Ken McGuire

Category: Wordpress

  • Testing WPtouch, Make Your Blog iPhone-friendly

    kenmc.com running WPtouch, iPhone-rendering plugin for WordPress

    A tweet from Donncha pointed me in the direction of WPtouch earlier today, now running on kenmc.com.

    What does it do?

    It’s a plugin for your WordPress-based blog that renders a very iPhone and iPod-friendly theme of your blog. Forget bulky images, scrolling screen after screen – load in the plugin, fire it up and browse a great looking lo-fi version of your blog (see the image above).

    You can customise how particular pages are displayed, tie in Flickr photos, full links pages login / logout function and, to an extent, set a colour scheme for the theme via the plugin options. I might as well do a little digging into the plugin and bring across some kind of consistency between the actual blog and the iPhone version of it but I’m impressed.

    Grab the plugin yourself here. It requires WP2.3 or higher and has support for WP2.7.

  • Stumbleupon, Spammers and WordPress 2.5

    While I’ve had a manic enough week in the office, I grabbed some time yesterday to poke around recent web stats and tackle personal email building up in my inbox. The two things I noticed?

    Four out of five blog posts I’ve penned recently have been picked up by Stumbleupon users, so – welcome SU users. I hope you’ve enjoyed the articles you’ve found and have been reading – plus I hope the assistance with the Popularity Contest plugin has helped, though Alex King will be releasing a fully WP compatible version shortly.

    The other thing I notice, as I sift through my email, is that the spammers were certainly out in force this week – trackbacks and comments alike. Clear out Akismet and it’s slowly but surely begins filling up again – and again, and again and again. Is there an issue with Akismet or has there just been a global increase in spam activity for the week?

    Finally, I will say that I’m enjoying the use of WordPress 2.5. The media gallery has taken some getting used to but functionality-wise and from an end-user’s point of view I think it’s bang on.

    Now, it’s time for the weekend.

  • Painless Upgrade To WordPress 2.5 (Plus Working Plugins)

    Well, the update to WordPress 2.5 went painlessly. After disabling each plugin I use, the overall upload time, upgrade time and plugin-check took about 30 minutes. Plus, I’ve remembered to set the time forward on the blog (the clocks went forward last night in case you’ve forgotton – happened me last year).

    For the first time too I’ve also used the automatic plugin upgrade which was used to update the Jaiku widget on the sidebar and Google Sitemaps plugin. Handy knowing a simple click from your plugins menu will retrieve the update automatically for you without the need to disable > download new plugin > ftp plugin across > re-enable etc.

    The following is a list of plugins I’m currently using, all of which showed no problems in upgrade.

    I’ve one or two advertising plugins to check across other blogs yet (as well as PodPress – has anyone had any notable issues?) but with a smooth transition to 2.5 I’ll be rolling out the update across the rest of my little blogging empire over the next few days.

  • WordPress Hooks At A Glance

    Came across a handy resource for WordPress themers. If you’re like me and usually end up throwing countless additional time into the day by pouring through WordPress, hacking up themes for one reason or another, you should find the WordPress Hooks guide really useful.

    It has a huge selection of hooks documented and explained in good detail, and can be broken down to specific versions of WP as well. Worth a glance or a bookmark.

  • Localising Your Own Ad Content?

    Does anyone know if it is possible to localise content through WordPress? e.g. You’ve got an Amazon.com Associate and an Amazon.co.uk Associate and want to display the .com ads to US based users and .co.uk content to European users?

    Any quick fix before I go hacking something?

  • Comments Error Fixed

    As highlighted by Keith this morning, and realised by myself last night, error messages have been appearing on the blog since the WP2.1 update yesterday when you go to post a comment.

    This was caused by a problem in the Subscribe To Comments plugin, which has been resolved by updating to the latest version (2.1). If you don’t already allow people to subscribe to comments via email I would suggest it, any time there’s the opportunity to do it on an interesting blog post I’ll take it…

    Top notch plugin too…

  • WordPress Upgrade Fairly Painless

    Pretty painless upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Started the ball rolling about 9:10 and its done as of now (bulk of it was me backing up EVERYTHING from the server, including the DB, something I should have done long ago).

    Initial impressions seem fine, few changes to the backend including the way the links are worked. Had to make a template tweak or two in order to display the links by category again ( get_links_list() bundles them all together, drop in ‘id’ – get_links_list(‘id’) and you’re laughing). Hopefully it will speed things up a little bit while browsing and posting.

    Also added the ‘Snap Preview Anywhere‘ plugin to the theme – think its nice to get a view of sites you’re being linked off to, spread the love and all that craic. Register on the site for your key, download and install the plugin, enter said key and away you go.

    Update: Triple post due to Internal 500 error…. have to check about that. Also manage area isn’t displaying any posts…. again, gotta check that out, likely the upload.
    Update 2: Above problems fix…. also replaced out Ultimate Tag Warrior to the latest version, seemed to help.
    Update 3: Think I was wrong about that…. could be a project for lunch time!

  • WordPress 2.1 – Get It While Its Hot

    Packed with some interesting new features and developments, WordPress 2.1 was released tonight and is available for download. Now, armed with more info on WordPress MU than you can shake a stick at after the weekend its time to get cracking on a multiuser install at KilkennyMusic.com. A 1.1 upgrade on the way I think?

