Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Posts tagged WoW – Wordpress on Windows
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!”
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 3 — Speeding up publishing.
Sep 7th
Yesterday while publishing a new entry into my blog I started getting PHP timeout scripts. At first I thought it was a plug-in I just installed for testing and removed it, yet publishing was still sluggish. I then remembered a new change I made. I had enabled a boatload of ping servers in wordpress. I went in and removed these ping servers and immediately my site publishing speeds increased back to normal.
So, if you have a large number of ping servers added recently and find your blog publishing is failing it’s very likely this is the problem. Fortunately, there’s a solution and it’s name is “WP-No Ping Wait“. Turns out I wasn’t the only one affected by this and a detailed write up about this issue can be found here: http://asymptomatic.net/2006/02/13/2260/why-posts-…
Additionally, GrabPERF plots the page load of ping-o-matic here: http://www.grabperf.org/homepage.php?page=scatter&…
Finally, here’s my list of ping servers, it’s no wonder my blog was timing out.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://1470.net/api/ping
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 2
Sep 5th
In this article, I’m going to talk about the Rating system I have on my site. You’ll notice each article has a series of stars listed below the title.
Like this:
These stars are the rating for that article. Each visitor is able to rate an article from 1-5 by simply moving their mouse along the image and clicking. The page reloads the image inline and updates the rating in realtime, no page loads or anything (sounds like AJAX doesn’t it). This is extremely useful and a very easy way for people to leave article feedback without going through all the steps of posting comments, etc.
This particular plug-in was created by GamerZ and is called WP-PostRatings (pretty original, eh?) and be found here.
Installation was straightforward and easy, upload the folders and activate it under the plug-ins feature in wordpress’s admin area (I’m really loving wordpress as a blogging engine).
The trickiest part of using this app is editing your theme. It seems in wordpress the themes are pretty standardized but still very open to the designer and as such many of these plug-ins need to be edited in. The nice thing is that adding them in is always very easy. Pretty much every one of these plug-ins say open your index.php file in your theme in an editor, look for this line
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
and Add this line anywhere below it:
<?php if(function_exists(‘the_ratings’)) { the_ratings(); } ?>
The beauty of this is that just where to put that line is really anywhere. So there’s a lot of trial and error to figure out just where anywhere looks best and each theme it’s going to look better in a different location.
Now the downside to this is if you change themes . . You change your plug-ins as you’ll start fresh and have to go in and add them anywhere again.
Ofcourse it may seem I’m simplifying the install of this plug-in but I’m not it’s an extremely easy to install and use. But it doesn’t stop there. This plugin gets even better. Under options you’ll find this plug-in has two options tabs. One provides your post ratings logs and stats, (I’ve had 6 users vote on 5 different articles so far). Under Ratings Options you can adjust the display type of the ratings image, who is allowed to rate (registered users, guests,etc) and the text Template allowing you to provide feedback to your visitors on various metrics like the number of users that have voted, the percentage, the max rating, etc.
There are additional features I’m not currently ‘Pimpin’ but I’ll be rolling them out soon, like highlighting the highest rated article and most rated article. So help a brother out and rate some articles.
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 1
Aug 24th
For this post series (my first post series) I want to highlight some of the wordpress plugins and extensions I’m using. As noted I’m running wordpress on MySQL & PHP on a windows 2003 server running IIS6 hosted at AppliedI.net. Oh and since acronyms like WIMP (WTF? WIMP?!?!) are hot these days I have officially coined my own for this series: WOW! for WordPress on Windows! WOW! (I wanted to use HOT DAMN! But just couldn’t come up with the right set of words 
)
Probably the first thing that stood out when you visited my blog was the theme I’m using. I’m using Vistered Little Theme. One of the nice features with this theme is the great backgrounds. You can select the backgrounds by clicking on one of the small thumbnail squares up in the left column. To upload your own background image you simply upload an image to the backgrounds folder and reload the home page and your new image is one of the available backgrounds. The backgrounds are listed in alphabetical order so you can adjust which background appears as default by selecting it above.
Another nice feature about this theme is that you can customize the location of the status bar on the right hand side from within the theme options.
You can also adjust the skin around the various blocks. I personally prefer the default skin as the others are well ugly in my opinion but then it’s my blog and my opinion.
One thing I found difficult with this theme was getting a handle on which page to edit to extend it. Some of the other plugins I’m using required special blocks and such so I had to get a handle on that first. Really there’s just two files I ever edit in the theme editor, the “Main Index Template” and the “Sidebar”. I edited the sidebar to add the various special features like weather, clustrmaps, my tagcloud, etc. I edited the Main Index Template for things like my rate this post, number of views per post, etc. The nice thing about this theme is that each block is setup in it’s own CSS div block so it’s really quite easy to get a handle on how to edit it.
All in all, the theme is very impressive visually and definitely gives the “WOW” effect and if nothing else the themes in wordpress were reason enough to switch to wordpress from the CommunityServer application I was using before.
