Archive for the 'WordPress' category

Some people have been telling me: “You blog! That must take a lot of time and you must be there each and every day”.

Don’t worry, I may post something on Roumazeilles.net every day, but it does not mean that I am in front of the keyboard every day. Far from it. I am using one small advantage of WordPress (the software package supporting my web site). I can write posts and schedule them for future publication.

That way, I have no limit to my inspiration. For example, I have currently scheduled weekly posts about optical illusions for the coming 6 months, a full week of feline-related news (daily posts next week), a full week of daily videos titled “when XXXXX get bored” in a couple of months.

Pour ceux qui souhaitent le savoir, chaque utilisateur sur le site Rouamzeilles.net peut avoir des droits différents selon le rôle qui lui est attribué (par mes soins). Les droits attachés ne sont pas toujours évidents, même pour un habitué de WordPress. C’est pourquoi j’ai produit le tableau ci-dessous pour expliquer.

Cliquer sur le tableau pour le voir en plus grand.

As you may have noticed (because of the unusually long time it took me to do the upgrade), I upgraded Roumazeilles.net to the newest version of WordPress 2.3.2.

You should see no significant impact (except some security improvements and in the administration part, if you want to propose an article). But if there is something, feel free to tell me.

While installing the new forums software on Roumazeilles.net (bbPress) [it was only an evaluation that will not be followed immediately by a full implementation], I noted a few of the details I needed to do in order to reach a conveniently installed package. Since bbPress is only lightly documented, it may be helpful for other.

Aim

The first objective was to install two sets of forums (in French and in English, as for the news blogs) in their respective URLs.

• English forums
• French forums

The locations have an influence on the rest since I still wanted to have a good integration with the wordpress blogs. You are expected to install the forums inside the blog.

So, here is how I did it.

(more…)

The design of a web site is notoriously opposed to the use of rich and varied fonts: You are strongly invited to stick to the small list of common fonts. Unfortunately, this is not always enough. If you already started exploring alternatives like text-in-GIF-images, have a look at this hackzine article: HOWTO - Use rich fonts in your web design.

I am in love with the Opera web browser. I use it for 99% of my web browsing, so it is also the tool I use when writing posts for the roumazeilles.net web site. The only thing that I did not have right out-of-the-box after download was the ability of checking my spelling (and several people noticed a few typos in my posts along with some of my bad English).

So I decided to add a spell checker to Opera (a plug-in to limit the risks of my own typos). I found a pretty simple one: Aspell for Windows that Opera will automatically recognize when it is installed. It has dictionaries for many languages (it is easy to create one from a mere word list in your own language if you need to). It supports several languages at the same time.

The only drawback is that it is not working in real-time, but you have to call it from a right-click on the mouse into the post box. I would have preferred an active underlining of wrongly-spelled words (like in Word or OpenOffice-Write).

May be you know a better one that you would like to share…

Note for new bloggers: Even if I have been waiting long for this, typos in your posts just pushes forward a bad image for your own web site. Go and correct this now.

Source: http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/.

You have a web site, you want to see its traffic growth (it appears that this is the number one way web site creators spend their time: They track each and every little traffic change with stat tools). I offer you here a frighteningly long list of ways to satisfy your worst statistical perversions.

There are two ways to read this post, one is to go to the web site and to look at the pages; The other is to check the RSS news feed ().

If the number of visits is the judge, there are only very slim chances that you know about the mere existence of the RSS thread . This is why, I’ll try to speak a little about it and give you some tips about it.

The central idea is to ease the reading og articles from a web site by grouping them in a simpler form. You need a separated reader but, you may not know it, you already have one included in most modern web browsers. Instead of going to the site to check if there are news, your browser will receive updates any time there is something new. You’ll know if it is worth coming to the original web site.

Here are some informations as they were grouped by Codesqueeze.

Beginners

Veterans

Advice to bloggers

Now, if you blog or if you have a web site, it is strongly advised to include your own RSS version of the news and posts that you produce. It is favoring the most experienced readers who happen to also be the ones most able to extend the buzz around your activity or web site.

For the users of WordPress blogging software and WordPress.com sites, it’s just a matter of using the feature already included in your web site. You just have to make sure that the template you use is properly showing the existence of the RSS thread.

All WordPress users should know that their prefered tool for creating a web site has just been upgraded. WordPress 2.3 is now ready and rolled into the public.

WordPress is currently preparing a new version 2.3 that will bring new possibilities to work together (multi-author blogs and web sites) and to enrich the articles/posts.

We should see the final 2.3 version on September 20th.

You may remark (or may not) the appearance of a new feature on this web site: on each individual post page, there is now a little list of similar articles. It is intended to help you discover new articles that you may not know but are related to the post your are reading at this time.

Have fun!

For the interested WordPress users, I can tell that to get this feature I used the “related_posts” plugin of Wasabi.

Some advice provided by Donncha for those who would like to move from PHP4 to PHP5 on a server supporting WordPress exploitation. Nothing big, but it is always good to check the items she points at:

• Location of PHP.INI
• Update to mysql and gd libraries
• Compatibility with WP-cache