Working at Home on the Internet » Plug-ins

English is NOT the Only Language of Working at Home

Joe Hauckes — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:15:17 +0000

Some of you long time readers may remember way back when, before the Changeover to the Current Theme, I had a link to Google Translator right below the Header. Long ago I realized that I had visitors to the blog from all over the world and wanted a way to make it easier for people whose second language was English to find out about Working at Home in their own language.

However, after the changeover to the New Theme, I never got around to reinstalling the link for various reasons not the least of which was the usefulness (or lack thereof) of Google Translator. But I still have a lot of readers from other countries stopping by for information that may be helpful to them.

Let me show you todays list of visitors by Country

Visitors by Country

Granted the majority of readers are English speakers (or at least in a country where the primary language is English) but there are quite a few from countries where English may or may not be even a secondary language.

Where am I going with this?

Well, since the main objective of Working at Home on the Internet is to give people an idea of what it’s like to Work at Home, Trials, Tribulations, Triumps etc, and there are people throughout the world looking for information in that regard…

I added the ConveryThis plugin to give ready access to readers who may have a little problem reading English but still need or want the information I try to provide.

BUT…

I have a question for you, anyone who speaks and reads a language other than English, Is This Tool Any Good?

If you would, please check out the translator in your language of choice and let me know if it is worth having. And if it is, please tell your friends that they can read the blog in their own language too.

A Short Story of Upgrading to WordPress 2.8

Joe Hauckes — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:02:28 +0000

Prelude

Way back in the olden days of WordPress, version 2.5x I think it was, if you wanted to respond to a comment from one of your readers, you would have to actually go to the post itself in order to have a conversation with the reader.

Each and every comment, spread over numerous posts had to be responded to in the same manner. Go to the post & type your comment. Go to the next post & comment. Ad Infinitum until you answered each comment from every commentor.

Then came along Better Comments Manager a plugin by Keith Dsouza. I could actually answer every comment from Within the Administration page of WordPress. They could be threaded, individual or multiple responses to the individuals of the community. Convient for me since I could do it all in the background and not have to access each post to have a conversation.

Lo and Behold, WordPress in versions 2.7x got the idea and ran with it, making it a part of the internal commenting system.

I naturally deactivated Keith’s plugin since I thought it wouldn’t be needed any longer. Then I delected it.

Interlude

All was well until the fateful day of the Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.

Most everything worked, even the Theme still looked good and all the Widgets worked just fine. Only one catch.

I couldn’t respond to comments in the Administration Page as I could before in v 2.7x. I asked people in the know, people who have dealt with this type of situation and I asked for advice. None of them were having problems with their “Reply” to comments in the Admin page. It seemed I was the only one.

The thing seems to be that I am running a Parent/Child theme. A Framework theme that others build upon in order to customize a theme to change the look and feel of a Blog.

Well, needless to say, I am not going to change my theme at this point just for the convience of being able to answer what few comments I get from the Admin Page. That’s when I remembered Keith’s Better Comments Manager plugin and started looking high and low for it.

End

I finally found it in some old zip file I had used way back when to install it in the first place. So, if you are having problems with your theme interface with comments through the Administration Page of WordPress 2.8, you may want to try the Better Comments Manager plugin by Keith Dsouza. It works for me.

Moral

If something works, don’t try to fix it unless something goes wrong. Then be sure to have access to older versions of what Did Work, just in case the fix is broken too.

WAHI Weekend Wrap-up VI

Joe Hauckes — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:16:32 +0000

I’m not sure if I’ll ever really be comfortable doing video’s, but I’m willing to bear the brunt of bad backlash if you are willing to watch my wandering wonderment willingly…

Recap of what I started with before I got so verbose.

