Category Archives: wordpress plugins

A smooth upgrade to WordPress 2.7

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Earlier today I wasn’t feeling great and left work to go home and sleep most of the day. After waking up and feeling a little better, I decided to upgrade this blog to the latest version of WordPress (2.7).  The process went quite smoothly.  My immediate impression is that the admin interface is fabulously better than before, much more intuitive and user-friendly. It is also quite configurable to suit my tastes.  In addition, I upgraded to the latest version of NextGen Gallery, the plugin that powers my photos page.  It is, again, a much better version with some nice new features such as a CoolIris slideshow that works very well.

Back to work

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It’s a dark, rainy Monday and the weather matches my mood as I get back into the swing of things at work after a nice but short vacation. I really think I need to be more like Tigger and less like Eyore but it’s hard to fight years of pessimism.

We had a really good time last week on Thursday through Saturday, going out to eat most of the time, watching a movie in the theater (such a rare occurrence), visiting the Field Museum, and buying some new pets to add to our already chaotic household. Yesterday we didn’t go anywhere or do anything; I think the highlight of the whole day was when I went to McDonald’s late in the evening to buy milkshakes for everyone!

I’m still trying out and getting used to the new stuff in WordPress 2.5. I love the new photo gallery functionality but find it very frustrating at this point because there is so little documentation on how best to make use of it. My plan is to redo all photos and host them here on this blog rather than on Flickr and/or Picasa, eventually.

I’m trying out the WordPress.com stats plugin and liking it so far. Also, I’ve added a sidebar widget for my Twitter posts using the great Twitter Tools plugin. Oddly enough, two different people have contacted me since I moved to a new host, asking me if I would allow them to advertise on this site. Weird. Also, I still have really messed up permalinks, unfortunately. And I am just about as confused as ever in terms of deciding on using categories vs. tags.

OK, now back to the real world.

A tag cloud for FML

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Last night I spent a lot of time figuring out how to use my WordPress categories to create a tag (technically, I guess, a category) cloud. I’ve tried doing this before but was never quite satisfied with the end result. Part of the problem is that I hadn’t used categories consistently, and also, I had tried using various tagging systems over the years with little success. I’m still working on filling out categories using the great Batch Categories plugin, but already I like what I see in my new tag cloud page, using the Category Cloud plugin.

What a mess

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When I reconstituted FML on a different host, I somehow didn’t realize or expect that just about all of my permalinks would be changed. What a mess. This means that anyone who has linked to something here in the last six years has a broken link. I wish I was smart enough to figure out how to fix that but I’m not.

And not only that, I decided to add a WordPress plugin for checking for broken links. It found 58 broken links. Maybe that’s not a big surprise but it is a pain nonetheless. I’ll try to work my way through them all, either removing or fixing each link, throughout the coming days.