Tag: wp

Stuck already!

Or, How To Be Extra-Specially Rubbish at Blogging, by Lou.

Oh dear.

So, it’s all of day two of this challenge thingy, and already I’m kind of stuck for what to write about.  So I’m writing about not being able to decide what to write about, mainly so that I’ll have something posted today at all!  Also, in the hope that if I keep typing, my fingers will come up with something that my brain has stalled over.  Or something like that.

Actually, I think it worked.  Because it’s not so much that I can’t think of anything to blog about, as that I have several things, but can’t decide which to start with.  So instead, I’m going to ramble about WordPress plugins.  Fascinating, hmm?  Specifically, it’s the plugin that autoposts to Plurk that’s giving me trouble – yesterday it did a weird triple post with the temporary page preview address in it instead of the address for the published post.  When I had a look on WP.org, I discovered that the plugin hasn’t been updated for ages, so that’s likely the issue there.  There are some new ones that should do the trick instead, so I’m going to install one of those instead.  Although since those also post to Twitter and FB (which I’m currently using the Jetpack module to do), I think I’ll swap over for those as well.  Assuming the new plugin works the way I want it to and all that.  /ramble.

In other news, I really want to go to the Nine Worlds con.  Really really really really really.  That would, of course, involve me Leaving The House and Going To London, and hard stuff like that.  Not to mention paying for the ticket and hotel, so.  We’ll see.  But I wanna!

I fibbed

Well, sort of – I said I would post pictures of the finished shawl today, and I haven’t got around to taking and uploading them yet.  What I do have is a sort-of, half-finished, almost new blog design.  Yeah, I know, but it’ll do for now – there will be many more adjustments to come.  It’s a fork of the Thirty-ten WP child theme.  Pictures by me, some things (like the Rav bars) not working yet.  Maybe tomorrow.

S is for Spinning

I can’t believe it’s come round again already, but the Tour de Fleece starts again on 3rd July.  Which means I shall be spinning along with many many others for the duration of the Tour de France bike race.  I probably won’t be actually watching the race as I spin, because I have other things I want to watch and listen to that interest me more.  I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to be spinning yet, but I think “as much as possible” covers it fairly well.

Happily, I’ve solved the missing post button (and tags and categories areas) problem in the edit screen.  Of course I went and did all the standard things first, like disabling all my plugins.  And then it occurred to me to try changing the screen back to the default 2 column view, instead of the 1 column I had it set on.  Oh look, there were the missing areas.  I’ve now rearranged and reset it back to the way it was, and all is well.  Hoorah!

R is for Reciprocity

IComLeavWeToday is the first day of June’s IComLeavWe, the comment-leaving equivalent of NaBloPoMo.  Well, sort of – the aim is to leave five comments, and return / reply to one, every day during the week of the 21st-28th of the month.  So it’s an equivalent in that it’s a daily goal … thingy.  I know what I mean, anyway.  You can either leave comments on the blogs of the other participants, and/or any other blogs you like, really.  It’s more a self-monitored thing, I suppose, since unless you list all the places you’ve commented back on your own blog, there’s no central record.  Anyway!  The point is, it’s a cool way to find new blogs and meet new people and all – many of the blogs on the list are ones I wouldn’t normally read.  Although I am going to try to make an effort to start leaving comments for the people I do habitually read again.  I’ve been rubbish about it, really.  Perhaps I should have a try at a little double thing – five comments to the IComLeaveWe bloggers, and five to people on my own blogroll.  Could be fun!

In other news, there seems to be a bit of a hitch with this new version of WP… or at least, there is for me.  Something has disappeared some of the sections from the Post page (the one that I’m writing in!), including the all-important Post button!  I can get around it because there’s a draft-save mechanism, and then I can post from the edit screen, but still.  That’s not right!  I may have to disable some plugins and see what happens.

Upgrading

(Or, Non-alphabetical Post The Third)

WordPress 3.0 is out – has been for a couple of days, actually – so I’m going to do the upgrade soon.  Probably not tonight, but most likely tomorrow morning.  I’m glad I hadn’t got too far with the redesign I was working on, in terms of coding, so now I can incorporate anything new to the theme.  I’m not sure if there is anything, but if there is, I might as well include it.  It’s all good practise, after all.