Found out that the WP-Poll plugin is doing really weird things. For some reason, it shows whatever current poll I have running on all the old post that Had polls.
No idea what causes this anomaly. I’m still looking.I did find out that the code for adding them to posts had changed from [ poll=# ] to [ poll id="#" ]. I had to go back and change all 21 polls that I had in archives so they showed the original poll and not the new one.
LOGO’s on FEEDS!
Most businesses have some kind of log for their company. Some spend lots of money to have them set up on their Blogs and Websites. Almost every one of them tries to increase the RSS subscribers to their sites so people will get the newest updates, be they posts or some form of product introduction- whatever- but something I noticed was a lot of their Feeds Don’t have their Company Logo on them. Why Not?
I’ll do a ScreenCast for a step by step tutorial on MCBS.

Thanks for watching and please leave comments if you want to add to anything mentioned in the Video.

And as always, if you are reading in a Feed, please click here to view the video.

Broken Link Checker Plugin for WordPress

Joe Hauckes — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:34:26 +0000

A MUST HAVE if you run a Blog Carnival (or just link a lot)

As most of you already know, I run the Working at Home Blog Carnival every week. Actually, it’s coming up on the 100th Edition in two weeks.

Now, even with weeding out all the Spam submissions and unrelated articles, I still end up with somewhere between 20-30 participants each and every week. Each of those blogs (sometimes websites) have at least two links associated with their submission.

20-30 x 2 x 100 = 4,000-6,000 links.

That’s A LOT of LINKS

That doesn’t even include the Weekly Helpful Reads, Blog Tipping posts or reference links I put within individual posts. At last count, I was well over 12,000 links over three years of Blogging. Not all of which continue to be viable due to a multitude of reasons, ie. the blog was moved, they changed their URL configuration, they just deleted the post or just closed shop. Any number of reasons can cause a link to go bad.

The point is, if you run a Blog Carnival or just link out a lot to your friends and associates, you will eventually end up with some (or a lot) of broken links. If you are just starting out, you can do as I did in the beginning, just check them one at a time. That’s all well and good until you start to run into the hundreds and then thousands of links. You don’t want your readers clicking a bad link because you recommended a site and they get an error on that page because it is no longer there. That is not a good thing.

For the past year or so, I have been depending on Xenu, a link checker that is quite good. As a matter of fact, it is one of the main reasons I have been able to keep up with the myriad of bad links that have plagued me since starting the Blog Carnival. Even though it is downloadable to a desktop and easy to use, it becomes quite cumbersome when you start hitting the number of links with which I have had to deal.

I have been able to keep the broken link problem to a minimum using that program, but I still have to remember to run it, have a different Tab open while being logged into my Blog and accessing each link individually, unlinking them manually and saving the original post. Lots of steps for something that should be nice and simple.

Luckily for me, I found the Broken Link Checker Plugin written by Janis Elsts. (I wish I remembered where I first saw a reference to this plugin, I would have put a link to them without a doubt.)

It is an easy to install WordPress Plugin, standard installation, simple to use. It will probably take a little time to run the first time if you have never checked for bad links before, but after you have a handle on the broken link problem, this plugin will be there for you whenever a link goes bad.

My Recommendation ***** Stars

Poll: Do You Use Related Posts on Your Blog?

Joe Hauckes — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:11:06 +0000

I have always liked using Related Posts at the end of an article as a reference to things I had written on a particular subject. I feel it adds a little more to the post and it can give the reader, especially new visitors, an idea of where I am coming from at various points on that subject.

I almost gave up. It got to be a little much going through two years worth of posts. Even when I had a good idea of what I wanted to reference, I still had to look through post after post. I just didn’t want to manually go through it all for every post.

I did find a plugin, Cross-references WordPress Plugin by Francesc Hervada-Sala that I am going to try out for a little while to see if it solves the problem of having to spend a lot of time manually looking up old posts.

This weeks poll will try to find out how many of us use related posts on our Blogs.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I’ll let you know how the plugin works.

Do you use a plugin for related posts? Do you just slog through all your old posts to find them?