Working at Home on the Internet

Review of WordPress 2.2, the Bad Things

New Here? You may want to Subscribe to my RSS feed for daily updates. Or if you prefer, Subscribe by Email What is RSS? Thanks for visiting!

Let me tell you a little story.

A few years back, “Irish Spring” was my preferred brand of soap. I would shower and feel really clean. I liked the scent. I even liked the way it looked with the little green stripes. Then they decided to improve it.

Although the New and Improved bars looked and smelled the same, they were different. When I showered, I would feel slimey and unclean. My skin broke out in a bright red rash. It wasn’t my old favorite bath soap anymore. I couldn’t use it without breaking out.

Needless to say I threw it away and never bought another bar of their soap.

 The reason I bring this up is I just installed the “New and Improved” WordPress 2.2 and I am not a particularily happy camper.

First… If you use more than one space, by mistake or otherwise, you get Á  which is not a good thing. Especially when you have used double spaces for an effect of some sort. Say, indenting a picture or some type for the aestetic value. Now, you get  Á  instead of white space. (the characters were inserted by using extra spaces) This not only affects current posts, but ALL posts. With more than a year and a half of writing, I don’t want to go back to fix (or check for that matter) every individual post.

Second… Where is my Post Preview? With previous versions of WP, I could Save and Continue Editing to get an idea of what the actual post will look like with the preview. Now, if you don’t Publish, you don’t have any idea of what your readers will see (see the first point). Why on earth would WP take out such an important feature?

Third… Widgets. Sure, widgets are a great addition to WP. The only problem with them is if you put One Widget in the Sidebar, it Takes Over the Wole Sidebar! Again, after 1 1/2 years, I don’t want to have to redo my whole sidebar by creating widgets for each and every one of the additional featues, put them where they used to be and hope they fit the way I want them. Widgets are great for setting up a sidebar from scratch, but not when there is already an established format in use. Why can’t they make it interchangable with what already exists in an existing template?

This is not to mention that I wanted to put a Widget in my Footer. Luckily, I had written the updated footer with a sidebar template, so there were not a lot of Major adjustments needed. I just had to create text widgets to include the information I already had. But, you have to remember… Widgets at present, only work within a sidebar. You can’t just put them where you want them, only in the sidebar or something you make “look” like a sidebar.

Lastly, I’m not sure if it is caused by the Widgets or the Version 2.2 of WordPress or something else, but the Page Rank Checker has stopped showing my PR since installation of 2.2. How will that affect my real page rank?

I haven’t even checked the interaction with all the Plugins I use yet, I just can’t wait.

Has anyone else run into similar problems? Any fixes, expecially for the Post Preview?

Technorati Tags: WordPress 2.2, Widgets, Missing Post Preview

June 16th, 2007 at 01:55pm | Posted by Joe | Reviews, WordPress | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post

Optimal Title: A WordPress Plugin Review

 

I have been looking for a way to show the Title of the Post in the Heading (the one that shows when you hover over a link and shows in the “Favorites”). This should be advantageous for SEO in the background and frankly be more user friendly for the reader when scanning Post Titles to read.

I almost found one in a Plug-in called Optimal Title by Elastic Dog.

The Plug-in works in older WordPress versions, up to but NOT including WP 2.1. I installed it on two different Blogs that have very different Templates. but both are running WP 2.1.

One, in which the plug-in is installed in the “header”,  seemed to work if it was installed without other plugins being activated. The problem I continually ran into was that when I tried to activate it I got the error

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/workingathomeinternet/public_html/WP/wp-content/plugins/optimal-title.php:84) in /home/workingathomeinternet/public_html/WP/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php on line 270

The second Blog (this one) the code was installed in the Index, Page and Single post php’s. I got the same error. On both I tried activating various plugins that I already had running, and it worked with most of them.

If I tried to run it with the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin running, I kept erroring out. I would get the correct Title Sequence in the Favorites Head and the Hover View, however, I would get the Error showing Above the Head of the Main Title Head of the Blog.

The only thing that seems to semi-work is the following code that I inserted into the php.

<title><?php if ( function_exists(’optimal_title’) ) { optimal_title(’|'); bloginfo(’name’); } else { bloginfo(’name’); wp_title(’|'); } ?><?php if ( is_home() ) { ?> | <?php bloginfo(’description’); } ?></title>

I had to De-Activate the Plug-in but the code alone Mostly works. The way the code is written it looks for the “optimal_title” script and when it is not found (else), it will show your Blog Title|Post Title instead of the other way around as intended. And if the landing page is “Home” then it shows the Blog Title|Description.

So, without the Plug-in activated, the code will provide the same (basic) result. Not as neat, but very functional for SEO and Reader Usability. I would really like to see this Plug-in work the way it was intended to when it was first written.

Aaron Schaefer Great Plug-in, but Please Update it so it works with the Newer Versions of WordPress.

Technorati Tags: Optimal Title, Plugin, Review, WordPress

March 7th, 2007 at 06:09am | Posted by Joe | Plug-ins, Reviews, WordPress | 8 reader remarks | Print This Post

What Would Seth Godin Do? Increase Your RSS Subscriptions

 Last week I asked… Is RSS Hurting The Blogging Community? The overwhelming response was that it is the Lesser of Two Evils. People don’t have the time to surf looking for your articles. RSS saves time and effort on the part of the reader and it is up to us to provide good content if we want to draw them into the conversation.

Lets face it, we All want people read what we write. That’s why we picked Blogging as a way to reach out to others for Business or Pleasure. That’s where RSS comes in. It is a way to give your readers what they want (good content) and they don’t have to go looking for it. RSS will send it to their Feed Reader as soon as you update your blog. I’m not going to get into the debate of full/partial feeds, that’s between you and your readers.

What I am going to do is share a WordPress Plug-in I found (I really don’t remember where, I should write these things down) that could help you convert new visitors to your blog into RSS Subscribers.

It’s called What Would Seth Godin Do?

What it does is put a Caption on your posts to invite New Visitors to Subscribe to your RSS Feed and/or through your E-mail Subscriptions. Just download the file, upload the file to your Plug-in folder (yes it is only one file). You can change the text to whatever you desire. The times it is shown to newbies can be set to the amount you feel works best for you.

It can be set to show either at the top or bottom of posts. It will show only once on a page, but will show on individual posts if the visitor lands on an individual post. The only minor drawback is that All of your visitors will be considered New until their cookies show that they have been there the number of times you set. So, don’t set it too high, you don’t want your regular readers to have to deal with it too often.

This is NOT a Paid Review… Boy, I hate having to say that, Damn Review Me…

Technorati Tags: RSS, What Would Seth Godin Do, Plugin

February 22nd, 2007 at 01:40pm | Posted by Joe | Blogging, Plug-ins, RSS, Reviews | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post