wordpress

So you all know that I was updating to Wordpress 2.7 because I touched on it last week. I am glad I made the switch because the admin interface is really nice. I liked the old 2.6.x interface as well but the charcoal on white is very easy to look at. The layout has also been cleaned up. Seems like less on the page but all the same information is there. Better organization makes it seem much cleaner to the eye.

The image above is loaded with the Ozh Admin Menu plugin installed which I love. But the menu is still good if you don’t use it (shown below).

As you can see the menu on the left side is quite nice. The only reason I use the Ozh plugin is to maximize the area which I write in when posting. That helps with layout and design.

The upgrade went pretty much as normal. Their process is quite manual which is annoying and most likely why I don’t upgrade with every sub version. Their guides are excellent in explaining the manual process and I have never had a problem upgrading my version, it’s more a matter of reward vs. effort. This version is definitely worth it. I use a theme from Chris Pirillo so my front end layout is already pretty customized and this version didn’t break that, which is nice. It also means that it didn’t change much on the front page.

I recommend that you stick with the ‘complex’ instructions. The simple ones leave out a couple of details about how to backup that I would have probably done wrong, don’t take the chance!

Happy blogging

This upgrade looks exciting. Can’t wait to try it out.

Although tentatively scheduled for November, WordPress 2.7 looks to be as big of a release since WordPress 2.5, perhaps even bigger.

First Look At WordPress 2.7 | Weblog Tools Collection.

I have been searching for a plugin for Wordpress to automatically send an email to my subscribers each time I post a new article. I haven’t been very lucky, until now! I have found a tool called Subscribe2. The name isn’t very telling however it will let you set up how new blog subscribers are registered for emails by default.

Before installing this plugin at www.thesleepygeek.com, subscribers did not receive an email notifying them of a blog post. Since installing the plugin, I can set that any future blog subscriber will automatically be put on the email list (unless they choose not to) so when posting they will be notified.

This is an exciting addition to The Sleepy Geek. I have wanted a medium to notify users of new material if they are not involved with the Web 2.0 scene. It has been easy to setup plugins that update twitter, facebook, pownce, etc. but there are people in the world who don’t subscribe to those services.

I was looking to add some RSS feeds to my sidebars for popular news sites that I view daily, or close to daily. I looked at using the RSS widget that is included in Wordpress but it is very limited and I wanted something more customizable, which I found on KB Advanced RSS Widget.

Adam R. Brown is the author of this widget and I am pleased with what he has done. He has added features to allow you to list certain portions of the RSS feed coming in. Some of the other features include:

• Decide which RSS fields to display (as opposed to the default RSS widget, which limits you to link and title), and
• Decide how to format the fields (it doesn’t have to be a list if you don’t want it to be).

You are also able to add titles to each feed so that it is clear to your readers what they are looking at. With some work you can limit the title to a certain number of character or parse the first X amount of characters off the beginning. This is handy if your feed has a static lead in that you want to remove.

He also mentions that this is called an advanced product for a reason:

Be aware that it’s called “advanced” for a reason. You need to know some basic HTML, and possibly a little PHP, to use this fully.

I am sure most people who know how to install an widget on their own hosted Wordpress will be able to get this in there and working.

As you can see for now I have added feeds from Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo because they are a couple of my favorites. I think that I will eventually move towards putting a news service, or a more current events type blog on there. That seems to make more sense to me for my blog.

If you are looking to add RSS feeds to your site go take a look!

Of course when you log into the dashboard for your Wordpress installation it will scream at you to update if you are not already at the newest version. After looking at that message for a few weeks, I thought it was time.

The easiest way to upgrade your installation is to follow their installation/upgrade instructions. They are very simple and easy to follow. I however went one step further and read through their comprehensive upgrade instructions. I recommend these for anyone who has installed a plugin or theme that wasn’t part of the original installation. I am pretty sure that means most of us running Wordpress to host our own blog.

One of the most important steps that they talk about is to backup. This is truly a must! I recommend before starting your upgrade that you install a plugin called Backup Wordpress. Most of the Wordpress backup plugins that exist are designed to do database backups and not file backups. The upgrade of Wordpress will touch the database but only at the end of the procedure. This backup plugin will backup both the files and the database so you are safe.

Once you are sure you have a complete backup, then proceed with the upgrade. There is a lot of manual file manipulation so I recommend that you use an FTP client to connect to your server unless you have a very good web host interface.

Watch their steps carefully. The only one that I would recommend against is their suggestion to use a plugin called Maintenance Mode. This is a good plugin for when you are performing some tasks on the site, but in this case you are deleting so many supporting files the site will go down anyhow.

After the upgrade you will find some new features. Although they don’t seem huge, they are nice touches and typical of a sub-version release.

• Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
• Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
• Add paging of Themes in Design panel
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet
• Add sorting to gallery
• Export/import post excerpts
• Theme Previewer
• Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
• Show when a term is both a tag and a category
• Wider Profile fields
• TinyMCE 3.1
• Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Have fun blogging!

I have been waiting for the new Wicketpixie theme from Chris Pirillo for a couple of weeks. He has released the new version of it and I have installed it on my website.

NOW! I need to configure it There are so many options and possibilities with this theme that I am a little confused as to where to start. There are a few things that Chris recommends on his post such as plugins. I installed those and now I need to customize how the page is laid out. The problem with it is that there is some customizing to do straight in PHP. Not sure how that will work out.

Wish me luck.