Blog Adjustments and New Plugins
VirusHead Blog changes and updates:
- WP-EMail – You can email any post now. There’s a link at the bottom of each post that will open a pop-up window, and there’s a tally on the sidebar of the most emailed posts. At the moment, there is only one. I sent myself the Green Day post to test the system. It’s like butter.
- Simple Tagging: I decided to go with the Simple Tagging Plugin rather than continue to use Ultimate Tag Warrior – Simple Tagging is easier for me to use, and it has a lot of features that I really like. The Technorati tags link directly to the tag page at the – guess what – Technorati site, and the others link internally to a page of all the posts with the chosen tag. The extra features I like (and I’m not using all of them) are the ability to list a specified number of related posts, the little menu of suggested tags, and the auto-complete type-ahead dropdown menu to add tags. I never used the heavy Yahoo tag suggestions in UTW. I prefer to do my own indexing regardless of the popularity of key phrases.
- Bad Behavior – I’ve installed this plugin as a first line of defense against spambots. Akismet is already installed to pick up most of the rest. Some people were having trouble every once in a while with seeing the verification image used by Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam. I love Peter’s plug-in, especially since you can add your own words as verifiers; I made up words for fun every once in a while. Still, it’s not worth it if anyone has trouble. I’ll see how well the Bad Behavior/Akismet combination works out. At the moment, Bad Behavior has blocked 3659 access attempts in the last 7 days. The total can be, and is, displayed in the footer.
- Recent Comments List – updated to version 1.9.
You can see all the plugins that I’m using at any given time (care of WP-Plugin List) here.
To Do:
Create a separate page with Simple Tagging tag cloud. I don’t really want it on the sidebar. I’ve read the documentation, but the page template they refer to simply doesn’t appear and I’m a little stymied. I’ll do a little more research on that.Done 5/27 – but I still need to play with the format.- Consolidate some of the tags – there are far too many and there is a lot of topic overlap. I still have some hundred or posts that don’t have tags at all.
- Now that this design is well and truly complete, I’m getting tired of it. It would be a real pain to change it now. I’m not using the WP widgets yet – everything has been hand-inserted except for the features that originally came with the SeaBeast theme. I would like it very much if I could figure out how to put the two sidebars on the left while keeping them SEO-friendly. I just prefer to read text that is on the right-hand side of the page.
- Experiment a little bit with web-friendly fonts. Is there a better one than I’m using?
Figure out how to make the font a little smaller in the footer display of Bad Behavior. Never mind. I just adjusted the code in the plugin.
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4 comments
“Bad behavior” sounds a little kinky or something…
Love all the changes around here.
Heidi, for the last week or two I have been getting intermittent failures when opening your posts. When it fails it displays “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.virushead.net/vhrandom/. Operation aborted” The URL given is either self-referent as above, or is the URL of the posting I was just trying to open. I know how hard it can be to troubleshoot these sorts of problems so I will give you my observations so far in hopes they might help. I have seen this on 3 different computers, all XP, one has IE7 the other two are on IE6. The failure always appears after the posting has appeared, and seems to have maybe a half second delay from the time the posting paints. It seems to have no relation to the bloglines reader I usually use. I have seen the problem just accessing the blog directly without using the reader. When I close out the error dialog with either the ok or Xing it out I sometimes get back to the post and sometimes get an IE error page (not a 404) that “Internet Explorer cannot display the web page”. When I get the error page I can usually get back to the post by using the back key on the browser. I will email you pdfs of two screen shots showing this behavior.
Oh, hey – nice face Vance.
Before you send anything… my host has had server problems, and I have also been doing a fair bit of editing to the templates and functions. You may just have had bad timing.
If you get the error, is it a usual “server unavailable” “server not found” sort of thing? Or is it a WordPress page?
You might also check your cache – since there have been a lot of changes, you might have to refresh the page (depending on your settings).
I use Firefox almost exclusively, so it may be an IE issue of some kind. I wouldn’t even know. On another design I was using, the whole structure would break if I had a photo bigger than a certain size in the main column – but it only broke in IE. Had no idea for the longest time…
One other thing, just out of curiosity. See if you get an error on http://virushead.net/vhrandom (no “www”).
Send me the pics if none of this sounds like what you’re talking about.
Heidi, thanks for the compliment. I thought you might appreciate a face to go with the “voice”. Regarding the problem, it doesn’t look like a server problem to me. The http://virushead.net/vhrandom site shows the problem too, but not all the time. All sites seem to take a long time to load the “blogflare.com/track/flare-471.gif” file — which may or may not be related. My screen shots of the problem are on my meditations blog. Since you don’t use IE I suspect it is an IE funny. I’ll try resetting the IE cache and see if that helps…
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