Category Archives: Wordpress

Review: Subtle but useful improvements in WordPress 3.1

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WordPress kicked out the latest upgrade to its popular blogging platform software this week and I upgraded GravitationalPull.net yesterday. So far the improvements are subtle and useful. Almost as important, nothing appears broken, particularly among the dozen or so plug-ins I have installed. WordPress posted a complete list of all the new features and tweaks here.

One of the biggest new features is the addition of two blog post formats called aside and gallery. Aside seems to be tailor made for copying the link post popularized by John Gruber on his DaringFireball blog.

Those are posts that are mainly intended to send readers to an interesting link with just a little bit of commentary added. They’re not quite full-blown blog posts. Gruber’s link posts (which are not done with WordPress) allow you to click the headline of the post to be taken off his site directly to the link, instead of the standard blog headline which keeps you on the same site when clicked and functions as a permalink to the post. Here’s a typical link post example on his site.

With the new aside post format, there is no regular headline or title to your post. Instead, the post just starts with whatever you are writing. And that start can be a link off site.

The gallery format, which I have not yet fooled around with much, lets you embed a bunch of photo thumbnails into a post all at once. Readers can click on any thumbnail to see the full photo. Saves some time if that’s a common activity in your posts.

Linking within your blog is a lot easier in WordPress 3.1, also. Now when you highlight some text and call up the linking dialogue box, you see extra options:

The section called “link to existing content” at first presents a list of all your previous blog posts in chronological order for easy link insertion. But you can use the search box to narrow the list to only posts including the search terms (the search appears to cover all of the text, not just post headlines).

Review: MarsEdit 3.0 useful for offline blogging and editing

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For the past few years, I’ve been composing and editing most blog entries directly on the web inside my browser via the WordPress installation that runs Gravitationalpull.net. Every now and then, I get burned when the browser crashes or loses web connectivity after I’ve written a big chunk of unsaved text. It also means that if I want to write a blog post offline, I’m stuck with a basic editor like TextEditor and I’m doing any HTML formatting from memory. Editing existing entries or fixed pages under this approach requires being online.

So a bit fed up with these limitations, I’m giving an offline blog editor called MarsEdit a spin. It’s the latest version, 3.0.

When you first set up the program, it downloads a bunch of recent posts and all your pages onto your hard drive. You can edit your previous posts and pages at your leisure — even without connectivity — and MarsEdit can sync them to your blog later. As a tinkerer (or phased perfectionist, I like to say) by temperament, that’s very appealing.

The basic editing screen is very straightforward and gives a code-level view of the post or page you are working on. There’s a separate live preview screen. I like being able to write in code and see the result at the same time. With WordPress, if you’re in code view you can’t also see the results in realtime. There’s also a handy drop down list of 15 or so frequently-used HTML codes like bold and links that can be easily inserted around selected text with a click. Categories are listed on the right and there’s an open space to add any tags you’d like.

Here’s a view of the editing window on the left and the preview window on the right

The preview isn’t quite perfect. For example, it doesn’t accurately show the automatic spacing between text and the picture of the MarsEdit icon as it appears on my blog via the theme I’m using. The program includes the ability to monkey with the preview template but that’s a little beyond my skills, I fear. But it’s good enough.

You can also easily incorporate pictures and graphics into posts and MarsEdit does all the behind-the-scenes work to upload the files and insert the proper links. The photo picker lets you look through libraries of popular programs like iPhoto and Lightroom in addition to just selecting files off your hard drive. That can really come in handy if you know a picture you want to use is in an iPhoto album, say, but you have no idea where the file for that photo actually resides on your computer. There’s also integration with Flickr which I didn’t test as I don’t use the site.

All in all, MarsEdit is a handy program for writing and editing blog posts and pages when you’re off the internets. With a $40 price tag, you have to really need it, though. Thankfully, there is a 30-day free trial in which all features are enabled.

How to exclude some pages from your WordPress header menu

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I am planning to change my header image to something more fall-like and as I started mucking around with some image files in various dimensions, I got tired of tweaking the various settings and php files of the SubtleFlux theme. So I decided to investigate alternatives.

