Clearskys.net Blog

WordPress 2.3 upgrade available and other news

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Well the big day arrived and WordPress 2.3 was finally released to the world. As I had already prepared a few of my blogs using the steps here, all I had to do was SSH into my server, go to each blog directory and type:

svn up

It took all of five minutes in total with no side effects (at time of writing).

There are more guides to upgrading your WordPress blog to the latest version at the Weblogtoolscollection.com site.

Plugin Subversion details

I have added a page to our development site with instructions and links to the Subversion repositories for all of our current range of released and in-development plugins.

If you want to stay on the (b)leading edge then this is the place to find all the details.

MyDashboard and WordPress 2.3

The MyDashboard plugin works quite well with the latest version of WordPress, however there is a problem with one of the standard gadgets so far.

The standard WordPress blog statistics gadget is looking for the now non-existent categories table and so will display an error if it is displayed on your Dashboard. The error is displayed above the gadget itself, so you can still (and should) click on the X to remove the statistics gadget.

I will have a new WordPress 2.3 compatible gadget out soon (I will post when it is available for download).

Tags: development, mydashboard, plugin, svn, wordpress

How to: WordPress 2.3 upgrade via SVN on Mediatemple Grid Server

It’s about that time of the week when I am feeling invincible and somewhat foolhardy, so I decided I would bring this blog up-to date and install the current release candidate (2.3-RC1) of WordPress.

Rather than have to do a manual upgrade with every new release (even though the WordPress automatic upgrade plugin worked quite well) I thought that I would follow in the foot steps of others and set up a new WordPress installation that I could quickly upgrade using Subversion.

The steps to do this have been documented on the WordPress codex site, but I will target them towards the Mediatemple girdserver and go through the steps I took to enable this blog for subversion updates.

Note: You will need to enable ssh access on your Grid server account to follow these steps. To do that login to your Mediatemple control panel, go to the Server administrator section and scroll down the section labeled SSH option. Make sure this is set to Enabled and save your changes.

Note 2: If you are not comfortable using the command line, then I can recommend using this plugin instead.

More »

Tags: 2.3, mediatemple, news, subversion, svn, Tutorials, upgrade, wordpress

Property Hounds site launches today

After a lot of hard work (including in no small part blood, sweat and tears) I am proud to announce the launch of the new Property Hounds web site. The new site is a re-development of an old framed Frontpage web site which came complete with, amongst other things, a home directory of 6000+ pages and images.

The site is now powered by WordPress version 2.2.3 and features a custom designed theme (which I have lovingly called HoundDog). The non-blog functionality of the site is accomplished with the use of the following main plugins:

• Clearskys Availability Calendar - This plugin is being used primarily for the booking administration features, as we are using the Calendar widget to display the booked dates.
• Clearskys Enquiry and contact form - Displayed in the footer of every properties page to capture rental enquiries
• Clearskys Availability Calendar widget - The calendar widget displays the availability calendar at the left hand side of every properties page.
• Clearskys Property plugin - This plugin has turned into something of an all-encompassing monster. It handles the majority of the sites property administration and display functionality from displaying property details through to handling the search and tag results. At the moment this plugin is not generic enough for general use, so I will be releasing a cut down and simpler version very soon, and will then work towards adding more functionality in later releases.
• cforms II - Used for the Contact Us and Management services forms, to keep the standard contact separate from rental enquiries.
• Excerpt Editor - A life saver, this plugin re-adds the ability to customise excerpts on pages. Why this is not available in the standard WordPress I do not know.
• IP 2 Nation - Changes the telephone number based on the country the visitor is from.
• Samsarin PHP widget - Used to display the More Information menu on the side of each page (allows me to call the Sticky Menu plugin for the relevant menu).
• Sticky Menu - Allows more flexible control over the Main and More Information menus.
• CSS Compress - This plugin automatically removes the comments from and GZIP’s your themes main CSS file (style.css) when it is called. It successfully reduced my main CSS file down to 5k (from 18k).

