Failure is the Key to Success

A couple of weeks back I talked about adding a plugin to convert my blog to be viewable on mobile devices.

After I had activated the plugin, I checked the site using the page check at ready.mobi and found that the pages created by the plugin had some statements missing and some other errors. By using the helpful guidelines on the site, I was able to modify the Main Index Template (index.php) in the WordPress Mobile Edition Theme.

Continue reading » Going Mobile Part 2

Tags:mobileok,ready.mobi,w3c mobileok validator,wordpress mobile edition

A while back, when I got my new work mobile, I checked out my blog using the WAP browser. The blog was visible, but as it was faithfully reproduced, it meant that I had to scroll all over the place to see it. This was obviously not the best approach for mobile users.

I’ve had a look around at Wordpress plugins and tried out two, WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King and Wordpress Mobile by Andy Moore. I used the demo of Opera Mini to assist me in my testing.

Continue reading » Going Mobile

Tags:alex king,FireStats,twitter tools,wordpress mobile edition,wordpress plugins

While checking Google Webmaster Tools I discovered that all the links to my library (bottom of right sidebar) had failed.

The Now Reading plugin that I use for my library requires Permalinks to be set to ‘Custom’ for it to work. Permalinks are what allow this post to have a URL like http://blog.ijhedges.com/2008/11/03/fixed-library-links instead of http://blog.ijhedges.com/p=379. In this case combined with the rewrite in the plugin they allow my library to appear to to be here http://blog.ijhedges.com/library/ .

I can only guess one of the Wordpress updates reset this. I’ll have to keep an eye on it in the future after upgrades.

Tags:now reading,wordpress permalinks

I have been working over the last few weeks to migrate my blog from Thingamablog to Wordpress. This is something that I had been considering for a while and then after Randa’s review of my blog, I started looking into it seriously.

I created a test install of Wordpress at home to play around with and then started to look at the options for exporting my Thingamablog data. On the face of it, the data could be exported in XML format. However, the structure of the data wasn’t compatible with any of the import options. In the end, I imported the data into Excel, reformated it and created a new file in Wordpress export format. This enabled me to import my posts into the test Wordpress install.

Continue reading » Complete blog makeover

Tags:akismet,askapache password protect,feedburner feedsmith,FireStats,google xml sitemaps,myavatars,nofollow free plugin,now reading,subscribe to comments,technorati tags,weathericon,wp-cache

I’ve been thinking about adding a widget to my blog to show the current weather for a while now and have finally done it now.

I have looked at a few options:

Weather Underground

The WeatherUnderground widgets are clear and informative, providing the current weather and a link to check the forecast. If you click through to the WeatherUnderground website for forecasts, there is a lot of useful information, but the page also has a lot of adverts, it is annoying.

netWeather

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Weather
Forecast

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Weather
Forecast | Weather
Maps

The netWeather widget from Accuweather is nice, and reasonably customisable but relies on Javascript and sometimes is slow opening. Also, in testing it seemed to constantly contact the accuweather website.

Weather Pixie

While investigating another solution, I came across The Weather Pixie. It’s a bit quirky which I liked, and the figure I have used, Weatherboy6, looks (with a bit of imagination) a bit like me except he doesn’t have a beard and maybe he has a bit more hair on top. As the weather changes, the background changes and as the temperature changes, so do the clothes that the figure wears. The choice I’ve got to make is temperature, wind speed and pressure in imperial or metric. For me this is a problem, as I mentioned in my earlier post about UK weights and measures, I generally use imperial, so mph for wind speed and inches of mercury for pressure suit me best, but I use Celcius for temperature. I will use metric for the moment, let me know what you think. By the way, the time on the image is the update time, not the current time.

Tags:weather pixie,weather widget

I have changed the comments system that was in use on my blog today. I migrated all of the previous comments into the new system and believe it to be working fine. I have set the system to allow me to moderate the comments initially, but will turn this off in the next day or so when I know it is working correctly.

Let me know what you think and if I’ve really got it wrong and you can’t let me know in the comments, then you can let me know via my contact me page.

Thanks to David Airey for making me aware of a problem with my comments and suggesting the contact me page.