Just on a lark, I clicked on the new default theme that appeared with WordPress 3.0 called Twenty Ten. And surprise, surprise, it actually seemed just fine. Maybe even better than fine. It even has a drop dead simple way to change your header image in the dashboard under a menu aptly named “Header.” How about that? Easy uploads mean no more visits to FTP clients or my ISP’s ancient uploading screen. Now about that new autumnal picture…

One tip: when I first installed the Twenty Ten theme, it listed every single page I have for the blog in the top navigation bar just under the header image. It was not obvious how to exclude some of the pages. Some web advice suggested mucking around with php files. Yuck.

So instead, here is how you can exclude some pages from your header navigation menu in the WordPress Twenty Ten theme. The trick is to go to the “Menu” menu under the “Appearance” menu in the dashboard. Then create a new menu and add just the pages you want to appear with the header using the check boxes. You can also include links to anything else on the web in the menu using the “Custom Links” section.

After I created the new menu, which I dubbed wp_nav_menu, a new section was activated in the “Menu” area called “Theme Locations.” Select the menu you just created in the drop-down box called “Primary Navigation” and Bob’s your uncle. I may try for a nested menu next.

Changing themes at Buckingham Palace

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Well, I was getting a little tired of my WordPress theme, Mandigo. Not that it wasn’t great but I find myself in the mood for something different after just about two years of no change. I’ve opted for a much simpler, cleaner, and less busy look using a theme called SubtleFlux by an unknown author (nada on his or her about page). I found it by perusing the useful WordPress theme listing page.

Unlike Mandigo, which adds a massive list of options to your WordPress dashboard, everything from widths and colors to drop shadow and bullet point choices, Subtle Flux leaves it to you to recode the basic files if you want to alter anything in its basic design. For example, to have it list only a few of my pages up top (instead of all of them), I had to go mucking around in its header.php file and learn about how the wp_list_pages tag works.

Another big difference is that this column of blog posts and the column at right with the search box and recent comments and so on are set at a pretty wide fixed width. You can’t see everything unless you widen you browser window. Mandigo and many other themes set things for narrower viewing so visitors won’t have to resize their browser window as often resize the column widths to fit everything in view in your browser. Not sure I like that but we’ll see.

So far, it also seems to be playing nice with all my widgets and junk like Disqus, GoodReads and MyBlogLog.

Last minute gift ideas for iPod owners and the gadget deprived

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Not much time left before the year-end holidays are upon us. Still stumped for the perfect little gift for your gadget-loving friends and relations? Here are a few suggestions based on things we actually bought and used this year around Casa GravitationalPull.net. Links below are mostly to manufacturers’ pages, but I’m sure you can find all of these items on Amazon and many at the local Best Buy, too.

I was going to start by raving about how great the iPod Touch is now that we have the app store and all the many new & great programs expanding its greatitude in all directions. But you knew that already. I do have a few less obvious suggestions that go great with iPods, though.

Audio technica ath-anc7 active noise cancelling headphonesI swear by active noise-canceling headphones but they typically cost a couple of hundred bucks a pair. This year I found some cheapie headphones for under $100 on Amazon made by Audio-Technica, the ATH-ANC7, that do just as great a job at blocking unwanted noise as far more expensive models. They are also quite comfortable to wear, if you don’t mind looking like a total audio geek.

I don’t think the sound quality is quite as fabulous as fancier models but it’s still quite good. They also came with a nice semi-hard carrying case that protects them from getting squished in your bag. Absolutely invaluable if you do much travel on airplanes.

apple airport expressI got an Apple Airport Express this year to play music on our living room stereo from files sitting on an upstairs iMac. The Airport Express connects wirelessly or via ethernet cable to your home network and streams songs from any computer running iTunes to anything with RCA jacks or a headphone port. It also can extend your existing wifi network or create its own, aiding efforts to sit on the couch and surf the web. With an iPod Touch or iPhone, you can download the free Apple Remote app to gain full iPod-like control of what’s playing, too. We also set up the Airport Express with this handy Airbase stand from Griffin so it doesn’t have to hang off the wall awkwardly sticking out of an electrical socket.

giftjpgWhile we’re on the subject of iPods, did you know that instead of giving friends an iTunes gift card, you can get a lot more involved and actually gift any specific piece of content? There’s a little gift box icon next to the grey “buy” button. Click it and you are whisked off to the gift giving screen. All you need is your recipient’s email address. There’s even a way to print out a gift sheet with a code number that you can hand someone instead of just letting them know via email about the gift. Among stuff I watched and listened to this year from the iTunes Store, I’m very high on AMC’s “Mad Men” television series, the movies “WALL-E” and “Iron Man” and a bunch of music I’m too embarrassed to disclose.

