WordPress 2.3
Is out. Amongst other things, it adds tagging support and update notifications. Anybody using Ultimate Tag Warrior can import tags to the new (much faster) system (and should disable UTW before upgrading), but expect themes to break. I've had to remove 'related posts', and the tags page is a bit sparse. I expect new plugins in the next few days will fix these issues.
Space saving
With some pointers from the helpdesk and a few wandering-in-the-dark bash commands via putty, I finally tracked down what was taking up all the space on my webserver. The Flickr Photo Album plugin was using 890mb with its cache. As great as that plugin is, it's going to have to go. There's no way to disable caching of photos from both my account and the groups I belong to, and I can't afford to have all that space taken up. I have also discovered that "rm -r" is roughly a billion times faster than deleting something via SFTP. I'm going to have to learn this linux thing one day.
Speeding up WordPress
Just to recommend Jerome's Query Diagnostics plugin for WordPress, which once enabled spits out a list of all the database queries used by a page, along with the time they took to complete. This afternoon I found that one plugin was doubling the processing time, and removing that has made the whole site snappier. I was trying to do this by looking at mysql logs, but it seems such things don't really exist on a per-user basis, so anybody sharing a server with x number of others is going to struggle to diagnose connection problems. People recommend other plugins, but JQD was the only one that worked for me.
Tweetings
I'm still enjoying using Twitter, by the way. The sidebar on the right-hand side might not last if it keeps stalling the blog whenever Twitter has a strop, mind.
I've set up Twessenger, which updates MSN's 'personal' messages with your latest Tweet. It works, although I seem to have to manually enable it every time I restart. Hopefully there'll be a Messenger Plus script with similar functionality before long.
I'm using Alex King's Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress, which has various features including hourly backups of tweets, non-stalling display in the sidebar etc.. It also has an option to post an automatic Tweet whenever I create a new blog post. I'm in two minds about this. I like the idea, but I feel like it must be annoy to continually receive such messages via SMS. Right now I'm writing a bunch of posts now and have disabled it. Still, the implementation is great.
In other news, why can't I ever type implementation without pausing?
Two useful plugins for the WordPress visual editor
I think they're handy, anyway:
- Enable Firefox spell checking in the Visual editor
- Add a toggle switch for advanced features in the Visual editor (try shift-v in IE or alt-shift-v in Firefox to do it manually). The extra toolbar has 'paste plain text' and 'remove formatting' buttons, which will help with a couple of the VE's annoyances.
Enough procrastinating, Andrew. Back to work.
Two Useful Plugins
A couple of WordPress plugins I've found very useful recently:
The Flickr Album plugin creates a very attractive page displaying photos from a Flickr account, but I actually think its additional feature of adding photos to the Write page for easy insertion into posts is more impressive. It offers you the full range of Flickr's resized images, too. I'm forever swapping between Flickr's photo pages and blog entries, copying and pasting the relevant HTML, and this saves a fair bit of time.
Also, Edit n Place allows editing of posts directly from the blog, skipping the admin interface. It actually works without making a horrible mess, unlike similar plugins I've used before. It interrupts the layout slightly for logged-in administrators, but this can be tweaked by editing the plugin directly (you may also take this opportunity to replace 'n' with 'in', if you're anal like me 
). The only problem I've found is that the hidden-to-non-administrators-link seems to be added to trackbacks, but for me its usefulness outweighs that issue. It's rare that nothing needs fixing / changing after I've hit 'Publish'.
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
