chrisg.com

I just majorly goofed on my blog. While upgrading a bunch of blogs to Wordpress 2.2 I overwrote my theme before checking my backup. It seems my FTP had not managed to transfer my sidebar so when I had a look at my handy work I had the default staring back at me.

• Don’t do upgrades in a rush, take your time
• Always take regular backups, not just when you are upgrading
• Check your backups before making big changes
• Rename any themes you customise so you are using a completely unique name to prevent overwrites
• Use Subversion or some other version control system if you have it so you can roll back changes

Seems I have things pretty much back to normal. That could have been nasty!

The buy me a beer plugin is not the only plugin I have been trying out recently. Here are some other Wordpress plugins you might want to try out

• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - sitemaps are not just useful for visitors but can help your posts get indexed also. This plugin makes creating a sitemap automatic and painless. I had to tweak the look of it a bit, perhaps in the next version there will be more formatting options.
• Comment Timeout - I noticed a lot of the spam was appearing on older posts, particularly manual spams which Akismet isn’t fantastic at catching. My assumption is the spammers were looking for pages with Google pagerank. Here is a solution, close comments after a certain duration. Combined with setting comments containing links as spam this has cut down my housekeeping quite a lot (obviously not all comments with links are spam and the few that are not I can retrieve from the spam queue, but 99% of the time they are and stay there, and yes I regard “signatures” in blog comments as spam, comments already link back without the extra clutter of a “signature”).
• Better Comments Manager - Once you have spam sorted you need to reply to your real comments. The new version of this plugin makes it easier to work with comments by creating a special control panel page that allows you to read and reply all on one screen.
• WordPress Database Backup - I am not sure why Wordpress does not contain this in the default install any more but backups are essential. Use this plugin to automatically email you a blog database backup every week.

Those are my new recommendations, which plugins have you found particularly useful lately? Let me know in the comments …

You might have noticed under my posts a little cup of coffee icon. I am trying out a plugin for Ankesh called “Buy Me a Beer Plugin” …

This WordPress plugin allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal. The plugin is widget enabled.

So the idea is if a reader likes your post they might send you a couple of dollars as a tip, enough to buy you a coffee or a beer. Neat idea, eh?

Update: My small problem fixed, you can buy me a coffee again now

In my last post I said blogs were an excellent content management system. A couple of people asked me to elaborate. What is a CMS and why are they a good thing?

What is a CMS?

A CMS (Content Management System) is simply a computer software package that makes it easy to create web pages. In the old days to create a web site you would need knowledge of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and some other geeky stuff.

Content Management Systems, sometimes also called Publishing Systems, came along to allow non-geeks to do the job. Initially they were bespoke-built for purpose, tailor-made to fit the exact need. Expensive generic CMS packages such as systems from Vignette were released and adopted by big websites, often they were ludicrously complicated and enefficient but still better than doing it the hard way. These were snidely labelled “consultantware” as rather than a team of webmonkeys you needed a team of consultants to get the best out of them.

Over time those products improved, cheaper alternatives were introduced, and some of the nastier aspects simplified. Many smaller companies though still avoided them because their needs were modest. Only larger organisations needed the multiple layers of procedure, checkpoints, version control, “work flow”, etc. Smaller outfits were quite happy to use Frontpage (shudder), Dreamweaver (smaller shudder) or cheap and cheerful ASP/PHP homebrew/open source setups.

Today there is a big overlap between low-end CMS and modern Blog packages. It is hardly worth making the distinction in most non-geek discussions of the topic.

Why should I use a CMS?

If you are not using a CMS then you might be missing out on the following benefits

• Easy - using a CMS is easier than edit and upload, you don’t need mad geek skillz just the same level of technical proficiency required to use Hotmail etc
• Fast - just type … that’s it
• Consistant - by using page templates all that you alter is the content, it keeps things nice and easy for you and your reader and cuts down on bugs
• Reactive - need to change the copyright notice in your footer? One change reflected instantly over thousands of pages.

Blog as CMS

Particularly in the case of Drupal and Wordpress, software seen as just for blogs make excellent CMS systems. Drupal even has some workflow and version control features and Wordpress has plugins to make it easier to make backups. With both you can change the front page to a more traditional website feel rather than the sea of news blog style.

The biggest benefits of using a Blog package as your CMS are price (free!) and ease of use. If you can blog you can create a traditional site and vice versa. Add to that the hundreds of free templates available that can be tweaked endlessly. There are tons of people willing to help you do it too. No brainer.

Summary

With Blog packages, the days of HTML geekery and FTP’ing changes are over. If you are not using Wordpress or Drupal as your website CMS I would take a good long look now.

Mark Angeletti has written a post on some essential WordPress tweaks, check them out at  WordPress - From Install to Pimped Out

This article will share some plugins, some code adjustments and some tweaks that will make your website more user-friendly, easier on your web server, and possibly increase your traffic.

