Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
WoW – Wordpress on Windows
updated the blog with new features and a new look
Feb 20th
The blog needed a little love and was time for a makeover. I wanted to change up the theme and add a few features. I found a great article on building link love through creating “ultimate lists of …..” and one of the examples was a smashingmagazine.com article on 83 wordpress themes you probably never seen. #1 on the themes list was this theme, redoable. I have to say, it’s a pretty nice theme.
What’s so cool about the new theme?
I like the extended live article plug-in in wordpress. it gives the uber-cool google suggest style live updating search results (example do a search for virtuozzo and watch the articles start to show up).
I also added probably the plug-in with the absolute coolest administration panel of all time. It’s called gregarious and manages the digg and social bookmark links in a very clean manner.
Next I added the “popularity” plugin. This plugin shows what posts are most popular.
Why the change?
Well, I didn’t like how the old blog theme handled H tags that was really it. It was a very clean and professional theme. The mean reason I changed was that it’s nice to change up the design from time to time and it keeps the blog exciting and new for both me and you 
WordPress Displaying Posts Multiple Times
Feb 18th
Using WordPress, I like to tag my posts in multiple categories to help with SEO exposure. However, after upgrading to 2.1 I found that my posts were showing up multiple times on the index, once for each category they were in.
Turns out the reason for this was that I was using Category Visibility-RH. This plugin alters the visibility settings for different categories. I have my delicious bookmarks posted to my blog and have these in a invisible category so they don’t junk up the primary index page. Turns out this plug-in wasn’t 2.1 ready. Fortunately Rich Hamilton, the author released a beta patch that is working perfectly for me. If you’re having this same problem definitely try out the beta patch. If you’re not into betas then you’ll want to disable this plug-in until it’s released RTM.
Windows Live Writer Style Not Updated
Oct 11th
I recently installed the WordPress Category Visibility Plug-in which allows you to select categories you don’t want to show up in different places on your blog. I have delicious set to upload my delicious links every day to a special category and I removed it from the frontpage to keep it from junking up my blog. I also set the default category so that all of these entries would be entered in their own category and this is the category I don’t display on the homepage. Well, shortly after this change I updated my blog template and when I went to update my Windows Live Writer so it would show new posts using the new template it failed, and failed and failed. I really couldn’t figure it out.
Well today I went to check my delicious links and found all the temp posts that WLW uses when it’s trying to determine your blog’s style (very cool actually). Turns out the problem was that these posts weren’t displaying on the homepage but instead in my delicious category and also weren’t getting deleted (I have like 50 temp posts in there). I turned the default category back to “Uncategorized” and set it to display on the homepage and presto! WLW works again. I suspect I’m not the only one having this issue so I hope this helps someone else.
A new theme & my fonts are jagged! HELP!
Sep 22nd
I installed a new theme last night at home and was really happy with it. The new theme is called Lush and was originally created by: Marco van Hylckama Vlieg. (say that 5 times real fast, I dare you!) It was ported to WordPress by: Christoph Boecken. I like the theme because it’s got the ultra cool (and useful too) AJAX powered live search at the top, the ability to adjust font sizes from within the homepage (helps for those late at night reads) built in support for widgets and support for some of my more favorite plugins without any modifications from me. The theme is still very new and quickly becoming a huge favorite with the wordpress community. You can find it here: WordPress Theme: Lush.
After uploading the new theme last night and dinking around with it a bit, I was all happy and proud and went to bed excited to show my friends and coworkers in the morning my hot new look. Well there was a problem the text was all jagged and busted. I spent a fair bit of time making sure my drivers were updated on my video card and monitor and it wasn’t any settings in my desktop. I even used Microsoft’s Online ClearType Optimizer (a very cool tool you should check out) to make sure my cleartype settings were tweaked, they were.
Turns out it was the Font! Below is what my jaggies looked like:
within the CSS file for the theme the font-family was set and the first 3 entries were: “Lucida Grande”,Lucida,”Lucida Sans”. Turns out I’m missing “Lucida Grande” in my family of fonts. I’m a big fan of Tahoma (which was next on the list so I moved it to the front and suddenly no more Jaggies! Hooray!
But I was still missing Lucida Grande and actually enjoyed it more than Tahoma. So I did a quick google for the font, found it host at gordeonbleu. I downloaded it from there, extracted to my c:\windows\fonts folder and reloaded my page… No more jaggies HOORAY! and I moved the other Lucida fonts back further in the line of fonts so it would be less likely anyone else would see a busted page.
So if your wordpress site looks jaggied, check your fonts and consider changing to a more common font family.
Pimpin’ My WordPress Part 6 – Optimize those tables for faster page loads
Sep 20th
I’ve noticed my wordpress site has started to slow down a bit. I thought it was because of the heavy web template I’m using and the large amount of widgets and plugins I’ve added but I wanted to do everything possible to speed up the website (afterall the last thing a webhost wants is a slow webpage).
Turns out the folks over at weblogtoolscollection.com has a recommendation that has resulted in an excellent wordpress performance improvement tip, optimize your mysql tables.
To perform this tip you’ll need to first access your mysql database using phpmyadmin, a free web based tool for managing MySQL that almost every webhost supports. Once logged into phpmyadmin select your database so that all your tables are displayed as shown below:
You’ll then want to select the ‘check all’ option and from the drop down box shown below select “Optimize”
This will proceed to optimize your tables for you. Once completed access your weblog and see for yourself if there’s a decent improvement. Now before doing this it’s wise to create a backup of your database. I use a wordpress database backup plugin called wp-db-backup and have it create a database backup and email it to me before making any changes to my database (so I can roll back easily).
I hope you find this tidbit useful and if you have a better way of optimizing the databases please feel free to leave a comment.
