In order to do my job properly for WLTC, I keep my ear to the WordPress ground for news about new themes and plugins.  Much of this news comes into Google Reader from a couple of news feeds I subscribe to.  I found an interesting one this morning that I had to chuckle about just a little – it’s a slightly different take on feed scraping.  The blog entry I found pointed at one of the plugins in today’s writeup – and used my words verbatim.  Granted, the guy added a couple more lines of explanation afterwards, so he at least had the decency to not completely plagiarize, but I had to laugh.  And I don’t actually have a problem with his copy-pasting my words into his own entry, since I often just copy-paste what the plugin authors write themselves when they post their plugins into the various directories around the web (though I do often make minor edits to correct for spelling and grammar errors and to generally make the announcements much more readable).  Mostly, I just thought it was interesting and amusing.

You may have noticed that periodically my site goes down due to a CPU Exceeded error from my server.  It’s been a constant annoyance the last two or three weeks, and research into the problem has not revealed the specific cause.  It may well be that I’m simply running too many sites from my server. 

In an effort to rectify the problem, however, I’ve just installed and activated WP-Cache to see if I can take some of the load off my server.  I don’t know if it will work or not, but I’m certainly going to give it a go.  If it appears to be working, then I’ll probably load it up onto most of the other WP modules I have running and see if that prevents that CPU server error from appearing again.

If something looks like it’s ‘off’ or not functioning properly, do please let me know.

Tags are coming to WordPress soon as part of the core.  This, to me, is both a good thing and a potential complication.  It’s good because suddenly WP users won’t have to rely on plugins to tag their entries.  The potential complication that could make things a bit more… sticky is whether or not the native WP tagging system will accommodate an import of tags from other plugins.  For instance, I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag my entries and make a pseudo-site index from the resultant tag cloud.  I spent a number of hours cataloguing my entire blog with UTW and the last thing I want to do is have to repeat the process with the native tag system in WP.  And believe me, I’ll likely prefer the WP tag system exactly because it’s native.  My philosophy has always been that the more you can do natively, the better, easier, and more efficient things will be because there will be less likelihood of coding conflicts to break functionality.  I’m really, truly hoping that WP will allow for some sort of tagging import for the most popular tag plugins because otherwise things are likely to become a bit of a headache again for a while as I transfer things over and manually go through and tag every single entry again.  We’ll just have to wait and see how the WP developers handle this new feature.  I’m always excited by new toys being added to the core WP files, but there’s always a bit of trepidation to go along with it, since there’s always the risk that many of my favorite plugins will break.  I’ve already lost one with the upgrade to 2.1.3; I hate to lose too many more.

I really, really, really wish that folks who release WordPress themes and plugins would include useful screenshots that actually show what the theme looks like or what the plugin actually does.  At the very least, it would be nice if they took the time to write a detailed description of the plugin.  I always skip themes and plugins that make me have to work to figure out what they look like or do.

I’m not sure how long it will stay, but I’ve got a new theme up.  It’s hopefully a bit simpler to look at, and the way it’s built, it forced me to turn off a number of plugins.  This should, in theory, allow the site to load quite a bit more quickly and hopefully eliminate my server overload problems.

And now that the weather is beginning to warm up again (hence, my depression going away) and my site looks a little less chaotic, I’ll see what I can do to get a few things written here this week.

Dang it.  I’ve learned my lesson.  It is possible to have too many toys, especially when some of those ‘toys’ involve badly written code.

Sometime in the course of the next week, I think I will be giving Writer’s Blog an overhaul.  For starters, I’m going to trim my number of plugins being used down to a somewhat more manageable number – the current count stands at 46 active.  A fair number of these will stay in place as they are, though I’ll be looking to see if any have been updated, since I use them on a daily basis as integral parts of my blogging process.  The rest, however, will get trimmed away.  Most of them are sidebar fodder, anyway. 

The reason behind this decision is because at least one of these plugins is built on bad coding.  As a result I’ve noticed that my site’s service keeps getting interrupted while the CPU resets itself.  Apparently, a script somewhere keeps overtaxing my server by not shutting itself off when it’s supposed to.  I’ve checked the error logs, but no one thing seems to stand out.  This is a pretty new problem that’s started only the last week, so I have to assume that it has something to do with one of the more recent plugins I’ve installed.  Either that, or traffic to my site has increased quite a bit, but I find that explanation less likely.

