Fathom this! In: About blogging

Two Wordpress pagination plugins

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:54:07 +0200

Paginator and WP-PageNavi are Wordpress plugins for pagination.

Everything you need to know about WordPress 2.9′s post image feature

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:38:04 +0200

Everything you need to know about WordPress 2.9′s post image feature.

Register Plus

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:21:59 +0200

WP Hide Dashboard

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:35:50 +0200

WP Hide Dashboard. Useful for all Wordpress sites that allow user registrations.

CodeColorer

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:33:54 +0200

CodeColorer. Another syntax highlighting plugin for Wordpress.

Starkers

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 07:44:47 +0200

Starkers. The completely naked theme for Wordpress. POSH!

SyntaxHighlighter Plus

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 07:38:16 +0200

SyntaxHighlighter Plus. A Wordpress plugin.

How to copy content into Wordpress fom Word

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:50:02 +0200

How to copy content into Wordpress fom Word. There's a little-know button for that.

Wordpress.com goes mobile-friendly

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:02:47 +0200

Wordpress.com goes mobile-friendly.

Yoast: Make WordPress's search function suck less

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:31:28 +0200

Yoast: Make WordPress's search function suck less.

Changing the table prefix in an installed Wordpress

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:59:40 +0200

Changing the table prefix in an installed Wordpress. Otherwise an obvious task, but steps four and five can stump you. For step five, the following SQL snippet may come in handy. UPDATE new_prefix_usermeta SET meta_key = REPLACE(meta_key, "wp_", "new_prefix_"); There’s also a plugin available.

Changing the table prefix in an installed Wordpress

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:59:09 +0200

Changing the table prefix in an installed Wordpress. Otherwise an obvious task, but steps four and five can stump you.

Secure your Wordpress uploads directory

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:45:12 +0200

If you serve only specific file types (eg. images) it can’t hurt to secure your Wordpress uploads directory a .htaccess file. Add to the file extensions as necessary.

Order Allow,Deny
 Deny from all
 <Files ~ "\.(jpeg|jpg|png|gif|pdf|gz|zip)$">
 Allow from all
 </Files>

How to retire a Wordpress blog (make Wordpress a static site)

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:53:41 +0200

Dear LazyWeb, I’d like to see two Wordpress plugins: one to retire a Wordpress weblog (i.e. generate a static copy of the site, add a “blog retired” note on all pages, and close commenting), and one to export the site, rich text, images, comments and all. The export would mainly be to extract a copy into one document, like a PDF. Despite the prevalence of guides on going the opposite direction, I’m not the only one thinking about converting a Wordpress blog into a static site. As for the one-document export, I have a quick and dirty solution, which I’ll be posting soon. As for creating a static copy of a blog, one way to go would be to use a spider tool. I haven’t actually used any of the “grab a whole site with one click” tools, so there may be easier ways, but one great utility is wget. It’s available on all platforms, and it has tons of nifty options. Here’s a quick run-down of options you may need to grab a Wordpress site. As always, the wget MAN page has all the details.

Why retire?

Why does a Wordpress blog need to be retired? Well, for one, it’ll lessen the strain on your database and speed up the site. The main reason is that every once in a while, a vulnerability is found in WP, and keeping a bunch of old installations up to date is a hassle.

Create a “retired” theme

I suggest you make a copy of your current theme and do at least the following changes:

remove the XML-RPC API link from the header
add a note to the header that the weblog is no longer being updated
disable commenting and trackbacks

Now, wget it

wget -r -E -T 2 -np -R xmlrpc.php,trackback -k http://[BLOG URL] I’ll briefly explain the options:

-r: recurse through the sub-directories
-nH: don’t include the host name in the downloaded directory
-T INT: how many times an URL will be tried; this is good to set, as xmlrpc.php will fail
-np: don’t include parent directories
-k: convert links to work with downloaded site
-E: adds .html extension to application/xhtml+xml or text/html content types without .html extensions
-R PATTERN1,PATTERN2,…: reject file suffixes or patterns
-X DIR1,DIR2,…: exclude directories, may contain wild cards

I’ve excluded the xmlrpc.php and trackback files as they are redundant in a static site.

Disable Wordpress

Finally, disable Wordpress. This was the whole reason to retire the site, right?

The ultimate guide to setting up WordPress after an install

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:37:45 +0200

The ultimate guide to setting up WordPress after an install. Most noteworthy are the recommended plugins and ping lists.

Scott Rosenberg: Mark Penn’s fuzzy pro-blogging stats

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:47:44 +0200

Scott Rosenberg: Mark Penn’s fuzzy pro-blogging stats.

