Category Archives: WordPress

Google Sitemap WP Plugin Tip

If you use the Google sitemap plugin for WordPress it’s probably a good idea to disable the auto rebuild option. This is especially true if you have a large blog and a small server!

Go to Options->Sitemap and uncheck “Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog”.

You can regenerate the sitemap by calling a URL with a secret key. It’s listed on the configuration page. Copy it into your bookmarks or make a cron job to call that URL at a time when your server isn’t busy. Posting to this blog would timeout quite often if the server was loaded in any way. If it wasn’t loaded before, it almost always was after! It took some time for me to figure out that it was the Sitemap generator.

The sitemap generator plugin is a great program, it does what it says on the box, but disable to the auto-update feature if you’re having problems posting!

BarCamp Ireland – September 30th in Cork

I found out from Damien that BarCamp Ireland now has it’s own blog. Their press release gives a quick overview, but if you want to know who’s going and talking you should take a look at the BarCamp wiki where you can signup to attend. There are twelve speakers so far with topics ranging from running a start-up, Web 2.0, OPML, Ruby and more.

Should be fun and interesting, and it’ll be great to meet up with some of the folk I met at the Web 2.0 Conference again. See you there!

Paper Blogs

-ChanServ- [#wordpress] Welcome to the WordPress IRC Channel
wpbot donncha is someone who blogs on the Internet
ketsugi o rly!
ketsugi as opposed to blogging on paper?
donncha yup
Kamigoroshi i tried blogging on paper once..
Kamigoroshi but no one commented..
donncha Kamigoroshi: lol. the good ol’ days?
ketsugi teehee
* ketsugi leaves a trackback on Kamigoroshi’s paper log
donncha actually, so did I, and I expect that blog will survive for a lot longer than my virtual one

Who will take care of your weblog after you’re gone?

Happy Birthday WordPress.com!

One year on and still going strong! Lorelle was the first to notice but shortly afterwards Matt posted a nice message saying that yes we had forgotten to celebrate the birthday but it was great that one of our own bloggers had remembered. Nice list of trivia too!

Reading through that list, it’s true that Matt and I hadn’t met when I started working for him. In fact it was several months later in December before we met.

WordCamp Pictures and Words

WordCamp went really well yesterday. I’m a little hungover today so I’ll point you in the direction of others who blogged the event:

Later – I uploaded my images to Zooomr and created a smart set there. That was a nice experience, the uploader is slightly better than a regular HTTP upload and the smart set feature is like virtual folders in Thunderbird. If they had upload by email I’d be there every day!

WordPress.com Paid Services

We finally launched the store to the public at large after what seems like an eternity in development! Andy's Custom CSS Editor is the first product there, and priced at $15/year it's very reasonable. Feedback has been positive mostly, although mixed at times.

There does seem to be some confusion about the CSS Editor, you can modify the css of any of the existing themes by taking advantage of the "cascading" feature of CSS. The styles you define in the editor override those in the theme's stylesheet.

I can't wait to see what people do with this. I hope to see a lot of talent come out of the woodwork and make their blogs prettier and unique!

Holy Shmoly, it lives!

This site has moved. It's now at ocaoimh.ie where I can play with a more up to date version of WordPress.

Upgrading was a breeze:

  1. I dumped the old database tables and copied them over here.
  2. I installed this site with the usual defaults included near-empty tables.
  3. Then I fed my old db tables back in, changed the prefix in wp_config.php to point at those old tables.
  4. I changed the siteurl and home in the options table to point at the new url.
  5. Finally, I visited the upgrade url which magically brought the db up to date!

I decided on using K2, and modified the default theme slightly to match my old theme somewhat. Unfortunately I had to edit index.php so I have to watch out when I'm upgrading.

I decided I needed a related posts plugin as well as one to display the latest comments. Both required a little bit of massaging to work with the development WP 2.1 which I'll update this post with later. Next in line is something to resurrect my "popular posts" list using data from my referrer plugin!

What about my old site? I used some rewrite magic to bring you here didn't I? 🙂

2006-07-21__mg_7940-sm.jpg

Damien had a nice lunch, I had sandwiches. Thought you'd like to know!

WordPress Gathering in San Francisco!

I’m off to San Francisco at the end of the month! Matt is organising WordCamp, a free WordPress conference on August 5th in San Francisco and I’ll be there along with the rest of the Automattic guys.

I’m really looking forward to it, meeting people I talk to every day online, hacking on WordPress stuff and taking lots and lots of photos. I’m not the only one making the trip across the Atlantic either; Podz is flying over too!

Corporate WordPress support is evil?

Toni announced yesterday the launch of the Automattic Support Network. This has of course attracted the attention of many blogs who have discussed the business implications but Peter Chris wonders if WordPress.org support will suffer. Here’s another post on the same issue but Matt replies with an excellent rebuttal.

I very much doubt the support network will have any immediate effect on the level of support offered to non-paying users. The number of non-paying users will always vastly outnumber those who pay for support. What happens if commercial support adversely affects the time spent on non-paying users? Guess what? There’ll be money in the bank to hire somebody else from the community to help out!

This can only be a win-win situation for all involved.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, then give WordPress MU a spin. It’s come a long way recently, and if you’re looking for more, then visit wpmudev for older releases, some plugins, a theme pack and other stuff.