    A quick episode of Commander In Chief then its off to update kenmc.com…

  • Geeky WordPress Theme

    It has been a while since I blogged about an actual WordPress theme but you’ve got to hand it to the developer behind this theme, whoever it is certainly breaks away from the norm in terms of WordPress theming. While it won’t have much use for the average blogger or average web browser, techies, geeks and fans of the ole command line approach to things (which includes me) should get a kick of it.

    Command Line Interface WordPress Theme

    The theme has been AJAXed up to the hilt and works pretty much as a command line interface should. The version linked above seems like the pilot, take a trip to the developers site for a complete version if you’re looking to download it. Gets a thumbs up for creativity from me anyway!

  • New Year – New Theme For Your Blog?

    If one of the things you’ve decided for the New Year is to change the appearance of your blog or to develop your own theme, Rachel at Cre8D Design has put together a list of useful resources to help to create a WordPress theme.

    Personally, I’d suggest having a look around the WordPress Themes site and maybe stick your head in at WP-Plugins, between the two of them you’re likely to be able to create something!

  • Canvas : Follow Up

    Paul Browne busied himself for 2 hours over the weekend and got his new Canvas-driven theme live on his blog. You can read about his experience here in the comments on the first post.

    Meanwhile, Sean McNamara has also tackled Canvas over the weekend, turning out this theme for The Technology Blog. A little bit longer spent on the theme and a little extra working around to turn it out bu

    Nice to see some variations appearing… (Nice to see people trying their own themes…)

  • Design Your WordPress Theme

    Trouble picking a theme for WordPress? Unsure of writing the stylesheets, or deciding what you want, or knowing how to display what you want?

    Might be worth giving Canvas a look if you’re a WordPress user…

  • Adsense-heavy Theme for WordPress

    WordPress users can bask in the new adsense optimised theme, Ads Minded, which utilises what the author has dubbed ‘QuickSense’, providing a high CTR AdSense layout, support for various styles and shapes of AdSense ad units including link units, banners, skyscrapers via a three-column layout, with an optional square ad position which can be switch on and off. Coupled with several handy plugins, for those of you interested in blogging for money, this could be something to look at….

    Or at least something for me to get my hands on and improve the looks of… 😉

  • Updating WordPress

    Following on from my post about upgrading to the latest version of WordPress from an older one (1.5) I’ll have to say that its actually quite easy. Still to apply the changes to this blog, I hadn’t realised that NFLView.com was also running WP1.5. After almost 200 posts to the ‘View since Christmas coupled with the plugins that I use over there, I was a bit sceptical about doing an update but it worked like a charm. After checking over at WordPress.org to see if there were any serious difficulties involved I set about the update this morning in a simple way…

    1. Dump the WordPress tables from the database via PHPMyAdmin (just in case)
    2. Backed up the WordPress config file (or at least made note of its contents)
    3. Disabled all current plugins
    4. Uploaded the latest version to the server, overwriting whatever was in its way
    5. Run an internal WP upgrade script (as suggested by WordPress.org)
    6. Re-enabled the plugins and switched to the new theme

    Overall the process took about 20 minutes, tipping around, making sure I had everything backed up. In the end, I didn’t really need everything backed up. The main plugins I was using (subscribe to comments, democracy poll, technorati tags etc.) all worked fine in transition and there was no real downtime. If I knew my current theme was going to work moving over to WordPress 2.0.2 I would do it in a flash, but for anyone considering the change – piece of cake!

  • Upgrading to WordPress 2.02

    Just out of interest… has anyone been in a position where they have bucket loads of posts on their blog and buckets of plugins, but would like to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress?

    I’m running 2.01 now on 3 different blogs, and 2.02 on two more and feel the time could be right to make the move from 1.52 for kenmc.com. Has anyone had any issues in upgrading? Serious downtime? Broken plugins? Lost posts?

  • Geotagging Kenmc.com

    For those of you interested, here’s a good web tutorial on Geotagging, particularly handy when it comes to your blog as you can indentify the content of your blog to a specific country, or region, including your RSS feeds. It’s been around a small age already on the web and I have it active on DeviantART to check nearby Deviants, so now I can check nearby bloggers I suppose!

    The site I was using was FeedMap (because blogs + maps = feedmap, isn’t it obvious?), still in beta as is most web 2.0 stuff floating around the web. Its a handy too to see who’s floating around your area.

    If you’re interested, and using WordPress, you can insert the following code into your header.php which will geotag your website…

    meta name="ICBM" content="52.6442, -7.2395"
    meta name="geo.position" content="52.6442;-7.2395"

    Then to tag my RSS feeds, I simply added the following lines between the before the last line of wp-rdf.php


    geo:Point
    geo:lat 52.6442 /geo:lat
    geo:long>-7.2395 /geo:long
    /geo:Point

    (Don’t forget that you have to open and close your tags…. the icbm tags are coupled with the longitude and latitude namespaces)

    Those locations will most likely stick you on the Dublin Road, just about at my office, only a stonesthrow from home anyway…

    If that doesn’t make any sense to you at all the I suggest reading this tutorial on making your site and RSS feed locatable!

    —–
    Followup…. if you’re feeling lazy… sign up to feedburner and you can geotag your RSS feed straight from there!