Making Wordpress mobile-friendly with plugins

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:56:40 +0200

Looking for a nifty way of making you Wordpress blog mobile-friendly? There are numerous plugins that aim to do just that. Some are better than others, however. Note: I’m not talking about making the admin interface mobile-friendly, only the public site. The plugins don’t seem to have much chatter going on in the Wordpress support forums; this can be considered a good thing: at least people aren’t complaining in droves that the plugins don’t work. WordPress Mobile Plugin WordPress Mobile Plugin was the first plugin I tried. The moment I clicked Active, it brought the Wordpress admin plugin page to a grinding halt. While this probably was because the server in question just didn’t allow external HTTP calls (even through port 80), it sure didn’t make a good first impression. I basically ditched this plugin after checking out its options page. It’s way too deeply bundled with ads. WordPress Mobile Edition Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition is the plugin that I ended up using. King’s approach is to sniff the user agent string and offer mobile browsers a paired down template (it uses a cookie to keep the ”mobile state”, so desktop-testing is easy to do after forcing the mobile version). The pros to this approach is that main site is left alone, and the mobile template is easy to customize. Just be sure that you don’t serve search engine spiders the stripped down mobile version. The plugin works in Wordpress version 2.7.1, though the template does use some deprecated template tags. It doesn’t consider Iphone to be a mobile client, but this can be fixed if you want. (Another way to go would be to modify the plugin to use WURFL, like done in this tutorial.) Wordpress PDA & iPhone Plugin Wordpress PDA & iPhone Plugin — Haven’t tried this one, but it seems similar in approach to Alex King’s, so it might be good. Mowser Wordpress Mobile Mowser Wordpress Mobile. The plugin detects mobile devices and uses the Mowser service to render the blog in mobile-friendly way. Generally, my experience with Mowser hasn’t been good. However, with effort, you could probably tweak you main site to work nicely with Mowser. MobilePress MobilePress has the nicest looking site of the plugins. But not having tried it, I can’t vouch for it. I do appreciate that it allows you to serve custom templates for Iphone, Opera Mini and Windows CE. Not sure which one would the majority of mobile browsers in the world fall under, though(did someone forget S40 and S60?). MobilePress version 1.0.3 claims to detect Google and Yahoo bots. Why this is noteworthy, I’m not sure — surely they’re using opt-in for known devices and defaulting to the main site for unknowns?

Johanna Tukiainen, Suomen paras bloggaaja

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:48:59 +0200

Johanna Tukiainen, Suomen paras bloggaaja.

Neoclassical theme for WordPress

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:18:10 +0200

Neoclassical theme for WordPress. Nice, neat and simple.

Eight nice Wordpress themes

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:24:25 +0200

Eight nice Wordpress themes. Blogging Pro, FirstD and Kiwi look usable.

Kirjoitusopas bloggaajille

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:29:24 +0200

Kirjoitusopas bloggaajille. Petteri Nummisen kirjoitusopas on jo muutaman vuoden vanha, mutta anti on silti hyödyllinen.

Vanityn uudistuksesta ja Hemingway-teemasta

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:54:51 +0200

Vanity on uudistanut ulkoasuaan. Olen aina ollut Hemingway-teeman fani, mutta Vanityn uudistus palvelee blogin sisältöä paremmin. Ulkoasua voisi vielä vähän hioa, mutta päivän lyhyiden Notes-merkintöjen siirtäminen oikealle toimii erittäin hyvin. Hemingwayn ongelma blogiteemana on juuri sen epäblogimaisuus: pelkän viimeisimmän merkinnän “nosto” piilottaa liikaa aiempia merkintöjä. Teema sopiikin parhaiten harvoin päivitetylle, pitkien artikkelien blogille.

Where publish buttons are plenteous

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 17:12:16 +0200

Tim Bray: “If it doesn’t have a “Publish” button, it’s broken.”

Inman against widows

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:56:25 +0200

Shaun Inman works to eradicate lonely widows. This is like a league of design superheros. Working one plugin at a time to make weblogs typographically correct.

But if the host dies, the parasites go hungry

noemail@noemail.org (Ilya) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 16:00:37 +0200

This Financial Times article on blogging (via Kottke) takes a refreshing look at blogging, but I still don’t accept the pitting of weblogs against traditional media. I guess the challenge is much more acute from the trenches of the press (declining readership, lost ad revenues), but what the hell? Weblogs are never never going to overthrow the press. Blogs make the media better. But if the host dies, the parasites go hungry.