We have liftoff!
Yes, it’s a bit sooner than I had planned. I had an unexpected (and very surprising) issue with my old web host, and had to move my site sooner than I really wanted to. You can see that it’s quite sparse at the moment, but I’m working as fast as I can to get the site’s content back up, and get things rolling along.
New changes are coming for the New Year – not quite a “resolution,” but more of “seemed like a good time to do this,” especially since the tax year starts on January 1. So here I am, already up and running with a new design, and a new lease on my business.
Have a Happy New year, everyone!
Moving WordPress
Moving WordPress may seem like a huge, daunting task to someone who looks at a phpMyAdmin interface and thinks “If I touch this, the world will explode.” There are many, many ways to move your WordPress installation, and you’ll be quite surprised to learn exactly how easy it can be.
For your pleasure, I have a guinea pig for this one 
You can thank Jacqueline for allowing me to do this for her. (I’ll pass the link later – because I’m literally moving WP for her – into a whole new directory, up one level from where it is now! So once I’m done, the link will be changed )
So I have favorite methods for moving a WordPress installation. There’s the official method, and there are other standby “absolutely safe” methods (such as using the “Import/Export feature that’s built in to the newer versions of WP), but me, I’m impatient, and I like things to be down and dirty, and fast. So I’m going to show you my favorite way of doing this.
NOTE: Craig posted a really great – and even easier – way of doing this if all you’re looking to do is change the “slug” of where WordPress is located. Just scroll down to the comments section and find his post. If that’s all you’re looking to do – then by all means, try his advice first!
Warning: Be absolutely sure you have a backup before you try this. I’m not kidding. If you screw up, and you don’t have a backup, you can kiss your blog goodbye. Although I can say that I have yet to seriously mess a site up by this particular method (you’re not really messing with too much stuff, but still…) I’m not taking any responsibility whatsoever for you choosing to follow this method. So play it smart – get a backup before you even try any of this.
So, here we go…
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An evil little trick.
Yes, I said “evil”. Because it is.
I belong to a couple of awesome networking lists. On one of these lists, recently, someone was asking about a possible solution to what is truly a common problem for us designers/programmers who provide CMS solutions for our clients. The problem?
Microsoft Word.
All of you reading this…how many of you have create an awesome site design with pristine code and gorgeous formatting, and your client is all “hooray!”…and promptly starts writing their content up in Microsoft Word, and the C&P’s the stuff into the CMS you’ve just made for them? (Come on, I know you’re out there. Raise your hands.)
I have two clients, currently that do this. No matter what plugins I’ve installed, and no matter how many different ways I instruct them on how to do it correctly (even with using their beloved Word!) they don’t do it. They just keep C&P-ing from Word, and keep calling me when the site breaks because of it.
Now, to why I am evil.
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Get the most out of your “Widgetized Sidebar”
Hello all! yes, yes, I know I’m late on my promised date. I’ve actually been compiling a list of ideas on topics to write a bout – and I’ve finally decided to choose one and go with it. (Yeah, I know I said it would be “How to Turn Your Existing Site Into a WordPress Theme” – but that sucker is actually taking a lot more time than I’d originally thought. But I swear, I’m working on it. It’s in my “drafts” right now!)
So. I decided a smaller step would be to show you how to get the most out of your widgets. You can choose whatever you want – what I’ll be touching on is how to make more than one “sidebar” and apply widgets to them.
“Sidebar” is in quotes because – you won’t believe this – you don’t HAVE to put them in your sidebar. You can put those suckers anywhere you damn well please. How cool would it be to have your site’s content separated by a widget that would hold – whatever you’d like it to hold? Or Widgetizing your footer? or you header? Or how about having a different set of widgetized sidebars based on what page you’re on?
You can do that?
You bettah believe it, suckah!
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sIFR
Ahhh…sIFR – also know as “Scalable Inman Flash Replacement”. I’m not going to go through and tell you the history and all that – there’s plenty of information on it out there for you to peruse at your leisure. Me, I’m a “get to the point” kinda gal – as you all know.
For a long time, people have wanted to move away from he “standard” fonts found in a particular browser, and use a nice font for headings, titles, and such on their sites. Usually, the way around this was to create said text as an image file, and plug it in on the site. But oh, how lovely would it be if this could be done dynamically, rather than creating an image for every single piece of text you wanted to replace?
