Beware of Wordpress 2.6. I just upgraded and lost all my categories. If you are adventurous, I would suggest backing up your database before proceeding.
Author Archive for Smitty
Mobile blogging just got better, the Wordpress app was just made available on iTunes. A full review will be posted in the near future after some testing.
Wordpress 2.6 has been released. Time to upgrade.
Cool new features
- Post Versioning
- Press This button for easy blogging
- Captioning for images
- Live preview of themes, before committing
- Google Gears integration
- Word count
- Gallery sorting, with drag and drop
- Plugin interface update
- New Avatar options
- Shift click to select multiple options
I’m a Computer Programmer by day and Photographer by night. I used to live, breath and eat photography in college and I’m still a active shooter. Over the years I’ve given several goes at having a photo blog and haven’t had a lot of success. One of the major reasons is because it always ended up being very time consuming to select, edit upload, post and link in the photo. Well I am here today to tell you there is an easier way, the way I know embrace.
The solution is to use Flickr. It’s that simple. Get yourself an account, they have free version and for pay version. I shelled out the extra cash for a pro account which allows me unlimited space. It’s very easy to become familiar with Flickr in a short amount of time. It’s simple to upload and organize your photos, something that is very cumbersome in a normal blog setting.
So now you have some photos posted to Flickr and you want to embed them in your blog. Login to Flickr and browse to the photo you want to blog. Above the photo will be a “Blog This” icon, click it to walk through the blogging process. The first time you try blogging a photo, it will walk you through attaching a blog to flickr. You’ll need to know your blog address (url), and user name & password. You can then give your post a title and some text to accompany the photo.
All said and done, I think this is the simpliest work flow for having a photoblog.
Benefits in short… Flickr will…
- Host your images and freeing up space on your web server.
- Manage your images with an amazing GUI.
- Allow you to resize them on the web.
- Provide you a good back up in-case of some disaster, heaven forbid.
- Make it easier for you to photo blog easier and faster.
If you are uploading many photos (more than 1) to Flickr, I would suggest a third party uploader. They are readily avaialble on the internet. I use JUploader for the Mac.
Lastly, Flickr has a great FAQ page if you run into any hick-ups.
I completed my first install of Wordpress 2.5 this past week and much to my amazement, I had a small problem. Everything went fine, untill I tried to upload a file using the new AJAX uploader. I looked at all the permissions and after a quick Google Search, I found that I needed to add the following line to my .htaccess in my root folder of my Wordpress install.
This is what I added.
<ifmodule mod_security.c>
<files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</files>
</ifmodule>
Spring is here, it might not be exactly warm right now here in Michigan but, nonetheless it is spring. With that said, this is a good time to spring clean your blog.
I would suggest the following…
Make sure you are up to date on your…
- Wordpress Version
- Plugin Versions
- Theme Version
Over time software and themes will be updated to fix vulnerabilities.
You could also…
- Clean up your categories and tags.
- Revise your static pages to be current.
- You might also think about altering or changing your theme to keep it fresh.
- Filter through your comment spam and possible start using a plugin like Askimet.
- Start submitting your entries to sites like Digg and Delicious to help in marketing.
- Lastly, think about your readers. Email several and thank them for reading your blog.
So if you are like me you are going in a million directions at once. I’m trying to be better about simplifying my life. I’m getting better with help from sites like LifeHacker and ZenHabits.
Here are a few of my tips for making blogging easier and efficient.
- Keep it short - Blog posts don’t have to be long to be effective. I find my self skipping the long blog posts when they show up in my feed reader.
- Keep it regular - Either once a day, once a week, or when the spirit moves you. Make sure to pick a schedule that fits your schedule. Start small like once a week and build it to maybe every other day.
- Blog during off times - For me this is during lunch, while I’m making dinner, or while my wife is watching some snoozer of a chick flick. If you have a cool iPhone you could blog while waiting at the doctor or waiting somewhere.
- Passionate Blogging - Make sure you are blogging stuff you are interested in, otherwise you end up falling off the bandwagon. If you are passionate about your subject matter you will be more likely to make time for blogging.
If you have some more tips drop them in the comments, we’d love to here them.
If you haven’t heard Wordpress 2.5 is around the corner according to Matt.
Highlights:
- Customizable Dash Board
- Multi File Upload
- Built in Galleries
- One Click Plugin Upgrades
- Tag Management
- Built in Gravatars
- Text Feeds
- Faster Loads
Cool ah? Can’t wait.
One of the things you will want to do once you get your WordPress Mu installed is to offer up your users a variety of templates to choose from.
WordPress Mu boasts as being able to support all themes that work on a normal install of WordPress. That works in theory, but doesn’t work in real life.
Tip: Use one of the more popular themes, it is more likely to work with WordPress Mu.
