Feed Problem and New Front Page

Apologies if you’re reading this using a feed reader. It seems that adding a WordPress excerpt for the two Frightfest reviews caused them to not show up in my RSS feed for the site. I’ve deleted the excerpts and hopefully the problem won’t appear again. If anyone knows how to use excerpts on posts with WordPress and not have the feed affected, I’d love to know. Otherwise I’ll figure out a workaround.

In other news, the front page of Is There Food has ditched the magazine look, and gone with straight blog again. There wasn’t enough variety of posts to make the magazine view work, and a few people actually said they found it harder to find latest posts. So back to the blog look we go.

More Frightfest reviews coming over the next couple of days. There’s some zombie news coming too!

Organize Series and WordPress 2.6

I noticed that Wordpress 2.6 broke one of my favourite plugins - Organize Series. I don’t use it on Is There Food, but it’s handy at Eurocritics. Thanks to the post revision functionality in 2.6, Organize Series goes a bit bonkers (it doesn’t know any better, bless it) and you end up with “part 8 of a 3 part series” after a few revisions.

But I’m happy to report I found a satisfactory work around: turn off those pesky post revisions. They’re great in the right environment, but for single user blogs they might not a great deal of help. And for now, I’d rather have working series functionality on Eurocritics than post revisions.

First off, follow the mighty Lester Chan’s advice to turn off post revisions. You can also use the SQL he’s posted to delete revisions from your database (although you might want to keep them around for the next part).

Then, fix the damage that’s been done. You’ll need to check through the wp_postmeta table and get rid of any references to posts with ids that relate to revisions. Then, set the series_part value for each of your existing posts to be the correct value.

Once you’ve done that, harmony and equilibrium should be restored.

Link!

Organize Series and WordPress 2.6 « Unfolding Neurons.

WordPress for iPhone

I’ve been looking forward to this one: the WordPress client for Apple’s iPhone has been released, and is available on the App Store.
As seems to be the trend, I’m writing my thoughts on the app, using the app. And it’s pretty good.
It lacks a certain amount of advanced functionality; there’s no capacity for advanced formatting, no way of inserting links in posts, and no capacity for blog management outside of writing posts. But this is a version 1. A first attempt. And as such, it’s a good one.
The interface is slick and easy to use, you can manage and post to multiple blogs, and there’s full support for tags and categories. Tags aren’t pulled from your blog, so best remember what you’ve used before.
It could do with a spellcheck, but that might be out of the question. It could also do with a way of posting links - maybe use the embedded Safari functionality employed by the post preview tool, but have a button to add a link to the currently viewed page?
I take my hat off to the development team though - this is easily the most impressive blogging experience I’ve had on any phone (including n95, and windows mobile platforms).
I look forward to the future of iPhone WordPress. Now, how do I get in on the beta and some ad-hoc distribution?

WordPress 2.6 Has Arrived

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6
WordPress 2.6 is now available. Hit the link above for lots of info on what’s new.

I’ve updated my hosted blogs, so if you’re reading this and I host a blog for you, you’re good to go. If you’re reading this, you know me, and I don’t host a blog for you (but you’d like one) let me know…I’m sure we can sort something out…

As for my favourite new features, there are a few. The Press This bookmarklet is extremely nifty, and auto senses whether you’re posting about a link, quote, picture, or video. Hopefully it’ll ramp up my blogging habits a bit on ITF. I might even create an asides type category for short and sweet posts. What say you, reader?

To use it, drag the Press This link out of the Write Post page onto your toolbar, or make it a bookmark, then just click it to include a link to the page you’re currently viewing. Or, select some text, and click it to include text and link. Or try it on YouTube…or…you get the idea.

Also there’s nifty theme previewing if you fancy trying new themes out, post revisioning (which will be handy for CMS and magazine style sites, like Eurocritics), and Google Gears support (hit the turbo button in the top right of your admin). Gears support looks nice, and does provide a nice speed boost. If I’d had it before moving away from my former hosts I might not have moved. But then I lurve WebFaction, so I’m glad I did.

Last couple: image captions (coming soon to ITF), and better image editing support in the editor are very welcome, as are the usual bug fixes and performance tweaks.

Another very solid release from the team. 2008 is certainly WordPress development’s most successful year to date.

WordPress 2.5 has arrived!

And it’s pretty awesome, in my humble opinion.

Earlier tonight, it was announced that WordPress 2.5 has finally been released, after what seems like an awfully long time. Automattic skipped the 2.4 release, and packed as much tasty php-powered goodness into this release as they could possible manage. Have a look at the post on the dev blog to see what I mean.

Is There Food, and all the blogs I host, have been updated to 2.5. As usual, if you come across anything weird, please let me know and I’ll try to fix it.

To weigh in on what I think of 2.5: I love it. I posted on the wp-testers mailing list the other day to say that, after a short period of adjustment, it’s really hard to go back to 2.3 (I’ve been using 2.5 in beta and RC form for weeks on other sites).

Is it niggle free? No. But then no release with changes this massive was ever going to be. Will things improve? Absolutely. There’ll be plugins or hacks to resolve the majority of complaints people have, and maybe 2.6 (or 2.5.1) will make some more alterations.

But for me, 2.5 is a massive leap in the right direction. I recommend you upgrade, or get someone who knows what they’re doing to do it for you

WebFaction Versus Media Temple

AKA Hosting Move Update #1 - Speed

It’s been almost a week since I moved this and all my other hosted sites from Media Temple to WebFaction. Given that there isn’t a massive amount of information out there on WebFaction (although there was enough to convince me to try them, thanks to Technorati!) I thought I’d do a short post on how things are looking on this side of the fence.

Host moves can often be a “grass is greener” type of affair. You like the look of a particular feature that your host doesn’t have, or their pricing seems better, or they offer a revolutionary scaling grid system that’ll make your site Digg proof, and you jump ship. I left A Small Orange to move to Media Temple (I seemed to have landed a slightly temperamental server at ASO, but friends have had no such problems with them) in order to host a big future project of mine.

I’m happy to say that, in this case, the grass is altogether greener and far more luscious than it was over t’other side. The main reason for my move was Media Temple’s apparent slowness with the sites I was hosting. These are all low traffic WordPress blogs, so nothing particularly adventurous or taxing, but when the mind boggling tedium induced by simply clicking on the “write” link in the WordPress dashboard became too much to bear I had to try something else.

I set up a WebFaction account for roughly $9.50. I’m in the UK, so I ended up paying VAT on top of whatever they charged, so a straight conversion won’t quite give you the total paid. I figured I could write that off if they ended up being slower than Media Temple and close the account after month 1. Or take advantage of their 60 day money back promise.

I copied one of my sites across, and loaded up the WordPress dashboard. Then, in another browser, on another monitor (yes, I have two monitors - how posh am I?), I loaded up the same site on Media Temple’s servers.

Now, admittedly this isn’t strictly speaking a fair test - there are a number of reasons beyond the host that could account for the difference in speed, but the WebFaction hosted site seemed so much quicker it was untrue. I was seeing ten second load times for the write post page, compared to three seconds on WebFaction. Maybe Media Temple was having a particularly bad night, but tests on subsequent nights confirmed a definite speed difference.