N is for Nothing Much

I seem to have hit the mid-month blogging slump.  Although on the plus side, I’ve also reached the middle of the month and I’ve blogged every day.  Hooray!

Today I went to the Bipolar group / course.  Looks like it’s going to be good, and a nice group of people.  It’s a sort of self management and education course, rather than a support group.  There is one of those, but it’s down in town on a Wednesday evening – that clashes with KnitJam some weeks, and anyway there aren’t any buses after about 6pm.  Which is a bit rubbish.  So anyway, I haven’t been along to that, and I probably won’t.  I’d rather be knitting ;-)

I still haven’t quite solved the problem I was having with the Ravelry progress bars, but it’s near enough so I’m going to stop being so picky now and leave it.  Time to go back to knitting, I think, or possibly spinning.  Although right now, I’m off to bed.

L is for Lazy Sunday

I really have done pretty much pants-all today.  I should make some kind of effort to at least get ready for doing things tomorrow – put the sheets in the washing machine so they’re ready to go, or something.  We didn’t have dinner over at Mum’s today as we usually do on a Sunday, because we’ve met up twice this week already (and are therefore sick of one another ;-) ).  I think the only other thing I really want to do this evening before I go to bed is catch up with yesterday’s Doctor Who episode.  Also, I just realised that Casualty was on.  I’d thought it wasn’t on because of football, but it seems I was wrong.  I expect it’ll get cancelled at some point during the world cup, though.  But anyway, that’s another show I have to catch up with at some time this week.  I love a bit of cheesy hospital soapudrama.

I’ve also been thinking about changing the design for this site.  I could just plonk a new theme (by someone else) on for a while, while I’m coding up my own one.  It’s an idea.  One which I shall have a think about!  Some more.  Yes.

G is for Gallery

I broke the photo album / gallery on this site ages ago, and since fixing it is going to be a long and arduous process, I haven’t done it yet.  But I’m going to set myself a(nother) challenge for this month, to get that finally sorted out, so I can have access to my photos on this site again.  Which, you know, would be (a) nice, and (b) useful.

Basically what happened, as far as I can tell (and as if anyone but me really cares), is that when I installed a WordPress gallery plugin (NextGen Gallery) to have a look at, it violently disagreed with my already installed gallery software (Coppermine), which had a bridge WP plugin so I could easily access my already existing photo galleries from there when I was writing blog posts etc.  Coppermine had been installed for years, long before I’d been using WP as my blogging platform.  Anyway, I don’t know what exactly caused it all to have a hissy fit, but I do know that none of my photos now show up, despite them physically existing on the server.  Marvellous!  I tried uninstalling NextGen Gallery, but since that didn’t help, I’m now going to move everything across to NextGen instead, and drop poor old Coppermine.  It’ll probably be easier in the long run, and I won’t have to be maintaining two databases etc any more.  But moving it all across is going to take a while, and be a pain.

If I do it a little at a time, though, it shouldn’t be too bad.  I think I’ll try to spend maybe an hour a day on it.  Surely that way it should get done pretty quickly?!  And also I’ll know for sure how long it does take me, rather than it just feeling unending.  I think giving myself permission to stop working on it after a specific period will help, too.  Let’s see how it works out.

I killed it!

My photo album, that is.  Ooops.  And yes, this time I think it really is gone – I was attempting to set up the new version of it using the NextGEN Gallery plugin within WordPress, and I guess that clashed somehow with the Coppermine script, because it’s all fallen down and the photos themselves won’t even show up as direct links.  They’re definitely physically there on the server, but I’m getting 404s when I try to reach them.  I don’t know why that is (though I have a suspicion).  So strange.

Anyway, that means that pretty much all of the photos on the blog are broken for the time being.  I’m going to try to get that fixed over the next couple of days, but I doubt it’ll happen tonight.  I have a concert to sing in!  But I might be wide awake after that, so I might make a start then after all.  Now, though, I’d better finish getting ready.  Concert blacks, here I come…

Where did the photo album go?