Power, power and more power. All geeks need more — to keep their iPods and other gadgets charged, that is. I found two useful recharging gadgets that might make good small gifts for iPod owners.

belkin portable mini surge with usbBelkin’s Portable Mini Surge with USB is great for people who travel with multiple gadgets. It turns one outlet into three and adds surge protection and a couple of USB charging ports to boot. That means you can leave your iPod charging plug at home. It’s smartly designed so its electrical prongs can rotate to different angles and fit in the tightest spaces.

The Griffin Powerdock2 has a simple mission, letting you charge two iPods/iPhones at once. It’s very pretty sitting here on my desk in a silver tone that matches my Macbook Pro. There’s also a four iPod/iPhone model. It includes the usual bevy of plastic iPod adapters so the chargers can hold all the various sized versions. Warning: It does not support the most recent versions of the iPod Touch and iPhone which altered the way power flows into their 30-pin connectors.Griffin powerdock two

Beyond the iPod ecosystem, I came across a few other giftable treats this year. My wife needed to do some quick videos for work so we got one of Flip’s original “Ultra” series camcorders. It’s cheap and easy and has it’s own USB plug and software built in. Record videos with the simple controls, plug into a Windows or mac computer and start editing away. The Ultra has since been replaced by some spiffier models, the Mino and MinoHD. Flip has a good web page comparing all the various models. The original is even cheaper now and still pretty nifty. Our kids love it, too.

The wordpress hoodie in actionWordPress is, of course, the platform du jour for blogging but it’s free software. Can’t make much of a gift out of that. But the good folks at Automattic, publishers of WordPress, are selling a line of authorized tee shirts, coffee mugs and hoodies. I have the dark blue hoodie and it’s fun to walk around town and get quizzed about what sport “WordPress” plays. Order big, as these guys tend to shrink.

If you want to buy a gadgeteer a completely captivating yet non-techy gift, we did greatly enjoy Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show (available on CD and DVD) called “Letting Go of God.” Julia may or may not find spiritual bliss on her journey but you’ll be laughing for the entire thought-provoking trip. (Get a little preview in this video from the TED Talks site)

Finally, as I mentioned the other day, I’m hooked on Fran’s Salted Caramels. I got mine at The Cheese Shop in Wellesley Center but check Fran’s web site to buy them online or find a retail location near you. Yum! UPDATE: Careful, some readers are finding them highly addictive.

And that’s the 2008 list of gift ideas. If you’ve got other suggestions, please drop a note in the comments. Thanks and happy holidays.

WordPress 2.7 is the best WordPress yet

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Wordpress 2.7's new dashboard When WordPress 2.5 came out a few months ago, there was a lot to like but there was also a lot to not-so-like. The layout of key parts of the program, including the dashboard and the editing page for new posts, didn’t seem very well thought out. The overall design was visually noisy and distracting, as well.

This week we got the next big thing from WordPress and the programmers clearly felt our pain. WordPress 2.7 fixes almost everything that went wrong in 2.5 and adds a bunch of new goodies to boot. Sure, there’s a few glitches but it’s definitely the best WordPress yet.

Start with the new dashboard screen (pictured above). As has been much praised, the redesigned dashboard has toned down useless visual noise and amped up things you need to see, with smarter color and layout decisions. I appreciate the new greyish tone that recedes out of mind so you can find what you’re looking for quickly. And the functions along the left side roll-up or down as needed. For example, in the picture above, I clicked on “Tools” and WordPress rolled out choices like “Import,” “Export” and “Upgrade.” Click on “Tools” again to roll them up. There’s even a handy quick post section for writing a quickie without leaving the dashboard.

The main page for writing and editing posts has likewise gotten less busy and more useful. Thankfully, lists of tags and categories have moved back to the right side, next to where you compose your posts. I was always forgetting to use them after they got buried below the post writing area in 2.5. One glitch here, at least using Firefox and a Mac, is that I have to keep my browser window open pretty wide. Otherwise, the box where you actually do your writing doesn’t narrow itself correctly and cuts off the display, as in “hey, where’s my cursor?”