I still have quite a bit of functionality to add to the site, so time permitting, I will try to put together some quick tutorials on how we accomplished certain parts of this site and how we will go about adding the new bells and whistles.

One last word, this is now a Live site, so please don’t enquire about a property unless you really want to rent it.

Tags: Announcements, Portfolio, property hounds, property rental, website, wordpress

Apple iPhone on O2 in the UK - oh well

It was announced today that O2 will have the sole contract for the iPhone in the UK.

I have to say I am hugely disappointed in this news, and can only hope that the iPhone unlocking software progresses. We recently made the decision to cancel all of our contracts with O2, mainly due to the extremely poor support, and certainly won’t be going back to them.

I have been in constant contact with them for almost 3 weeks so far (by email, as they refuse to give me a non 0870 telephone number so that I can contact them from Spain).

What started as a simple enquiry as to why SMS text messages could not be sent or received between the Yoigo network in Spain and the O2 network in the UK has still yet to be answered despite 28 emails, requests for a standard contact number, press office details or to have the support request passed up to a technical support person.

From my exchanges so far I have had such gems as:

I’m unable to tell you why you aren’t receiving text messages from our network. We don’t restrict any text messages sent or received on the Yoigo network in Spain.

I have contacted our network services team who have advised that the reason messages are not being received on your mobile phone is because O2 do not have an agreement with ‘Yoigo’.

and lastly:

Thank you for emailing us about our press office details.

We encourage our customers to contact our complaints team in writing, please post your written complaint to:

O2 Complaint Review Service
PO Box 116
Leeds
LS11 5DS
Fax: 0113 388 1153

Apologies for the off-topic rant. It would seem to me that a company should aim to get the small things right before taking a larger bite of the Apple. And if their support is bad now, I can’t even imagine what it would be like come the iPhone release in November.

And now we return to your normally scheduled programming.

Tags: news

I’m stats happy with Reinvigorate

My statistics dreams have come true. Reinvigorate’s Snoop is a real-time analytics tool that connects to the new Reinvigorate analytics tool and provides "as it happens" activity reports for your blog or web site.

Now you can view the effects of design decisions and layout changes immediately, rather than having to wait up-to 24 hrs with Google Analytics.

Once downloaded and connected to your Reinvigorate account, Snoop sits in the background and alerts you to new visitors, comments, donations or other events.

As well as the Snoop interface, Reinvigorate has a full web-based statistics reporting engine that provides all the information you could possibly need. As far as I can tell from experimenting over the past few hours, it seems to also be updated live. So now I can really see how my sites are performing.

I am going to run Reinvigorate in parallel with Google Analytics for a few weeks, but I think, from early impressions, I know which I will be choosing in the long run. Reinvigorate is currently in Beta, so you will need to register your email address with them and then keep your fingers crossed for an invite.

Tags: news

jQuery User Interface library released

Earlier today the jQuery team released the brand new User Interface library jQuery UI.

jQuery UI is a fully themed interaction and widget library built on top of jQuery.

The library introduces a lot of standard user interface components (as seen in the likes of Scriptaculus and the original jQuery interface library) but adds a themeing ability.

I will be taking a serious look at using the UI library in the next myDashboard release. Though this may depend on whether the next WordPress release incorporates the recently released jQuery 1.2.1

Tags: news

Availability calendar hidden features

When we released the current version (version 1.0) of our WordPress Availability calendar plugin, we added quite a few new features as well as improving the overall speed and functionality of the code.

Unfortunately due to our work load at the time, we never got around to detailing all of the extra bits in the documentation. Prior to completing the documentation for our much anticipated (well by us anyway) new version, I have decided to highlight a few of the more useful features here.

More »

Tags: Tutorials

A polite request to hosting companies

Dear Hosting companies (present company excepted)

Many years ago a lot of the sites you hosted on your servers were personal web sites containing nothing but family pictures, animated gifs and the odd (in both meanings of the word) family newsletters.

