WordPress Warning: Undefined variable $cpage in /home2/pixelwit/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/fvariant2/header.php on line 11

Lemons to Lemonade – Automatic Upgrade

September 04th 2008 Posted to Site Development

lemons
photo credit: ms.Tea

After the fiasco with The Ignoramus, I briefly considered refunding his money since he was so disappointed about the Improved PageFlip not documenting the super-secret (i.e. known to everyone but him) process of resizing the stage. Fortunately I quickly came to my senses and decided to do something much more satisfying and give the money to a worthy cause.

WordPress is known for it’s rapid rate of upgrade releases and keeping up with all of the changes used to be a real pain in the butt until WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin came along. The WPAU plugin presents a series of links to painlessly guide you through the upgrade process and handles all of the backing-up, downloading, deactivating and reactivating for you. Download the plugin, install it like any other WordPress plugin, read the FAQ and you’ll be upgrading in no time. Sweet clean and neat.

Thanks guys, I know $12.50 isn’t a lot but maybe it’ll help get that “rollback” feature into future versions.

Comments(0)

Better Feeds Plugin for WordPress

June 30th 2008 Posted to Site Development

When I talked about customizing the length of your WordPress feed I mentioned that I was using the More Feed Excerpt plugin in an effort to force WordPress to split RSS feeds at the “more” tag. After talking to the developer of the More Feed Excerpt plugin, George Notaras, I decided to take his advice and give version 1.99 of Ozh’ Better Feed plugin a try.

At that time it would be fair to say the Better Feed plugin was quite rough or “unpolished” at the very least. All of the features worked but the lack of an administrative interface forced you to dig deep into the PHP code to edit variables and template text. The plugin included a function to put related Categories in the RSS feed’s footer but I had to cobble together my own function to display a list of related Tags.

BUT… fortunately for you version 2.0 of the Better Feed plugin has just been released and it provides a great new admin interface and a Related Tags feature …
Read More

Comments(14)

Comment Policy, Do You Need One?

June 18th 2008 Posted to Site Development

After writing 2 posts about the Ajax Edit Comments WordPress plugin, and receiving an e-mail from a reader who was wondering why I was editing comments, I thought it was salient point in time to develop a comment policy for PixelWit.com. But where should I begin?

The first thing I did was read a bunch of articles about blog comment policies like:

Then I ‘perused’ (the literal sense of the word, look it up if you must) approximately a dozen comment policy examples like these …
Read More

Comments(0)

Ajax Edit Comments, New Features Added

June 10th 2008 Posted to Site Development

A few days ago I reviewed Ajax Edit Comments for WordPress and I really liked what I saw. Since that time the plugin developer Ronald Huereca has stopped by, listened to what people had to say, left a comment explaining his choices, and then promptly released his next version for evaluation. The new Ajax Edit Comments 2.1 Pre-Release Candidate is out and ready to be tested.

If you’re a WordPress blogger, I highly recommend installing this plugin to ease and simplify comment editing for both site administrators and site visitors. Plus if you try AEC RC 2.1 right now, there’s a pretty good chance that your reasonable feature request will make it into the next version of the plugin.

Give it a try, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Comments(4)

Ajax Edit Comments, WordPress Plugin Review

June 05th 2008 Posted to Site Development

I recently installed the WordPress Ajax Edit Comments plugin and I have to tell you that I’m quite impressed with Ronald Huereca’s work. The Ajax Edit Comments (AEC) plugin makes editing comments super simple for site visitors and administrators.

Setting up the AEC plugin is a breeze thanks to a clean administration interface featuring a wide variety of well explained options. Once installed, WordPress administrators who log into the Comments Administration section will see a new “Edit” link next to every comment (red highlight added for emphasis):

Ajax Edit Comments Admin Interface

Pressing the “Edit” link brings up an Ajax window like the one below: …
Read More

Comments(7)

RSS Feed Length, Partial or Full?

June 03rd 2008 Posted to Site Development

[poll id=”18″]

According to my FeedStats plugin, PixelWit.com’s RSS feeds are accessed an average of 194 times a day. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing this translates to approximately 4 human readers and about 190 spambots. 😉

If you happen to be one of my few human RSS subscribers you might have noticed a new change in my RSS feed’s format. This is due to a recent WordPress upgrade which forces RSS feed publishers to choose between either truncating all articles at a set number of words or publishing the entire article’s text. As you may guess, I’m not particularly fond of either option.

Truncating all feeds at a predetermined word count can lead to awkward line breaks which abruptly halt sentences before the reader even has a chance to …
Read More