Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

Downtime, with database error

Apologies to those of you who noticed a brief downtime last night.  My hosting company was moving the database from one IP address to another, and they have warned me about it a few times early on the way.  All I had was to update configuration of the blog, but somehow that slipped through my memory.  Once I noticed the problem, it was trivial to fix.  Everything is back and should be working just fine now.

This blog wasn’t the only one affected – I’m hosting quite a few  web sites, and most of them had the same problem.  As far as I can see, all of them are up now.  Let me know if you notice that something is still broken.

More polish with WordPress plugins

I am still polishing a few things here and there on this site. If you don’t follow my Twitter stream, then here is a quick update for you since I wrote about it the last time.

  • Installed 404 Notifier plugin. When somebody hits a non-existing page on my site (Error 404 – Not Found), I get an email telling me which page was missing, from where the visitor came, and what browser he used. Since I don’t have the time to monitor my web server logs closely, it was often that I missed something and didn’t know about it. Now, this plugin tells me if I need to fix something. First few days were a real something for my Inbox, but it seems that things are slowing down. Most of the stuff has been fixed and now it’s mostly notifications from SPAM bots and references from some really old web sites.
  • Installed Search Unleashed plugin (and removed Search Hilight plugin). Search Unleashed provides an extended (and much needed) functionality for WordPress searching. First of all, it does plenty of highlighting. When you search for something on this site, or if you came to this site from search results of one of the major search engines, you’ll see your query highlighted on the page. Secondly, Search Unleashed extends searching with patterns. So instead of searching for “Limassol” and then “Limasos”, you can now search for “Limas*”. You can also use quotes to search for an exact phrase. And you can even use some logic operators. If you are interested in these things, check plugin’s page for more information.
  • Installed WP-Cache plugin. This one should have improved the speed of the site quite a bit. Unfortunately, I can’t make sure of that myself, as my Internet connection is the real bottleneck. However, I do have a feeling that loading of the front page is a bit faster. On the other hand, I get a feeling that posting a comment now is a bit slower. If you noticed any speed changes here in the last few days, please let me know in the comments.
  • Installed Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugin. This one should help Google (and a couple of other search engines that support the standard) to index the web site better. Hopefully, this will bring more people to the site and increase the number of comments we have here.
  • Installed WP_PingPreserver plugin. I often publish posts with links to a few previous articles, and when I do it, only the first of the articles gets a pingback. With this plugin, all of the linked articles should be pinged.
  • Fixed Google Analytics code. Now my statistics will work again and I’ll know better who visits the site, when, from where, and why. Spotting problems will also be much easier.
  • Fixed plenty of links. Mostly these were links to my old photo albums. Before, I used to have them on my server, but then moved them to my Flickr photo stream. The links in the old posts were broken until recently. Now you’ll be redirected to the appropriate section in my Flickr archives.
  • Added protection from some major SPAM bots and other “bad guys”. This was done through .htaccess file with many of the tips coming from this article. If you suddenly get a “Forbidden” error message or get redirected somewhere that you shouldn’t, please let me know via comments. If comments don’t work for you, send me an email, SMS, or IM.

Update: Oh, and I’m still moving things around the sidebars.  This should stop eventually…

Having fun with the Sidebar

I had a mood and a few moments to spend on making my blog better. This time I decided to take a closer look at the sidebar. I’m not finished yet, but the changes that you can see are the following:

  • Compressed archives. Archives have been taking too much of valuable space, so now they are compressed. You can either navigate (page by page) through archives for a particular year (which, I guess is not very useful), or click on a plug sign near the year that you are interested in. You’ll see the year expand into a list of months that have posts. Click on any month, and you’ll see the posts. If you want similar functionality for your blog, I used the Collapsible Archive Widget plugin.
  • On this day. I’ve been blogging for a few years now and managed to accumulate quite a few posts here. But neither me, nor most of the visitors to this blog ever went through the archives of this blog. It’s a shame, since there is plenty of cool stuff in there. I’ve installed On this day plugin, which shows up as a widget in the sidebar and shows a list of everything that got posted on this day in previous years. Also, if you are not on a front page, but reading a post, sidebar will show you more posts not from today, but from the day that post was published. It’s fun, like any other attempt of a time machine.

Update: Collapsible Archive Widget plugin has been replaced by Fancy Archives plugin, which is a bit more flexible and suits the need better.

See the face behind the comment

I’m glad to say that this blog gets more comments these days than it ever had. This is probably due to several reasons – frequent posting on my side, improved web design of the site, recent comments list on the sidebar, email notifications for replies to your comments, etc. Most of these improvements were introduced via different WordPress plugins.

Today I am adding yet another one, which will, hopefully, bring in even more comments by making the web site a little bit more personal. I’ve installed the Easy Gravatars WordPress plugin, which shows the author’s picture near the comment. Pictures are taken from the Gravatar.com web service, which was recently acquired by Automattic – the company making excellent WordPress software and running WordPress.com web service.

If you don’t have an account at Gravatar, no image will be shown near your comments. But if you do, your comments on this site, as well as on any other web site that uses Gravatar.com will become more recognizable. So, I suggest you go register and upload the image of yours – it’s really simple, straightforward, and free.

So, let’s see faces now behind all those comments…

P.S. : I mentioned avatars before on this post.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1

I’m doing lots of silly stuff.  Who else could post a few articles in the morning, and then start with major WordPress upgrade?  Surely, there was a disruption of service while many of your came to read the posts.  Sorry, guys.

The good news is that I finally did it.  The blog was lagging behind the recent security updates and new features, running on WordPress 2.2.2 .  Today I updated it first to 2.2.3, which went without any problems.  Then I went for 2.3.1, which broke a few things.  I had to remove a few files and re-upload them and then fix a few places in the database and adjust the theme a bit.

All my posts were under a single category, and were tagged with Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which WordPress 2.3 provided an import for.  That thing didn’t work properly.  Probably, because I have a few thousands of posts, and a few thousands of tags, and importing them all takes more time than a browser is willing to wait without timing out.

But I don’t care for that right now.  It was a mess anyway.  Some posts got tags imported, others didn’t.  I’m not going back to fix them all. What’s done is done and it’s time to move on.  All posts will still remain under the single category (General), but that won’t be displayed.  Instead, you’ll see the tags to each post.  I’ll try to keep them orderly, and maybe even organize them a bit later.  For now, if you want to find something, use the search box of this site, Google, or drop me a line and I’ll try to locate the bit for you.

If you notice any misbehavior of the site, please let me know.  Thank you.