Wordpress 2.7's new edit post page

Another even more serious problem remains from the past few upgrades. It used to be when you uploaded a photo that one of the fields you could fill in immediately was the alternate text. That’s where you are supposed to put a textual description of the photo that can be read by browsers for the blind and that appears even if the photo itself doesn’t load. But WordPress changed the upload box so you can only fill in alt text if you write a caption.

I don’t want a caption to appear under my photos. The only way to get just alt text and no caption is to upload the photo, place it in the post, click on it in the post editor and then click on advanced settings to reach the old alt text box. Since every photo needs alt text but not every photo needs a caption, this is backwards. Please fix, WordPress!

Back to the positives, another huge improvement is the new page listing all your existing posts. There’s a menu that appears under each listing now if you mouse over the post’s name. You can choose to quickly jump to edit, preview, delete (with confirmation) or quick edit. The new “quick edit” choice allow you to change or add to the most important fields and metadata without having to open the whole post back on the editing page. It’s great for adding tags or categories you forgot the first time around. One tip – you can use the search box to find all posts about a certain subject and then easily make sure you tagged and bagged them consistently. Quick editing is also available on the list of your existing pages.

Another handy new feature is the display options menu, available on many pages under a light grey button near the top, right side called “Screen Options.” Under this menu you can chose to display or eliminate different headings in lists or boxes on pages. I never use custom tags on my posts, so I can switch off the box for custom tags and not have to see it on my new posts pages. I’m the only author on this blog, so in the list of all existing posts, I can get rid of the useless column displaying authorship.

You can also drag and drop all the boxes on each page to re-arrange the layout. Want the tags list back underneath the editing box instead of on the side? I’ll call you crazy but just drag and drop it where you want it.

WordPress can also run some of its functions from your own computer instead of making your web server do extra work. This feature relies on Google’s Gears program, which you have to install first. Then click the “turbo” button in the upper, right corner of your dashboard to get WordPress geared up.

And that’s all I can rave about for now. I’ll update this review as I discover other cool stuff or find useful write-ups elsewhere.

Bluehost Internet hosting service eases upgrades with SimpleScripts

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I have generally good things to say about my web hosting service, Bluehost. They are very reliable, with uptime for my site of over 99.5% (at least since I started monitoring it in September using the free SiteUpTime service). Bluehost also offer lots of add-ons and free services, like high-end spam filtering and automatic installation of dozens of popular web software packages like Drupal and WordPress. And the price is reasonable at less than $7/month.

The one drag was that Bluehost used a service called Fantastico Deluxe to install or upgrade web software packages like WordPress. And for reasons I could never quite fathom, Fantastico was very slow to make upgrades available. That’s particularly annoying when said upgrades are to fix serious security holes. So I was heartened a few months back when Bluehost added a speedier install and upgrade service called SimpleScripts. But the fly in the ointment was having to manually reinstall my entire WordPress package before I could switch to using SimpleScript for upgrades.

Then today, when I was yet again bemoaning the fact that Fantastico was lagging SimpleScript for the latest WordPress upgrade, the highly-praised version 2.7, I noticed that Bluehost had added an automated switchover routine. So, after backing everything on my web site up three different ways, I had SimpleScript run its automatic changeover from Fantastico and then upgrade WordPress to 2.7 (from whence this post is being written). It went utterly without a hitch. I’ll post a review and some blog links for the much-improved WordPress shortly.

Prior coverage:

Fantastico or who won’t let me upgrade WordPress (May 8, 2008)

Speaking of simple, upgraded to WordPress 2.5 (May 6, 2008)

Fixing my blog’s del.icio.us widget without a widget

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New widget results from delicious web site

New widget results from delicious web site

I tend to read a lot of web pages every work day and they can all blur together if I’m not careful, or the coffee machine is on the fritz. So I use a couple of methods of saving and organizing my webstream, including Google Notebook for stuff that’s highly relevant to whatever project or story I’m working on, and the social networking site del.icio.us for stuff that’s not immediately useful but might have the makings of a future story or blog post.

Naturally, I wanted to share my del.icio.us stream in the sidebar of this blog so you all could see what I’m up to. There used to be a downloadable widget plug-in from del.icio.us that you added to your widgets directory to do just that but it mysteriously stopped working months ago. Even more annoyingly, my WordPress installation indicated that an upgrade was available to the del.icio.us plug-in but every time I tried to install it, it not only failed it also somehow wiped out my MyBlogLog plug-in. Frak!

