Deborah Woehr

This plugin is loaded with all kinds of features that can give you the stats on your blog in at least twenty different ways. As good as this plugin is, it isn’t without its problems. First of all, it took about a week for the plugin to kick in and start culling the data on my various blogs.

Then I read a comment in one of my readers’ blogs who said that this blog was running slow. If that wasn’t enough, he couldn’t post a comment last weekend. I had no idea why until another blogger who told me that he was having similar problems with his blogs. I’ve since disabled the plugin.

While it provides excellent data for WBA, it’s overkill on my personal blog. Hopefully this will solve the speed and commenting problems.

A big thanks goes to Marti and Scot for testing out my feed. I spent over half of yesterday trying to figure out what caused the problem, which actually began before I left for vacation. I started seeing the feeds for this blog, the blog I had on my main directory, and my “On Book Design” blog merge together. Not only was my RSS acting up, but I lost valuable pages on my other two blogs.

The root of the problem was a missing file on this blog, which I wasn’t aware of until I changed my permalinks structure. With the other blogs, I installed WordPress from Fantastico. But with this blog, I downloaded the program to my computer before uploading it to my server. For some reason, the .htaccess file disappears on Unix and Linux systems.

If your Cpanel is linux-based, check to see if that file is installed. If not, you need to create a new file and change its permissions to 666 so WordPress can automatically update it when you make a change to the permalinks structure or install a plugin that requires this file.

It’s also important if you’re going to be creating multiple blogs on one domain, like I did. Make sure each blog has that .htaccess file. I deleted most of the blogs and subdomains during the trail and error process of this fix.

I’ve kept my “On Book Design” blog, but will move it to its own domain because readers have shown an interest in it. That’s on my To-Do list for next week. Right now, my novel is screaming for my attention.

Melly was kind enough to tell me that she is having problems viewing my feed in her RSS reader. While the Feedburner link appears to be working okay, the WordPress link isn’t. I’m getting this External Protocol Request whenever I click on the WP RSS link. I’ve experienced this with other blogs when I tried to access their RSS feed.

Poring through the WordPress Codex has proven futile so far. So I posted a support ticket on their forum. I hope that I’ll wake up tomorrow and find either an answer or some direction.

Update: I’ve disabled the Feedburner redirect option and pasted the WP RSS link into a desktop feedviewer. I was able to read this blog’s feed. Will you test the link (below) on your aggregators? I’d like to see if I’ve solved the problem.

http://www.deborahwoehr.com/blog/feed/

Canvas is a widget-like program that allows you to create your own layout, using the drag and drop method. It’s not out yet, but I’ve signed up for their waiting list. The only downside I see to this program is the compatibility with the many themes out there. It is compatible with Kiwi.

Once it comes out, I’ll test it and let you know how it works.

John asked me how to hide the standard WordPress header type without deleting the title and description from their fields in the Options menu. I did this once with another blog, but realize now that I did it the hard way. After experimenting with the Kubric file (and breaking it), I decided to perform a search. I found this link, which offers a good variety of tips and tricks for your headers. Enjoy!

Designing Headers

I’ve kept tabs on Emily Robbins’ Comprehensive List of Free WordPress Themes for the past year. Around this time last year, the list of themes was somewhere around 280. Today, it’s reached 615 and counting!

More will be added, thanks to this year’s Wordpress 2.0 Theme Design Competition.

After wading through the sea of “Help Me!” threads at the WordPress Support site, I found two sets of instructions on how to upgrade to 2.01. They were a bit different from each other, so I will combine them, adding my own tips.

1. Back up your blog
2. Deactivate all of your plugins, and set your theme to the default.
3. Delete all of your current WordPress files except the config.php and the wp-content folder.
4. Upload the new files
5. Run wp-admin/upgrade.php
6. Activate your theme and see if it works.
7. Activate each of your plug-ins, one at a time. Test each to see if they work or break your blog.

Good luck!

I not only figured out how to upgrade this blog, but I’ve imported all of the posts from my old blog, including the comments. Woo-hoo!

I’ve got to hand it to the WP team in that they work fast. WordPress 2.01 fixes 99% of the bugs that plagued the new system, including the image uploading. I’m going to test this out on a new blog before I update this one. Click on the link below to find out exactly what they fixed and to download the latest version.

2.01 Release

On the surface, this tool is very nice. The problem I’ve been having is with the links. Often, they won’t show up as links the first time around. When I paste a link into my post or page, it inserts an “x” between the “a” and the “href” in the HTML code. I’ve tried to fix this manually through the HTML interface, to no avail.

Excerpted from Problogger’s Ten Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.0

There are a couple problems I see, as a web purist, with this approach. TinyMCE, though it will probably continue to be improved, creates really shoddy HTML in some cases. Empty tags, funky cut-and-paste, and the now-internally-infamous shoddy image feature makes it great for quick and dirty entries but poor for day-to-day usage. I don’t use Safari, the preferred browser for most Mac users, so I can’t be sure if it works yet for you Safari users, but last time I recall it didn’t.

Turning off the WYSIWYG option in your profile solves these problems.