I’ve done it before, using dynamic text replacement, which creates PNG images on-the-fly. This is a popular method for people who want to have this ability, but don’t have access to Flash. But I’ve noticed if you use it for a lot of different things (like a recent client who wanted EVERY link replaced, as well as headings and certain pieces of text) you’re gonna back things up like eating a pound of cheese on constipation day. (yes, as if we all have a “constipation day”. Mine’s on Friday. LOL)
Ahh, how I wanted to use sIFR. And now that I have my shiny new Mac with CS3, I can finally do it. So last week, I started to try it out for the first time. And I failed. Miserably.
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Installing WordPress on IIS
So, I had the joy of trying to install WordPress on a Windows IIS Server. Now, I think it’s no secret that I hate Windows servers. It’s a personal preference, really. Mainly because any time I’ve had to deal with a Windows hosting client, the reason the host chose Windows is because they have no idea what they’re doing, and the “tech support” would disappear every time I had a question about some stupid configuration setting, and then come back three weeks later asking “Did you get it figured out yet?”
Granted, there are some people out there who know what they’re doing. But in my experience, IIS sucks unless you know what you’re doing – and 99% of the time, the people behind the server don’t have a clue.
That rant aside – I had a client who needed WordPress installed on IIS. Two-and-a-half weeks later, I got it installed. For those of you having this issue, I’m going to tell you what made the difference for me, so you don’t have to go through what I did.
Part 4: Neat Little Snippets of Code That Are Useful for WordPress
Okay, so here we move on to Part 4 of my “taking too long to add to this” series
I had a client this week who is an author. He does some work on practice lists, and wanted a spot to gather his writing together. The thing that he wanted was something that would count the words within his posts – since many of his lists require practice pieces to be under a certain word limit (or they just want to know how many words there are).
I found a few plugins, but when I went to test them, the word count was always off. One of my test posts was 301 words long, yet the different plugins would vary anywhere from 320 to 350 words. There were different reasons for this, and to me, it wasn’t worth troubleshooting 200 or so lines of code in the plugin to figure out why.
So I wrote my own function instead: and it took all of 10 lines (if you count the commented sections, and the two lines it took to create the function).
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Part 3: Neat Little Snippets of Code That Are Useful for WordPress
The Content Scraper (for sites that have no feed).
::now holding my ears to shut out the yelps::
Okay, okay – calm down. Here’s the thing. I debated long and hard about putting this here. I truly did. People hate content scrapers, and yes – for the most part – the ones that use it for horrid purposes are evil bastards. But being in the Christmas spirit that I always get in at this time of year, I’m going to try and believe that people are good for the most part – and although I know this might become abused here and there…well at least I can take slight solace in the fact that this one, at the very least, will cache the content on the spammers server, so your bandwidth isn’t too huge.
I still have trepidation about this one – so seriously, if it does become an issue, and I get a lot of people who really don’t want this one here, I will remove it. This one was a toughie to consider sharing, but I’m hoping that people use it for the greater good. I’ve seen a lot of requests for this kind of stuff on the forums – people who would like to “scrape” the content on their own site that they have in one place and stick it on another one they own so they don’t have to write the same thing twice in two different places – and honestly, that’s what this was developed for.
Part 2: Neat Little Snippets of Code That Are Useful for WordPress
Ahhhhh…. ye olde “Send to a Friend”. One of my recent clients really wanted this sucker for every single post on their site – all you needed to do was put in your email address, your friend’s email address, maybe write a little personal note and send it on it’s merry way.
The problem with “Send to a Friend” scripts is the abuse factor. Basically, you’re leaving your server wide open for some POS to some along and use your server as a mass spam machine. They can send to as many people as they want, and when the crap hits the fan, you are the one that gets blamed for it all, and you are the one who pays the price.
God, I hate spammers.
Part 1: Neat Little Snippets of Code That Are Useful for WordPress
So, as an introduction, I’m going to tell you that there will be no real rhyme or reason to this series. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several paying clients (and one pro-bono, who really pushed my limits) who have forced me to learn new things, and pull out some creative thinking. As I said before, I’m not a programmer, I just know enough to get around. So I’m absolutely positive some of these could be written in some other cleaner way – I just don’t know how. So by all means, if you know of a better way to accomplish these things, share it.
So, our first trick will be something basic, something simple. Blockquotes.
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