Recently however, there are an increasing number of people who are using your services to run their businesses, build their online brand / identity and generally try to earn a living whilst maintaining a professional and business-like online presence.

Not all of us can afford our own servers, so we gladly take up your offer of shared hosting and hand over our pennies, with the dream that one day, just maybe, we too can be on a dedicated server.

Then, one day we strike it lucky and write that one post or find that single product / advertising technique that works and finally we get noticed. People start to visit our site, ask for our advice, order our products and even, god-forbid, pay us for the privilege.

People start to talk about us, even rave about us. We try hard to maintain a professional image, answer all of our emails politely and help our customers with their problems. For we are in business and that is what businesses do.

But then one day the orders and the emails stop. Have we been forgotten already? Are people really that fickle?

A visit to our web site reveals the reason. A large message at the top of the screen "This account has been suspended, please contact the billing department".

Oh my, how long has that been there? How many of my customers / clients have seen that message? What has it done to our reputation? How many orders have we lost? How many people will think we are out of business and go elsewhere?

So this is a polite request to web hosting companies everywhere. Please think of your customers and change your "Account suspended", "Bandwidth exceeded" and other messages. I guess a lot of them come as standard with cPanel (so this call also goes out to the cPanel developers).

How about having a nice "Sorry about the inconvenience. We’ll be right back" message like the Apple store uses, or even just a blank page.

Please remember, it is OUR customers that will see that page, not yours. It is us, however, who will have to deal with the aftermath.

Thank you for your time, you may now return to your desks.

Barry

ps. Why not pass this post on to your hosting company or friends for their input?

Tags: cpanel, open letter, suspended, Thoughts, web hosting

Announcing 4 new MyDashboard gadgets

Gafeman over at viciao2k3 has recently released 4 new MyDashboard gadgets that I think are definitely worth looking at. All four of these gadgets will work in both English and Spanish, which has inspired me to move forward with the multi-language functionality of the MyDashboard core.

If anyone would be willing to help translate MyDashboard into another language, please get in touch (via a comment or on the forum) and I will get in touch with the required details.

Anyway, back to the gadgets. More details on each gadget can be found, in Spanish, on this page. For those who don’t speak Spanish I have included a screen shot of the gadget as it appears on our own blog and a basic description of the information it displays.

Activity Monitor

The Activity Monitor gadget shows more detailed statistics on the number of comments on your blog and days of the week that get the most comments. It also has a count of the number of comments you are away from 1000. As you can see I am quite a distance away yet.

Your Drafts

The Your Drafts gadget is similar to the standard Posts gadget, but displays a list of your draft posts rather than your published posts. Clicking on the title of a post will take you to the edit page for that draft post.

Technorati Graph

This gadget displays a Technorati graph of the reactions to your blog and the days on which they occurred. I think this gadget will work quite well alongside the standard incoming links gadget.

myDashboardReStart - Blog Stats

This final gadget is designed as a replacement for the standard MyDashboard Blog Statistics gadget. It splits up the number of comments on your blog to show which are genuine comments and which are trackbacks or pings.

Installation instructions

• To install these new gadgets, download the archive from the Gafemans web site and un-compress it into a directory on your computer.
• Upload all of the uncompressed files (and directories in the case of the Activity Monitor gadget) to your wp-content/plugins directory.
• Login to the administration site of your WordPress blog and navigate to the Plugins page. Activate each of the new plugins.
• Now go to your MyDashboard page (click on the Dashboard menu), and click on the Add Gadgets link in the top right hand corner. The new gadgets will be listed and you can click on the Add to Page link underneath each of the new gadgets that you wish to show on your dashboard.

Tags: wordpress, mydashboard, gadgets

1000 Downloads via WordPress Extend

Ok,I admit it, I’m a bit of a statistics junkie. I’m trying the wean myself off them, but I just love to watch that little counter move.

As of 5 seconds ago, MyDashboard hit the 1000th download on the WordPress extend pages. The WordPress extend page for the MyDashboard plugin currently brings in 25% of the traffic to the MyDashboard development pages.

Tags: news