Most year-end awards are for commercial products. But there's some good free stuff out there that's free but worth paying for so it stays around. Read the rest »
WordPress Plugins I Use
With the site redesign I figure it’s a good time to run through the WordPress plugins that I use. Previously I had kept the number of plugins to a minimum, looking for simplicity. Even though I've added some new plugins, I also eliminated some so I'm still at 15 plugins after the site redesign. Here's the 15 plugins I use. Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #54: Vacation is Over Edition
It had to happen sometime, my vacation is ending and it’s back to corporate America on Monday. This blog was silent for a month with barely a peep the month before that but things picked up recently. Recent fun included a new laptop, encryption and some WordPress related changes. Read the rest »
WordPress Caching Plugins
WP Super Cache has long been my “go to” plugin for improving performance of WordPress. But that just changed. There was an update to WP Super Cache recently and I installed it. I had some time and did some testing beyond making sure the site didn’t break and what I found was that the plugin really wasn’t working. Unfortunately I haven’t been completely testing each and every change to the site. If nothing breaks I consider it good although I hadn’t gone so far as to verify pages were being cached. Somewhere in the past it appears the WP Super Cache plugin stopped caching many pages. I can’t say if it was an earlier upgrade to the plugin or if it was something I added/changed that Super Cache couldn’t handle. It wasn’t the latest update as another of my sites that was still on the older plugin had the same problem. This led me to chose two other caching plugins that provide a nice one-two caching punch. Read the rest »
PHP-CURL Library Added to Apache
I was receiving the error "Call to undefined function curl_init()" when I tried to use the Twitter Tools plugin with the newly required OAuth authentication. The solution required a new PHP module but was easy to set up. Read the rest »
Favorite WordPress Plugins: WP Super Cache
There’s a few WordPress plugins that I just can’t live without. I like (and need) them so much that I’ve contributed to the plugin author to encourage them to keep developing the plugin. There’s only a few of these and the first I’ll write about is WP Super Cache. As the name implies it’s a caching plugin for WordPress. The plugin setup may be a little more complicated than other plugins you’ve installed. This depends on the security settings of your webhost. The included readme, along with the website does [...] Read the rest »
Fixing Plugin Auto-Update in WordPress 2.7.1
As much as I like screwing around with software, I spent some time this weekend looking into ways to spend less time maintaining my WordPress installs. WordPress has had the ability to automatically update plugins for awhile but it’s never worked for me. Whenever I tried to do a plug-in update I’d get prompted to enter a ftp account and password. This isn’t something I want to do (keys to the kingdom in an unencrypted webpage) but I figured security and file permissions were a place to start. Long story [...] Read the rest »
Preparing For WordPress 2.5
WordPress 2.5 still hasn’t been released, at least not as I write this, but it is due this week (today actually). [Update: News that it's been postponed a week.] I spent some time on Sunday getting this site ready. Blog Herald published an article with changes theme and plug-in designers should expect. On Friday they published a more general checklist of what to do for a WordPress upgrade. I didn’t do everything that was on the checklist. I did update plug-ins to their latest versions. I also went through and [...] Read the rest »
WordPress 2.3.1 Upgrade & Maintenance Mode Plugin
WordPress 2.3.1 has been out for a little over 2 weeks and I finally got around to upgrading this site. In addition to the WordPress upgrade, five of the plugins I use also had minor updates available so it was a good time to update them. The update includes 22 bug fixes including tagging support for Windows Live Writer and improvements to database queries. I upgraded my test site last weekend and did some testing during the week and didn’t find any issues. This was the first time I used [...] Read the rest »
WordPress Plugins: WordPress.com Stats and Google Analytics
When I redesigned my site at the beginning of June I added two new plugins for collecting site statistics. Both share the ability to exclude logged on site admins so my own site visits are ignored. The first is WordPress.com Stats by Automattic (so sometimes listed as “Automattic Stats”) and the other is Google Analytics by Denis de Bernardy. WordPress.com Stats WordPress.com Stats requires you to have an account at WordPress.com, although you do not need an actual blog there. The Stats are hosted on their servers. Also, you’ll need [...] Read the rest »