Today, I decided that instead of trying to get WordPress to automatically upgrade the del.icio.us plug-in for the millionth time, I’d do it manually. But when I downloaded the linked file, I discovered it was actually the outdated sidebar plug-in that you used to need back before WordPress 2.2 to have any widgets on your blog at all. No wonder it messed up my skunk works. Thus, important lesson number one: do not use the automatic upgrade if your old del.icio.us plug-in has stopped working.

Fishing around del.icio.us, I eventually found the site’s tools page with links and instructions to create several kinds of widgets. All you do is pick one widget, like linkrolls, adjust the settings to display just what you want and copy the resulting code that del.icio.us produces for you. Then back in your WordPress installation, go to the Design>Widgets menu and create a new text widget. WordPress has some instructions about text widgets here. Paste the code from the del.icio.us site into a new text widget, remember to save your changes, and Bob’s your uncle (or in my case, Bob’s your dad). You can now once again see all the web sites I’ve saved lately at the bottom of the right-hand column.

Seeking more interaction from readers, I’m adding post ratings

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A survey of web sites and blogs a few years ago found that only about 1 in 100 visitors are motivated enough to leave comments (tip o’ the cap to ProBlogger for the link). On this blog, sadly, the ratio is even lower. For example, over the past month there were 2,453 visitors and just 13 posted comments (excluding comments by me). And more than half of those were on one controversial post defending the Kindle e-book reader. You can see them all on the blog’s page at Disqus. That’s a ratio of barely more than 1 comment per 200 visits, which I’d really like to improve.

So in addition to just saying, hey, comments are MOST WELCOME, I’ve also added Lester Chan’s WordPress plugin called WP-PostRatings. You can see now at the top bottom of every entry, just below the list of categories tags, as a rating of 1 to 5 stars. Any and every reader can click on the stars to dole out their own ratings. So please feel free to rate away.

It took a little bit of tinkering to figure out how to get the plugin working properly. Just uploading the code to my plugin directory and activating it on the WordPress plugin settings wasn’t enough. I had to also add a snippet of code to my index.php and post.php template files. It wasn’t totally obvious where to put the snippet in the files, which are customized already as part of the Mandigo theme. A quick email to Mandigo’s author, Tom Picard, received an equally quick and easy answer from Tom. he told me to put the PostRating snippet anywhere after the code:

<?php
while (have_posts()) {
the_post();
?>

I did and everything works great now. Thanks, Tom.

First impression of WordPress iPhone app: a solid B

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Wordpress releases iphone appThis short post comes to you courtesy of the brand new WordPress app for iPhones and iPods Touch. It’s short because typing on my iPod gives me a headache but my first impression of the app is a positive one. Set up took under 30 seconds and I was ready to post. There are fields to fill on in for the title and text of a new post plus a place to add tags and a nifty multi-touch scrollable list of all your categories. Personally, it is hard to imagine writing much more than this on the tiny keyboard (and the app didn’t switch to landscape mode when I tried). But on in a pinch or on-the-go I give WordPress a solid B for this version 1.0.

UPDATE: Phew, back on my laptop and the typing is easy — well, as easy as it gets for old two fingers here. Here’s a link to WordPress’s description page of the new app. I couldn’t figure out how to add a link to a mobile post in the app or grab an image from the web, so I did both of those functions just now from the full, webby version of WordPress.

When working on or editing a post, there are just four buttons at the bottom of the screen: write, photos, preview and settings. Write brings up the keyboard. Photos takes you to an (in my first use)  empty image library with the opportunity to add photos from the iPhone/iPod’s regular iPhoto-linked library or to take a new picture with the built-in camera. If you go to your regular library, you can choose any photo from any album. The preview button takes you to a view of the post on your blog in an embedded browser. And settings lets you edit the publication date and time or set a password for the post. Pretty simple but entirely useful, as long as you keep it short.

I think we’re going to need to have some link functionality added, however, as that’s a core function for blogging, obviously.

UPDATE2: Zdnet blogger Michael Miller makes the obvious and most excellent point that the real failing with the app is Apple‘s failure to include cut and paste support or allow external blue tooth keyboards.