Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

WordPress feed not working – fixed

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

I found out my news feed was not working for my WordPress blog news.smartlabsoftware.com.

The feed is supposed to be directed to feedburner. The feedburner feed worked fine. But…

I typed in the feed path: news.smartlabsoftware.com/feed/ and whoa! A 404 not found.

First I blamed the plug-in. Not that.

After some research, I found out there was no .htaccess file in the blog’s root directory. Nor on my copy on my computer. I copied one from another blog site and the feed started working. I used the generic .htaccess that appears when WordPress is installed. I’m surprised WordPress did not recreate it. I’m on WordPress 2.9.

BTW, a nice feed to subscribe to is the FeedMedic alert. It is at the bottom of your home page for feedburner. It alerts you of any feed problems. Nice.

The Secret to Getting a WordPress Blog Claimed on Technorati

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

I tried to get a WordPress blog claimed on Technorati and it failed.

One fix suggestion was to remove the trailing slash from the feed and the blog URL. That did not work.

The next suggestion I tried was making the feeds full text instead of summary. That did not work.

Technorati says in its instructions to add the claim code to an existing post and the crawler will find it. Therein lies the problem.

I added the claim code to an existing article. The article updated but not the feed. I ended up writing a text post with the claim code on a separate line. I made sure I could see the code in the feed, the I claimed it. Successfully, I might add.

BTW, my feed goes to Feedburner which should not make a difference.

Making a Clickable WordPress Header

Monday, April 13th, 2009

How to replace the kubric header image with a better image in WordPress 2.7.1.

1. First I replaced the kubricheader.jpg image with my own. I kept the image dimensions the same (760×200 pixels).

2. In header.php I replace the header div with the following:

<div id="header">
<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>"><div id="headerimg"></div></a>
</div>

This worked very nice. I would rather use a theme but I was in a time crunch.

SEO Slug Documentation Update

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

seo slugs is a useful WordPress plug-in which removes common words such as ‘a’, ‘and’, and ‘but’ automatically from the WordPress permalink. The documentation has not been updated for a year and a half so I decided to do it. I have rewritten the seo slug WordPress documentation for v2.7. The plug-in works fine with WordPress v2.7.

Here is a copy of the updated documentation:

Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.

== Description ==

The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this:

“What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”,

Wordpress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug:

/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings

SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this:

/immediately-higher-rankings

The slug is generated on saving a post (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish. It won’t overwrite an existing slug. You can force a new slug generation by deleting the existing one.

The list of common words is in the seo-slugs.php file and can be added/deleted/modified with a text editor. Use a simple text editor, such as NotePad, so extraneous characters are not added.

== Installation ==

1. Upload ’seo-slugs.php’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. There is no admin screen.

When creating a post, give it a title and press Save Draft. A permalink will be created underneath the title without the common words in it. If you edit the permalink, the plugin will honor your slug and won’t change it even if you add common words.
If you publish instead of saving as a draft, seo-slugs will strip out the unwanted words and create the permalink. Once created, it cannot be changed.

The author, Andrei Mikrukov, gave a link in the original documentation but it does not work any more.

Doug

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Problem

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

On my test blog (fortunately), I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. However, a problem occurred: for an unknown reason, the file editor_plugin.js (in wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wpgallery) would not upload to the server. I invoked vsmon.exe and the Visual Studio editor would try to start. If you don’t have Visual Studio, something else may occur. Anyway, I checked the file for extraneous characters and found none…

BUT I found the first characters were carriage return, line feed. I deleted them (i.e. removed the blank line using notepad), saved the file, and now it would upload.

In checking other .js files, they had all the whitespace stripped out. This one was apparently forgotten. I’m not sure why the fix I did worked, but it did. I tried Expression Web 2, Filezilla, and 1and1 ftp. All gave the same problem.

Doug

An Odd WordPress 2.6.3 Bug

Friday, October 31st, 2008

I recently changed themes of my investing blog and noticed the sidebar was scrambled. After a bit of digging, I found out the WP text widget was inserting one div and two /div tags. After I added a div tag as the first line in the text of the text widget, things were fine. Hopefully, the great WP crew will fix this. I’m not sure if this bug existed before v2.6.3.

Doug

Automatic WordPress Backup

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

This blog was updated automatically using the automatic WordPress upgrade to version 2.5 from version 2.3.3. I have read others have had varied success with the process. I will not go over the details of installation because it is readily available on the website.

One of the plug-ins I use did not get restarted which was easily done manually. Note the wp-content directory is not upgraded so any themes or plug-ins are not damaged.

One thing AWU does not do is update your local copy. Only the server copy is upgraded. Your local copy can be easily updated by copying the updated files from the server to the local drive.

Having success with 3 upgraded blogs, I will use this plug-in in the future.

Backing up WordPress Blog Database

Saturday, February 24th, 2007

I am all for saving time. In the old days backing up a WordPress blog meant either using phpAdmin to back up the database or manually logging into each blog and using a backup plug-in.

No more.

Starting with WordPress 2.0 the bundled backup program was taken out and made a separate plug-in. Version 2.0 of the WordPress database backup plug-in takes advantage of WordPress cron program and will email a backup on a regular basis. I use once a week, though the granularity can be once an hour.

Once installed, go into Manage then Backup. On the bottom of the page the time frequency of the backup and the email address is set. Note if you choose once a week, the weekly backups are on the day you hit submit. Since I like getting backups on Saturday I started all my backups on a Saturday.

Note this only backs up the WordPress database; not the WordPress source code.

admin Doug

WordPress 2.1.1 Upgrade

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

WordPress released a new version 2.1.1 which is mostly bugfixes and security fixes. Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. Here is the file diffs between v2.1 and v2.1.1. (No guarantee comes with this). Download WordPress 2.1.1 upgrade diff. Just overwrite the existing files, upload them, then run the upgrade program.

Read about the upgrade in depth on the WordPress blog.

Doug

Close Comments to Reduce Spam

Friday, January 19th, 2007

One of the banes of blogging is spam comments. Nearly every blogger gets them. One way to reduce comment spam is to turn off accepting comments on older posts. Each blog host will have a different way to do this…if it is possible. Check with your host to see how.

Generally trackbacks are a nuisance since they do not require a login to implement. The poor moderator or comment filter must decide whether these are legitimate or not.

Since shutting off accepting comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks before a specific date is not built-in, WordPress has a comment timeout plug-in that does the job.

Doug