Honestly, I have no idea what’s happened: my photo album section has seemed to vanish off the face of the web.  Only, all the files are still there, the database seems to still be up and running… I’ve tried repairing and restoring back-ups, the whole shebang, but with no luck.  Eh?!  The little plugin that links the album script to WordPress is still working perfectly though.  You just can’t get to the album via its URL.  Not the front end or the admin section.  I wonder if it’s a conflict with a WP plugin, or if I maybe need to upgrade Coppermine?

Or perhaps it’s a sign that I should do what I’ve been considering for a while, and import the whole thing into WordPress.  Makes the template easier, that way.

ETA:  I upgraded Coppermine, and no luck.  But then it occurred to me that the upgrade page had displayed, so it must be something template-related (I hadn’t re-uploaded the template files).  So I put up new versions of those, and oh look – the photo album is back.  I’m still going to change over to using a WP plugin for it sometime soon, though, to make maintenance easier in the long run.

On Giving In Gracefully

So, back in March I made some bloggy resolutions about what I intended to do for weekly posting goals.  Obviously, I haven’t kept those up… and then I started feeling like I was in catch-up mode all the time with myself, and oh noes, panic!!  Which is bad, since this blog isn’t supposed to be a duty!  Therefore, I have Made A Decision: I’m giving myself permission to “give up”.  In actual fact what that means is that I’m going to forget about Project 365 this year, since taking the photos already wasn’t working out – maybe I can go again another year, but I’ll see how it goes.  I’m still going to do the Friday 5 whenever I feel like it, but not necessarily every week.  I am going to try to post more about knitting and spinning and things in general.  This way, it’s more of an adjustment of my goals to something more realistic, rather than really giving up.

Another thing that I’ve decided to let go of is taking strict part of the Sock Knitter’s Pentathlon ’09.  I haven’t been knitting very fast this year, and I’d ended up knitting nothing but those socks and still not finishing them.  It all got a bit too much like hard work!  So even though I love the patterns for the first two socks, and I really like the look of the third one which has recently been released, I’m not going to start #3.  I do intend to finish the first two socks, but not as my most immediate projects.  Instead I’m going to go back to my other knitting works in progress and try to get those finished off.  They’d been pushed back while I was knitting just socks.  That’s meant that I’ve now almost finished the shawl I’ve been making for Emily (I’m casting off at the moment, but that’s deadly boring so I’m just doing a few stitches at a time then putting it down again *g*).  And I’m really looking forward to picking up the projects I’ve been neglecting and making some real progress on them.  Hooray!  I don’t even feel like starting something new, because my old projects are almost like new ones by now.

I’m also thinking about giving in using Coppermine for my photo album software.  Yes, I’ve been using it for years on this site, so it seemed like a more sensible decision to keep using it and integrate it with WP rather than migrate to something else.  But there’s a good photo album plugin for WP, and the integration plugin for Coppermine doesn’t do precisely what I want it to do – it’s a great plugin, and it’s probably perfect for everyone else… but I’m picky!  Also, I do have to do some tweaking of the source code every time it updates because of the way I have my Coppermine set up, and… well, in the long run it might just be easier to change to using something more integrated with WP.  It’ll mean not having to theme Coppermine to match WP, too.  I’m going to ponder it a while more, but I expect I will change over.

Why am I mentioning this, when no-one but me cares?  Because it kind of fits the theme of the rest of this post: I’ve been hanging on to some things that I should have gracefully given in on a while back.  Letting go and making a few small changes will make things easier.  Note to self: change is good, and giving up on something doesn’t necessarily equate to failure.  There we go, that’s my deep personal insight for the day.  Now I shall stop rambling, let go of this post and send it into the big wide world (= hit the publish button)!  TTFN.

Tadaa: it’s version 4

Version 4 of the site is done at last: all moved over to wordpress, and with a nice springlike design – Sheep in a Field by Nikki Jeske. It feels a little bit like cheating, using a theme by someone else, but I couldn’t resist because look: SHEEEEEEEEP! I have done some tweaking to make it work exactly how I wanted it to, especially since I’m using WP pretty much as a CMS for the whole site.

Anyway, I hope everything is working – please do let me know if you come across something that’s broken!