last week, we upgraded to Wordpress 2·8. Admittedly, this was an improvement over the previous 2·6. and it restored my faith a little in computing. (Wordpress 2·6 was progressively buggier by the week.)
   Given that 2·8 worked quite well, I pressed, today, the ‘Upgrade to 2·8·1’ button on the Wordpress desktop today. Bad idea.
   After a long wait with the words ‘Reading lucire.com’ at the bottom of the browser in the status bar and nothing else happening, I opened up other web windows to find out how long this should take. Most users agreed this should take a minute, not 10 to 15. Eventually, since Firefox reported that it was ‘Reading’ and not ‘Writing’, I stopped the process. Another bad idea.
   This corrupted the entire set-up which meant I had to install the entire Wordpress package from scratch. Luckily, our database was left intact. However, the dashboard was unusable, with all its CSS specifications gone, looking like a second-rate website from the early 1990s. Reloads could not restore it.
   After the reinstallation, the dashboard was still munted, despite reloads. I ran the install.php line as Wordpress’s manual instructed. This is a lesson I never learn. Never, ever trust the manual, especially when computers are concerned.
   I got the message, ‘You appear to have already installed WordPress. To reinstall please clear your old database tables first.’
   If you Google this error message, you get all sorts of recommendations about deleting PHP tables and whatnot. Basically, it is a serious error. I was already worried, and instinctively I knew that deleting things was a bad idea.
   Real solution in layman’s language: go to the dashboard. Reload it. Problem solved. No deleting PHP tables, going into PHPMyAdmin, etc., necessary.
   Hopefully, the above will save someone some grief because the innocent upgrade button does not work as it says and it certainly does not take a minute.
   Suggestions to Wordpress: give us some sort of status bar to tell us how far the upgrading process has gone. Or, don’t try to be clever with these buttons when I would have saved myself time and worry doing it the hard way.

Here are some of the everyday things that happen to me when using Wordpress, yet I can find no mention of these errors. Any other blogger experiencing these? I have experienced this regularly in XP and Vista, but only recently. It’s either a Wordpress bug, a PHP bug on our server, or a Firefox bug. (Of the three, Firefox has changed; the others have not, to my knowledge.)
   1. The weird link glitch. No matter what I click on, Wordpress refuses to go to that particular page. So if I clicked ‘Manage’, Wordpress clicks through to every page but the one I requested. It might go to the dashboard, the comments, or, most regularly yesterday, the create-post page.
   2. The page appearing inside random boxes glitch. For no apparent reason, entire pages load into boxes where they aren’t supposed to go. This may happen to any box on any page in Wordpress. Here is me accessing one of our blog posts at Lucire at random to demonstrate:

Wordpress menu glitch 1

Wordpress menu glitch 2

   3. The oversized suggestion box glitch. This one happens most of all, of the ones I blog about here. As I enter tags, a box appears below the entry field. It can wind up dominating the entire screen, making it impossible to do any further work down the page:

More Wordpress going mental

   4. The dashboard inside the dashboard glitch. This is related to (2) and, as you can see from this screen shot, it can happen in more than one window. The dashboard reloads inside boxes on the dashboard page. If you look closely, the two dashboards look different, so even the glitch itself does not behave consistently!

Dashboards inside dashboard

   5. The blank or nearly blank page glitch. Either I get a page with nothing on it, or a lone zero, or, bizarrely even by my standards, a row of buttons. The first two might happen on loading any page in Wordpress. The last one happened three times just because I scrolled a blog-post page. The screen went blank and all I had left was this:

Scroll in Wordpress, get a page of buttons

   I refuse to believe I am the only person on the planet which this happens to, but based on a Google search, I am. Even members of my own team do not come across these problems.
   I like Wordpress, but like a lot of programs, it seems to get buggier with each new iteration—unless Firefox or PHP are to blame for all of these issues.

Just got this in from Mike Corso at Cool Site of the Day.