There are several big names using various versions of WordPress Mu. I try to use themes that they use, I figure that they have invested sometime to determine which themes work well and don’t work well. Below is a list of themes that I’ve compiled that I would consider using in my WordPress Mu installs.
Themes
- 72 Class
- Almost Spring
- Ambiru
- anarchy
- Andreas04
- Andreas09
- Anubis
- Banana Smoothie
- Batavia 1.5
- Benevolence
- Black-LetterHead
- Blix
- Bluebird
- Blue Green
- Blue Moon
- Blue Zinfandel Enhanced
- Borderline Chaos
- ChaosTheory
- ChaoticSoul
- Citris IslandWP
- CleanTidy
- CommentPress
- Connections
- Contempt
- Copyblogger
- Cordobo Green Park
- Crop Circles
- Cutline
- Daisy Rae Gemini
- DayDream
- Deep Blue
- Deichnetz
- Digg 3 Column
- Dignity
- Dixie Belle
- Dusk
- Emire
- Fadtastic
- Falling Dreams
- Fauna
- Fjords04
- Fleur De Lys
- Flex
- Flower Power
- Framefake Theme
- Fresh Bananas
- Freshy
- Garland
- GenkiTheme
- Gentle Calm
- Girl in Green
- GloriousDay
- GlossyBlue
- Greenday
- Greenery
- Green Marinee
- Gridlock
- Hemingway
- Iceburgg
- Jakarta
- Jentri
- K2
- K2-lite
- Kubrick
- LetoPrime
- LetterHead
- Light
- Mandigo
- man~ja
- MistyLook
- Neat!
- Neo-Sapien
- Newsportal
- Nikynik BlueMU
- Northern-Web-Coders
- Ocadia
- Ocean Mist
- OceanWide
- Pinky-Kupy
- Primitivo
- Pool
- PressRow
- Quadruple Blue
- Quentin
- RadMod
- Reaching Darkness
- Redoable
- Redoable Lite
- Regulus
- Rounded
- RoundedFlow
- Rubric
- Sandbox
- Sandbox-10
- Sapphire
- SeaShore
- Shocking Blue Green
- Silver is the New Black
- Simpla
- Simplr
- Solipus
- Sunburn
- Supposedly Clean
- Suhsweet
- sumenep
- Stean
- StrippedPlus
- Sweet Blossoms
- Tarski
- TerraFirma
- Trevilian Way
- The Journalist
- Thirteen
- Thoughts
- Toni
- Treba
- Twenty-eight Thirteen
- Twilight
- Unsleepable
- Vermilion Christmas
- veryplaintext
- Vertigo
- Vistered Little
- WaterWilly
- White as Milk
- WordPress Classic
- WordPress II Silver
There are many places to download themes on the internet, usually each theme can be found in a couple of places. I would suggest Googling the theme name plus “WordPress”. You could also use one of the many theme viewers and cross reference your findings with this list to see if it is one of the themes known to work with the Mu version. Lastly, I would suggest downloading the lastest release directly from the developers website. This might take a little extra work, but you would be guaranteed to find the most up to date version.
I happen to work for a school district, where we get frequent request for blog installs. With a normal Wordpress installation, only one blog can be hosted per install. This is great if you only want one blog, or possibly two. But if you need to maintain 10, 100 or even a 1000 blogs, it is time to start looking at different solution. You will find it very time consuming to keep Wordpress, plugins, and themes all up to date across multiple installs.
I use a modified version of Wordpress called WordpressMU, which allows you to have one install of Wordpres and about as many blogs as you want (space permitting). Some big names use it like Wordpress.com, EduBlogs, and Harvard.
There are many benefits of WordpressMU. One install will provide you with as many blogs as you have hardware resources for. All the blogs install into one database as well, making backups up very easy. Lastly, with just one install updates are a breeze. It is just as easy up dating one blog as it is a 1000 blogs.
Steps.
Step 1) Download WordpressMU.
Step 2) Setup a blank MySQL database, user, and password. Note the hostname of the server as well.
Step 3) Run the install. This is almost identical to the normal Wordpress install.
Tip. For large installs, run your MySQL on a separate box. I run a centralized MySQL server for all my web servers. It allows me to allocate a ton of ram to MySQL and allows for easy maintenance of my many databases. I will talk more about this in a later post.
Tip. There will be a point during the installation where it will prompt you to have your blogs be sub-domains or using a single domain. A single domain is far easier to get setup, especially if you are new to DNS editing or Wordpress.
Tweak. Because I work for a school district, I like to be control freak and control who has blogs. The normal WordpressMU install allows any user to register and create a blog all willy-nilly. To fix this I remove or rename the wp-signup.php file from the main folder of WordpressMU. I also remove the links that point to the setup process. These links are located within the home.php file located in the ‘Home Theme’.
In Part II of “So you want more than one blog?” I will discuss which themes I use and how to tweak them all to use Feedburner without any user setup.
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