Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
WoW – Wordpress on Windows
Accessing Windows Live Writer error logs
Sep 20th
My version of Windows Live Writer wasn’t pinging all of the sites on my blog ping list. Turns out Windows Live Writer has an extensive logging capability. To access the WLW logs enter the following at a command prompt and it will open the Windows Live Writer Log in notepad:
%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\Windows Live Writer.log
Turns out some of the ping servers just weren’t responding:
WindowsLiveWriter,1076,Fail,00073,19-Sep-2006 22:01:47.531,”Failure while pinging http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
Windows Live Writer + Ultimate Tag Warrior = a killer tag team!
Sep 18th
Without question the WYSIWYG editors for WordPress are lacking and the only way to create a decent wordpress post is using a blog editor. There are may blog editors available these days from the free to the commercial but my preferred blog editor is Windows Live Editor, a free beta application from Microsoft that supports almost every blog application available. One of the nice features of WLW is that it’s expandable via extensions. One much requested extension is the ability to create tags for your blog entries from directly within WLW. My preferred Tagging engine is Ultimate Tag Warrior so the ability to create tags for UTW from within WLW is something I’ve been waiting for. Well the wait is over, David Brunelle has an excellent article on how to hack wordpress to allow Windows Live Writer to tag your posts within Ultimate Tag Warrior. David’s solution involves modifying your xmlrpc.php file (make sure you create a backup .. just in case) then allowing you to use the keywords property in Windows Live Writer to add your tags to your post.
WP Tutorial: Your First WP Plugin « Mark on WordPress
Sep 16th
Tutorial on creating your first WordPress Plug-in. Mark has created a fantastic video tutorial on creating your first wordpress plug-in. Definitely worth checking out.
Pimpin’ My WordPress Part 5 – Hiding Categories in WordPress
Sep 15th
I’m using del.icios.us to post links to my blog on a daily basis in a seperate category called: Daily Links & Tidbits. The nice thing about this is that my blog is updated every single day. The bad thing is that if I don’t write an article for a couple days and only post links the blog looks like crap. So I decided it would be awesome if I could hide these posts from showing up on the homepage but still have them show up everywhere else in my blog. The solution:
The WordPress Category Visibility Plugin
This plug-in allows me to tag categories and assign them visibility options such as:
Front: Visibility on the front/main page.
List: Visibility on the list of categories on the sidebar.
Search: Visibility in search results.
Feed: Visibility in RSS/RSS2/Atom feeds.
Archive: Visibility in archive links (i.e., calendar links).
User Level: Visibility on user level basis. All users this level and higher can see categories as checked. Does not affect feed visibility, obviously.
Numeric User Levels: Administrator: 10, Editor: 7, Author: 2, Contributor: 1, Subscriber: 0, Premium_subscriber: 0
So I unchecked Front on the category I didn’t want to display on the homepage and ta-dah, the category is now hidden but still searchable, available in the list of categories, available via RSS feeds and shows in the Archive.
This is definitely a great plug-in.
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 4 – Integrating Gallery2 & WordPress
Sep 9th
I recently got my photogallery back online, it’s been down for about 9 months as I was pretty upset with Gallery2 (from http://gallery.menalto.com). I’ve been using gallery for about 4 or so years now and have over 6000 images in my gallery currently! Yes SIX THOUSAND. My gallery is 6GB in size in fact. The reason I got upset with it is that it was just too much of an overhead beast to maintain (probably has to do with the 6000 images). I’ve been working on flash based galleries and converting to them in hopes that I could provide a simpler solution that didn’t require as much administration for my online gallery. Well, they aren’t there yet. All that’s really needed is a decent admin interface written that will export the XML files for you and categorize everything and they would be a winner.
Gallery2 is without question the best gallery application on the Internet though and with the recent update to 2.1.2 I decided to go ahead and upgrade my gallery and make it public once again. Plus you’d be surprised how many of my friends and family emailed me asking where it went. Kinda cool really.
So I decided now that it’s online I wanted to integrate Gallery2 with WordPress, seems like an easy enough request right, I mean afterall there’s just about every kind of plug-in for gallery you could ask for and every kind plus a dozen more for wordpress. At first I was testing out WPG2, seems like the best merger between gallery and wordpress, basically it would create your standard gallery pages within wordpress. This is great but I doubt my blog visitors want to see my 6000 images within my blog. Plus, it seems it requires the Gallery2 installation and wordpress installation running on the same server. Unfortunately, I run gallery (@ http://www.thejungle.org/gallery/) on a Linux based VPS running on Virtuozzo by SWsoft and my Blog (@ http://www.jesscoburn.com) on a Windows 2003 based hosting account. The Linux VPS Blog hosting as well as everything else here is powered by Applied Innovations. So with different web servers, different database servers and not to mention different operating systems running the two sites WPG2 was not a solution for me. So back to google I went and I found Chunkeymoon’s blog and the Ultimate Gallery2 Slideshow Plugin. Which just so happens to be developed with the possibility that the two applications could be hosted on completely seperate servers just like mine.
The application/plug-in was extremely easy to install. I simply uploaded the plug-in to the wp-content/plugins folder (as is common) and activated it. I also uploaded and activated Tiger Style Administration which is probably the damn coolest mod to WordPress yet and I’ll follow up with a seperate blog entry about this one as it deserves it’s own.
Once The Ultimate Gallery2 Slideshow Plugin was loaded and activated, I had to define where the mysql database for gallery2 was located, the url to the gallery2 installation and that was pretty much it. Then I simply had to add the code tag that calls this plugin:
<?php ug2slideshow_print(); ?>
Which I placed in it’s own seperate box on the right column in my vistered little theme and instantly now have 20 images in a javascript based slide show on my blog adding yet another little personalized touch to my blog or in the Pimpin’ my blog motif, another touch of “BLING, BLING BABY!”
