Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’
Automagically publishing to facebook revisited
July 30, 2011 | 
Author For some time it has been easy to tweet new blog posts. If you want to do the same with facebook then it seemed to require either setting up a shell of an application to install to post with or letting an application have rather a lot of access to your facebook information. I have recently been on the lookout for another plugin that will do it easily and quickly. Facebook page publish requires an application to be created so that was binned immediately. I also tried one which involved linksalpha but the list of abilities it wanted was quite long. I wasn’t sure it really need access to so much facebook information. That was quickly deleted. It was also annoying as it required a minimum 8 character password and seemed to be very slow in creating an account.
I also had a look at wordsocial. That didn’t seem to want to have quite as many rights as linksalpha’s. It was really simple to set up but there remains the nagging doubt of having a service that is embedded into a blog via a plugin.
I then returned back to twitterfeed which I use for updating twitter and added a facebook wall publish too. Saves a lot of bother as it means only one place to check! I have tried several other automated tweeters, plugins for wordpress and the like but twitterfeed seems to be the easiest to use and maintain so I am sticking with it for now.
Posted in Computing & Technology | 
Tags: Facebook, publish, twitter, twitterfeed, wordpress | 
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Amazon webstore bites the dust
It has with me at any rate. After several months of wrangling with it and endless support queries I have thrown in the towel. It won’t work happily with firefox with web bug prevention software also running. Amazon won’t support it on Safari even though it works a little better and you can’t have a vertical product category menu. Yes, really. A store without a vertical category menu!!! Madness.
In view of the fact only this morning there was some hooha on the register about java security holes I’m sticking to my guns and ditching webstore rather than ghostery. I have already found a reasonable alternative in the form of prestashop or its hosted friend prestabox. I have tried a few other open source ecommerce solutions including a wordpress plugin. As I seem to be having wordpress issues with 3.1.3 then the prestashop solution seems to be the best for now.
After all this hassle I have gone off the whole notion of retail completely. I had grand plans for a little cat related trinket shop with a mix of my own sourced items and some already existing on Amazon to pad out said shop. Looks like I’ll be going for plan B. A shop that sells wordpress and blogger themes. Nowhere near as exciting but greater potential for profit without pain and storage requirements.
Moving a wordpress site to another host
Ugh. Is the best way to describe the process! If you’re lucky and have virtually no plugins then it is much easier to install a fresh copy on the new host and use the export utility to copy all your content and import it into the new site.
If you have several plugins and the content types are not exportable then it is a pain in the proverbial. I usually start by downloading the whole original wordpress site by ftp. Then you have to export the entire database. Once you have the whole database then you have to use find and replace to change the hardcoded urls and file paths which are buried within. This saves you having to destroy your old site by changing the home and siteurl values then exporting the database. It’s much better to edit the text of the mysql dump to be honest as you can have a few goes at it to get it right if you load the tables and then drop them again if it doesn’t work. Then I upload the whole lot to the new host taking care to edit the wpconfig file to make sure the correct database connection details are in.
If you get the siteurl correct you can at least login and amend the home url to be correct. An incorrect siteurl will just lead to 404 errors all over the shop so you must get that right. If you get as far as logging in then the next issue is to refresh permalinks which needs the htaccess file to be writeable. Once that is all done there is one big gotcha. If you have installed via a webserver or updated using that method then many of the directories will be under completely the wrong group/owner. This will lead to you being unable to install new plugins and strange behaviour with ones that already exist. What is worse you may not be able to change the files yourself and might have to rely on your web host to do it so there may be a bit of to-ing and fro-ing while you experiment with the settings so that everything works ok but without leaving some gaping security issue.
How to back up your blog and everything else
Backing up is one of the most important maintenance jobs you need to do regularly with your blog and your computer. A backup service needs to offer sufficient space, sufficient bandwidth and an idiot proof back up tool. Back ups are too important to leave to chance or try and manage with complicated tools that need to be checked constantly. I want a set and forget tool that backs up all my files without me having to worry that it is getting on with it but that also notifies me each time and it has done something so I know it is working without having to remember to check.
Being a Virgin Media customer I have access to the free Vstuff. Unfortunately you get what you pay for with this software as it is appalling. It is slow, unreliable and takes ages to back up your files. Other users have reported that files are going missing and multiple versions of the same files are being uploaded endlessly. Vstuffed more than Vstuff.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy answer that would let you back up all your blogs and all your computers, macs and pcs alike that works easily and reliably. Well funnily enough… there is.
Idrive is a back up tool from http://www.idrive.com. They have both mac and pc versions and a plug in for wordpress. There are several levels of service available – a free 2GB back up space, a paid single machine account and the the one I have – the family pack. The family pack offers 500GB of backup space for up to 5 machines. This is ideal for most people and at just under $15 a month it is competitive to other back up services such as dropbox. It can be bit slow on my old tiger machine but on the more recent leopard one it is fine. Compared to Vstuff it is a cheetach as opposed to a 3 legged tortoise with a limp.
The best bit about Idrive is the new Idrive plugin for wordpress. This makes sure that all your files and the database are backed up regularly. It defaults to daily backups and is intelligent enough to backup only the files that have changed. It also dumps the contents of the database too so you have a complete snapshot of your blog which should make it easy to restore should the worst happen.
Luckily the worst hasn’t happened so I haven’t had to test out the restore capabilities beyond doing a quick check…