The other bit I think I’m going to do is either find or create a different to use here.  I do love the Navigation theme and it will always hold a special place in my heart.  Heck, I even built a bbPress theme that will partner with it.  And I’m sure I’ll trot it out again at some point down the road.  But I think I’d like to find something that’s a bit more minimalistic – plain, simple, and fast.  And since I’m already going to be shutting a number of sidebar plugins off to try to help ease off server loads, I might even be able to drop back down to a 2-column theme.  I’m just not sure, yet, what sort of layout I want for my blog, so I’m not sure if I’ll be looking for a theme that already exists or if I’ll custom-tailor something.  I’ll likely have to grab a sheet of paper and pencil and layout what things I want to appear on the site, where on the page I want it to sit, and what I want it to look like.  From there, that should guide my ultimate decision.

Frack.

One of my favorite WordPress plugins – Text Control – is broken with the update to WordPress 2.1.3.  Unfortunately, I didn’t notice it until this morning, so it’s probable that my blog was broken all day yesterday.  I’ve no idea if this plugin is still being supported – I certainly hope it is because all of my entries are formatted using Textile 2, which Text Control handles (or did) very nicely.

I can only hope it gets updated.  And soon.  For now, all my formatting from historical entries is broken.

Edit: I’ve reinstalled the Textile2 plugin (now TextileWrapper) so that at least my formatting works again.  But I’m back to the problem I had before where, for some reason, the quicktags for my Contact and PluginsUsed pages break.

Today I’m starting a series of entries on some of the software that I use on a daily basis, things that make my life a lot easier and simpler and allow me to do just about anything I want and need to from just about anywhere.  In this series, I’m going to talk about a handful of desktop applications I use frequently, portable applications (software that can be run directly from your flash drive), add-ons for Firefox that make the browser much more versatile and powerful, Greasemonkey scripts that further enhance the way you see aspects of certain websites, and WordPress plugins – both those that I consider essential to any WP installation and those that serve as WordPress glam.

This first part of the series will deal with defining some terms, since I know that not everyone is aware what some of these things are:

• Open Source refers to software that is open to anyone to modify and change.  The source code is open to everyone, and so there is usually a general community of people who collectively work on making it better.  Personally, I’ve come to swear by open source software because, first and foremost, it’s free.  These days, with the ready availability of software on the Internet, there is now open source software out there for just about anything that is just as good (and in some cases, better) than brand-name software that you can purchase from a software company.  Open source software also tends to be updated frequently, and many extensions and modifications may be available from other coders who wish to make the software more versatile and more powerful.  Firefox is one example of this type of software, which we will discuss in greater detail later.
• Freeware is similar to open source software is that it is freely available to all consumers.  The major difference here is that freeware isn’t generally continually under development by a community of developers.  Either the software is developed once and distributed across the Web, only to be promptly forgotten, or the original author maintains exclusive rights to the source code and so upgraded releases and extensions are developed only by the author.
• FTP stands for file transfer protocol.  FTP is what allows web developers to maintain their sites easily by making it fast and efficient to upload (or download) lots of files at once to their websites.  Later on I’ll discuss my favorite FTP client and how I use it to make continual changes to my own website.
• Flash drives are miniature hard drives.  They run in size anywhere from 256MB to as much as 8GB.  Of course, now there are portable hard drives that weigh in at a hefty 250GB that function in much the same way as flash drives.  Most flash drives, though, can go on a lanyard or key chain for easy portability.  They make great storage for files and applications.

• Portable applications are applications that are designed to be completely self-contained so that you can run them from anywhere – your desktop computer’s hard drive, a CD, or your flash drive.  They don’t install – that is, they don’t make any changes to the registry in your Windows operating system – which means that, if you have the application on CD or a flash drive, you can just plug it into any computer anywhere and run it instantly.  This is what makes them portable, by being able to essentially take specific functions of your computer with you.  I’ve come to swear by portable applications, so much so that pretty much every application I run on a daily basis I run from my 1GB flash drive.  I’ll talk more about portable applications later and why I think they are so valuable and convenient.

  This is just a taste of things to come.  The articles that follow from here will detail different types of software that are great for web geeks and some that are great tools for anyone.

Greasemonkey + Gmail Super Clean = a much prettier Gmail interface

It kind of bugs me – I’d really wish that, when users leave bug reports and such for plugin and theme authors, that those authors would then at least acknowledge the receipt of those bug reports and give some sort of feedback as to the status of correcting those bugs, even if it’s just to say, “Hey, I don’t have time to work on this right now and probably won’t for a while.” I’ve got three or four different plugins in use at the moment, all of which have minor bugs and glitches, but the authors of these plugins almost seem to have fallen off the planet.  If it wasn’t for the fact that there is still new content showing up on their sites (which, to be fair, could be scheduled content), I’d have to assume they’d abandoned their blogs for a while.  Some of these reports I’ve left have been out there for several days now.  It’d just be nice to get an acknowledgement that, yes, they’ve seen my bug report, and it’s on the list of things to be investigated and, hopefully, fixed.  It’s just common courtesy.