Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

WordPress Cribsheet

Friday, March 15th, 2013

WordPress Upgrade to 3.5.1: My Immediate Issues & Fixes

Friday, March 15th, 2013

Recently, my Hosting account received an upgrade on WordPress to version 3.5.2.  Some immediate issues:

  • Sudden increase in Spam user-comments
    • Possibly coincidental, but can’t help wondering whether its associated with the upgrade, like maybe it caused blog pages to be more spam-machine-compatible?  Just a gut-feeling, no knowledge or evidence.
    • The volume was not impossible to handle manually, just irritating.
    • I chose to enable a shielding-service.  It seems to be working so far, blocking Spam but of course at the cost of discouraging user-comments, as well as some other things…
  • Toolbar did not have the Indent button.  In fact only the first half of that toolbar was present, buttons like Bold and Indent buttons are normally to be found in the second row of that toolbar, which was not present.
    • Fix: Click the right-most button, whose ToolTip says, unhelpfully, “wordpress.wp_adv_desc” (sounds to me like some unfinished programming…).  It enables the second row of the toolbar.

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Better WordPress Blogs at 1&1

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

This blog is hosted at 1&1 where I use their default Blog option from my account’s Control Panel.  It works but is extremely limited and the web-based editing facility is cluncky and glitchy, while its resulting text layout is …well.. pathetic.  So I googled around to see what others have done about it – what am I missing?  It seems the best way is to create a fresh blog based on more current /comprehensive WordPress software working with the MySQL database that comes as part of the 1&1 packag.  Just one concern, before I leap into it: how do I migrate existing content off the existing blog (preferably retaining their existing timestamps) ?

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WordPress – Getting Spaces Between Paragraphs

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

Issues:

  • In this blog, I never moved beyond novice newbie level of WordPress use.   I’m using the WordPress service that comes as part of OneAndOne’s hosting.  I edit via their web-based editor, which I now realise is a widely used one, called TinyMCE.  That editor is frustrating to use, not only because it is fragile and clunky but in particular if I try to break text into paragraphs then it removes the break, producing a single block of text.  Surely there is a better way, but I have little time to invest in looking into this.
  • The main workaround I have been using is to employ bullet-point lists.  Each paragraph goes under its own bullet-point.  The result doesn’t look too great but at least it’s better than monolithic blocks of text.

But there are other ways.

The simplest, I just discovered right now (by making a fortunate  mistake) is to click the Indent button, even when there are no bullet points.  This seems to put the text into a paragraph-respecting mode.

I wish I had found this a long time ago!  Though it’s still a bit clunky/fragile, e.g. how come this very line didn’t get spaced only one line below the previous paragraph…

There is also another approach:

Can I upgrade the version of WordPress on my OneAndOne package?