Posted by Louise on Aug 2, 2009 in
Holiday,
Wordpress I’m almost into my second week of my holiday in La Palma. I am really enjoying the peace and quiet. I am on my 3rd book and I only brought 4.
The big news here in La Palma is that there are forest fires. As the island is not too big they are quite close, but thankfully the wind is blowing them away from me. More details on the holiday blog.
I’ve been investigating trackbacks and pingbacks tonight. Thanks to this blog for helping me figure them out. Hopefully after adding that link to the holiday blog that’ll be a ping back. I’ll have to see what happens.
Right, back to reading, sleeping and drinking the local rosé wine. Life is hard :-) It will be when I get back, got a heck of a lot to do.
Tags: blogging, holidays, Wordpress
Now I’ve actually uploaded the wp-mail.php file this should post at exactly midnight. Another funny thing was that the server time was out. Not by an hour due to BST/GMT/CET but by about 8 minutes. You know I thought it was strange that it was possible to reply to an email before it had actually arrived. Sorted that too. You’d think that it was the easiest thing in the world to keep a computer at the correct time, but it isn’t.
Tags: Technical, Wordpress
I’ve been having problems posting images in WP. They when I insert them the dialogue box says “crunching” and then not much else happens. Today however I did manage to upload an image. By pure coincidence it was only 69.7 kB in size. I did think deep down that this was the problem. I have previously searched everywhere but no one is saying what the maximum file size for upload in a post is. I’ve done a bit of experimentation and here are my results.
72 pxi, Photoshop Save for Web high (60%) 70.8 kB jpg
300pxi Photoshop save for web High (60%) 201 KB jpg width 1000 px
300 pxi Photoshop save for web High (60%) 327 kB jpg width 1500 px
300pxi Photoshop save for web High (60%) 485 kB jpg width 2000 pi
All these have uploaded without any problems. The last one I tried was 896 KB so I wonder if the max is 500 KB. One last go to check…
300 pxi Photoshop save for web High (60%) 578 KB jpg
Nope, I guess it is not 500 KB. This is probably getting a little large anyway and 500 KB is probably a good size to aim for. Now, wonder if I can set up some sort of image macro to do this automoatically?
Tags: Images, Wordpress
Posted by Louise on Jan 23, 2009 in
Technical Finally this afternoon all my email addresses were working. Who needs a managed server? Actually I take that back. There is no way I could ever learn enough to manage a server to make money. I can set up email addresses now and Wordpress blogs but that is definitely it, and I am still on the lookout for anyone who really knows what they are doing with servers, just in case ours ever gets a problem. The last thing I had to set up/amend/correct/modify was the MX record. The reason I was getting a “relay access denied” error in the bounced email was because there were several very strange MX records. Turns out that I couldn’t amend these in Plesk but had to do this in the SSC. Part of the problem was that I didn’t know what the LeaseWeb SSC was - Self Service Center - duh. Thankfully I figured it out before I had to send a very embarrassing email to the support guys.
I spent most of yesterday faffing about with themes and plugins for this blog and uselesscupid.com. I’ve installed some stonking ones on UselessCupid. It now has a UK weather plugin courtesy of Clive. The feed comes direct from the BBC RSS weather feed for Norwich. The only thing that is missing is little weather icons to go with the forecast. Unfortunately the BBC don’t publish the icons in the RSS feed. One day I might find out how to add them. I know it is possible because other weather plugins have them.
I also installed an embedded media player (Embedded Video) into UselessCupid. I’m not 100% convinced it is the best one but it seems to be doing the job. On this site I use CoolPlayer. I didn’t think it was working with WP 2.7 but now I know to look for it under WP settings it might just work. More testing needed.
The final plugin I went for is Contact Form 7. This sets up a really simple form on your WP blog. I don’t like having mailto tags on my websites because of the spam they generate and Contact Form 7 solves that problem because of course my email address is server side not client side (do I sound as though I know what I am talking about?).
Plugins area great but they do take a long time to research, at least they take me a long time because I have to make sure I get just the right one first time. The plugin directory on the Wordpress site is great but there are so many there. The next one ito research is a gallery one. I’ll let you know when I find the perfect one.
Tags: server, Technical, Wordpress
I’ve been looking for cool plugins for Wordpress for a few days now. I have of course updated and uploaded Mobile WP by Alex King. This plugin is great for mobile users (phone, PDA and that thing by Apple). This plugin is so great I actually PayPal’d a donation to Alex when I first found it. What it does is that when someone vistits your WP blog on their mobile device it automatically shows a text only version. Great if you are in a non-3G area. I think you can post with it too. I haven’t used it for that because when I am away from my wired (as opposed to bluetooth) keyboard I blog by email. Just for the record, Mobile WP does work with Wordpress 2.3.
My next plugin to try is Cool Player. This plugin embeds video into your blog. I couldn’t find any updates for it though…
Tags: mobile tech, plugins, Wordpress
Posted by Louise on Dec 27, 2008 in
Technical What do you think of the new Wordpress theme? I found it last night, well, the early hours of this morning really. I saw it and loved it! It is designed by Geek With Laptop. I’ve had to make one or two changes though. The original theme had a picture of an iphone and I couldn’t have one of those on my blog. With a little bit of creative Photoshopping I changed it to my n95. I also added the PDA and changed the coin to a Scottish £1. I added some dropped shadows to make it a little more alive. I also had to alter the line spacing of the tabs above in the styles sheet to 1 instead of 3.5. 3.5 looked well weird if the page titles were longer than one line.
I am still using Wordpress 2.3 which is so out of date. 2.7 has been released and I am desperate to upgrade. Only problem is that I might be changing server at some point soon and I don’t want to have to do it all twice. I also can’t find the login details of the current server to do a database back up! This is the sort of thing that I berate Nick for.
After the server move and Wordpress upgrade I am going to install a photo gallery plug in. I have been searching around for a good one and think I have found one designed by Alex Rabe called NextGEN Gallery. It is on the Wordpress plugin page. It works with WP 2.7 so it is not really worth while trying to get it to work on my version. It looks really, really cool and I think will do everything I want… upload pictures and create thumbnails and do cool stuff.
Tags: Images, Technical, Wordpress