I desperately need to do the printer-friendly one, a reader pulled me up about it earlier but I still haven’t found the time (design stuff takes me much longer than normal people!). The .htaccess hack is also worth looking at. Personally I don’t like hacking .htaccess so if my web host doesn’t sort this out for me (Dreamhost does) I use the No-WWW wordpress plugin!

Tags: blogging, wordpress, cms, hacks, tips, plugins, apache

Here is a quick tip for any Wordpress users frustrated at the crappy default page titles you get with most templates. I got asked yesterday how I changed mine and if I used a plugin. No, it’s way easier than that.

Go into your Wordpress admin and navigate to Presentation then Theme Editor. You need to edit your Header template. Find the Title tags. Replace with the following:


<title><?php

?></title>

What this code will do is display your blog name (set in options) for the homepage, otherwise your post title (or archives, whatever) followed by your blog name.

If you want to display something other than your blog name replace “bloginfo('name')” with the text of your choice surrounded by quotes, eg.

echo "Chris is fantastic";

That’s all there is to it really. Let me know if I haven’t made this clear.

Mark is asking When Will You Upgrade to Vista? To answer your question Mark, not any time soon. Microsoft hasn’t exactly completely lost me as a customer but neither have they done anything at all that makes me want to upgrade. I will elaborate but first here is what Mark has to say

Is there enough in Vista to convince you to jump early on the bandwagon? Having used Vista, I think it’s just fine. The look and feel are slicker, the security features are better (albeit somewhat annoying) and multi-media features are impressive. Despite all that, Vista is an upgrade rather than a new release, and like any upgrade, you really need to ask yourself if it’s worth the hassle and aggravation to move from something that works to something that apparently works better or differently.

Based on conversations with people within the tech community, I’ve come across one person who has upgraded to XP (and it hasn’t been the most pleasant of experiences). Meanwhile, I’ve heard of several people making the move to Mac. Is there a trend here? Probably not but the Mac’s stability and hassle-free OS may be starting to win over more people who wouldn’t have even considered moving to the Mac side. There also appears to be growing interest in Linux (a few folks at a party on the weekend were talking about Ubuntu)

First of all, Mark! Talking about Linux … at a party? Shame on you, heh.

My thoughts are closer to the people in the tech community Mark has been speaking to. I upgraded from Windows XP to a Mac laptop, a dual-boot XP and Ubuntu laptop (which still doesn’t work wirelessly under Ubuntu, curses!) and a Centos Linux based LAMP development server. Out of these machines it is the Mac I like best.

My Windows desktop dev machine is staying XP for now but since I get Microsoft software for free while I still have my MVP MSDN subscription (the award expired but my subscription has yet to) I might just give Vista a try at some point. I have real doubts it is powerful enough to run Vista, and I have even more doubts I will gain anything from it. In fact my guess is I will spend fruitless and expensive hours swearing at it and go back to XP.

There has been nothing at all I have read that makes me want to upgrade. Many people are saying the Vista experience is slower and more frustrating than XP. I don’t play games, XP works, it is all set up how I like it. I’m productive and do not have any serious security worries.

Microsoft, anybody, give me one good reason why I should upgrade …

Jeremy Zawodny has gotten his dislike of JavaScript Badges and Widgets off his chest

With all the talk of how the web has “become writable” with advent of blogs and self-publishing tools, you’d think that we’d have a better way of getting third party content on to our sites. Given that an overwhelming number of sites that are likely running PHP or some other “dynamic” hosting setup, these least common denominator solutions just feel wrong. (This could easily be followed by a rant on problems with the spread of web services and RSS.)

I mostly agree. Some blogs are getting pretty ugly from excessive use of these knick knacks and the vast majority of them don’t add to the visitors experience even when they don’t detract from it.

The appeal though for the average blogger is the ability to just copy and paste some code. While Jeremy makes good points he is talking from a geeks perspective, not the average Joe/Jill Bloggers. Anything requiring hacking PHP or interfacing with web services is just not going to catch on. Heck a lot of bloggers I know ask for help installing plugins.

Aaron has posted an excellent reference for anybody interested in editing or migrating templates. In his Template Tag Reference Sheet he cross-references tags between the Blogger, MovableType and Wordpress platforms. Worth bookmarking and coming back to when you needed.

It’s a shame Drupal isn’t in there. Hey Aaron, here are the Drupal equivalents (using PHPTemplate)

“Non-Loop” (page.tpl.php)

• $base_url
• $site_name
• $site_slogan

“Loop” (node.tpl.php)

• $content
• $teaser
• $name
• $terms

Note: Some of the above variables are not always available, you might need to use variable_get or add to a Global statement

37signals has put Getting Real online for free. While I don’t agree with everything they write it is a damn good read and has been very influential. The main thing I like about their philosophy is the emphasis on small and lean and containing the scope. Good advice.