A recent Brazilian YouTube sex scandal threatened to close down every WordPress blog around the world.
   Did you hear about it? It's already called “YouTube Gate”—apparently a spicy sex scene was posted on YouTube and someone discussed it on a WordPress-hosted blog.
   The problem is the Brazillian courts placed a ban on viewing the IP address of the entire WordPress website …
   … And that means potentially thousands of bloggers can't have their content shown in their country.
   Even worse, this isn't the first time a violation like this closed down an entire network of blogs.
   But the bottom line is this should be a wakeup call for those who rely on hosted blogs (like WordPress) to tweak their strategy and avoid getting their own blogs banned.
   The good news is the fix is simple … just host WordPress on your own server (rather than hosting it on the WordPress site).
   Getting WordPress installed on your own site is now a snap … just take advantage of John Saya's FREE WordPress autoinstaller.

http://www.cnotes.com/r/wordpress.html

Any questions, shoot me an e-mail.

Mike Corso
Cool Site of the Day

   This is a bit disturbing. Global Voices has more info. One of the quotations indicates a million Brazilian bloggers will be affected.
   I am not sure if a Brazilian judgement should have an effect on blogs like this, penalizing those in Brazil who are using wordpress.com. Those who didn’t feature the home-made porn on their blogs—as in the overwhelming majority of Wordpress users—should not pay the price for the handful that did. (And surely non-Wordpress blogs are affected, too?)
   Surely a simple deletion of the offending URLs would suffice?
   And this desire to post someone’s home sex video on to their own blogs—well, it ain’t my scene. Stick it on to YouPorn and let the perverts all go to the same place, and keep it off the blogosphere!

[Cross-posted] One glitch aside (in the notes below) I think we might be ready for prime-time—this is the public announcement (rather than the private one sent to Voxers earlier). Lucire has a blog—after I resisted it for years. The idea: to write about some behind-the-scenes stuff. I see no reason about having any “mystique” behind what we do. We work—hard.
   Some of you in the marketing world will know that I did not think much of blogs originally. And that led to my refusal to go with a Lucire blog—after all, the forum was pretty successful from 2002 to 2005 before our hard drive conked out in 2006 and a lot of the data disappeared (they’re buried on the server somewhere, I am told by the team).
   But the world has moved on, too, since 2005, and putting the occasional op-ed in blog form doesn’t seem too bad an idea. As long as it contributes to the community and allows us to talk to our readers, why not?
   It’s been repeated in the first post of the new blog, where Lucire ‘Insider’—the name comes from the print edition, though I did toy with ‘Oracle’—is stated to complement the Forum and Facebook group.
   What I am wondering is how long my MySpace opposition will hold out, now that I am eating humble pie on this issue. As mentioned, the idea of a JY&A Media publication appearing on a Murdoch Press site feels funny.

Note to Maureen: we weren’t able to fix that earlier glitch you mentioned as nothing in the coding shows up (especially harder since it can’t be replicated on our computers), though there are some oddities (the Digg.com, Del.icio.us, etc. links only show on some posts, and there is no logical reason for them being “selective”). But who said computer programs were logical?! One entry aside, only a few dozen people are visiting the blog at the moment as we haven’t exactly made it obvious, so maybe with a bigger sample we might be able to track down the error. Please do bear with us!
   If anyone else cannot see parts of the Lucire ‘Insider’ comment form, viz. if the name, email and blog fields disappear, please send me a comment here. Especially if you have theories on why this happens!—JY

Now with two blogs under Wordpress, I have to say it’s OK, but it’s not that big a leap over Blogger. I still prefer Blogger for its HTML controls and there is another reason: Blogger blogs seem to get picked up in Google Blog Search more quickly. They may ping more accurately, or perhaps Google has a natural bias toward a company it owns. Now that the speed of Blogger has been sorted and there is an auto-save, my two main beefs with the service have been solved.
   Still, I can’t say I miss the standard Blogger comment forms and the Wordpress interface is a Doozie. (Or is that Duesie or Düsie?) Being able to group posts by tags and having the whole Wordpress program on our server are boons.
   Let’s say I have no one preference yet, but that Wordpress is not problem-free. But if Blogger ever upgrades again and goofs it as it did last time, I am now skilled enough on Wordpress to do the basics.