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Entries Categorized as 'Blogging'

Tweaks to fix annoying Wordpress 2.5 backend

Date April 9, 2008

If Wordpress 2.5’s annoying backend is driving you crazy, here are some tweaks to keep you sane until, hopefully, they change things for the better.
First, here’s the list Sillybean kindly compiled of issues with some commentary from me explaining what they’re about:

* the whole issue of below-the-post vs. the right sidebar. (In the Write Post [...]

Permalinks Migration plugin for Wordpress

Date April 8, 2008

I recently decided to change the permalink structure on one of my blogs. The Permalinks Migration Plugin promises to do that seamlessly for you by giving 301 redirects from the old links to the new, so the search engines update (just like they would if you carefully went through and made htaccess redirects for every [...]

Dear Wordpress: please change these things back

Date April 6, 2008

I like the new Wordpress, but there are a couple of features that are really getting on my last nerve:

The permalink saves as soon as you start typing the entry. I never choose a title before writing the post. This means the permalink saves as “http://bluemushrooms.com/876″ and I have to edit it after I write [...]

The new Wordpress 2.5

Date April 4, 2008

The new version of Wordpress 2.5 is simply awesome.
It loads the site faster for visitors (and weary shared servers), which is always my main concern. It’s also got some features I’ve been hungering for forever:

Automatic updates!!!!! This is the Rolls Royce of the new features. Now when you see a plugin that needs to be [...]

Tam Tam’s span filter cuts out crazy amounts of spam comments

Date April 3, 2008

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I’d just installed TanTan’s Simple Spam Filter plugin for Wordpress and it seemed to be catching a lot of spam already, but the real test would come at the start of the month, when referral spammers go crazy.
Since then, I’ve seen this plugin perform through the beginnings [...]

Excerpt feeds are off-putting to visitors

Date March 26, 2008

I recently tested using excerpt feeds on this site (and a couple of others) for a few weeks - where you just see part of the article in your feedreader and have to click over here to read the rest - to see if it got more people to come over to the site and [...]

Who are you, my readers?

Date March 25, 2008

Wendy Piersall recently discovered that the people who read EMomsAtHome are not all moms. Or even parents. I can understand why she felt overwhelmed at first, but what a golden opportunity to learn how audiences really think. (Yes, I’m one of her readers who is not a mom, but didn’t let the brand stop me [...]

On video posting

Date March 14, 2008

I second everything Stu recently said about why he doesn’t like video blogging. It’s not quotable. It’s not skimmable. For a lot of us, it uses up more time than reading does.
But there’s one more thing that bugs me: it comes across as vain. There’s a certain sense that the blogger spends evenings at home [...]

Somehow I screwed up feeds; make sure you’re subscribed to what you want

Date March 11, 2008

I have no idea how I did it, but somehow despite lots and lots of checking, I screwed up the feed links on this site and AMJ when I set up AMJ. You may not be subscribed to the blog you mean to be subscribed to.
Now they’re working. If you want this feed, make sure [...]

The crap fling

Date March 3, 2008

A lot of successful blogs don’t offer anything of real value. They’ll take a problem everyone’s trying to solve, say they have a solution, and:

Write a post that just rehashes all the solutions we’ve already tried that didn’t work.
Write a post that sounds like it has the solution, if only you could figure out what [...]