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Goodbye, Helio

As of 3pm today, Jim and I are no longer Helio members. (yes, I know they are now Virgin Mobile, but apparently accounts are still separated in their system and for all intents and purposes, it’s still “Helio”) Wow, I can’t believe that two years have already passed!

My Ocean has been a really good device, but I can honestly say that now I’m glad that we upgraded. It was time to move forward and sadly, the Ocean 2 (or “O2″) isn’t near as nice as Apple’s iPhone aesthetically- (nor functionally-) speaking. So far, the AT&T service has been really good. Hopefully it’ll stay that way. (although I really DO wish they get their collective asses in gear on this MMS crap!)

So AT&T is not the devil?

Speaking specifically about their wireless service, I’ve got to admit that AT&T has made it a lot easier for me to do business with them. They’ve cleaned up the online billing process and I love their iPhone app — it’s great for paying on the spot, changing account info, checking usage stats, etc. They’ve even implemented a CSR chat function on their website. It has been great for letting me get small tasks taken care of without having to stay tied up on the phone. (which also allows me to work on other things at work while chatting with the CSR!)

I still won’t go back to them for internet or residential services, but hey I’m happy with the wireless service overall.

What about the extras?

Someone recently asked me what was to become of the fanlisting, blogroll, or other Helio-related goodies here. I think for now I’ll let them sit. If an interested party wants to take something over, I’ll gladly hand it off — or maybe I’ll kill ‘em all in a mad cleaning spree 6 months from now. You never know …

Upgraded to WP 2.7

I figured I’d go ahead and bite the bullet this weekend and update to 2.7 now that it’s available. So far, I am impressed by all the WP Admin changes but haven’t had time to look much into anything else. I know I will have to update this theme and all of my releases to include the new comment functions and other good stuff. With any luck, I’ll get this done next week.

I can see from the WP feeds that 2.7.1 is hot on 2.7’s heels, so as soon as that’s available in the upgrade options, I’ll do that too.

Let me know if anything looks out of place or wonky!

WordCamp Birmingham Notes

Note: I had intended to post this Monday night, but work has been crazy-busy this week and Jim’s having a bit of a site snafu, so spare time has been pretty much nonexistent. LOL!

We had a wonderful time at WordCamp Birmingham this past weekend. A big thanks to Andre Natta and the B’ham team for all of their hard work. I’m most definitely looking forward to next year’s. The date is already set (September 26-27, 2009), so be sure to mark your calendar! Matt Mullenweg is slated to be a keynote speaker, so it should be awesome!!

The Future of WordPress

The first speaker we saw Saturday morning was Dougal Campbell with “The Future of WordPress.” He briefly covered WordPress’ version history and various milestones over the last few years. Thinking back, I think I started off with either version 1.0 or 1.1. I remember the upgrade to 1.2 being pretty hard, but that was nothing like having to re-do my theme for 1.5, LOL!

Ahh, those were the days … :lol:

He then moved on to the upcoming and much anticipated version 2.7. It’s due sometime next month. According to Dougal, there will be:

• more backend UI re-design;
• upgraded API, so you can upgrade themes, browse and install plugins and themes, etc.;
• comment improvements (many of these are covered in great detail on Otto’s blog) such as:
  • threaded comments
  • paged comments
  • auto-close comments
  • replying to comments from the Admin menu (a HUGE plus!!!)
• sticky posts;
• “Quick Edit” inline editing via Ajax for posts;
• HTTP-only cookies, a security feature;
• a new HTTP request API for plugin developers, replacing the current request API (Snoopy, I think?);
• and many others …

He also went over some possible features for future versions of WordPress:

• APP Importer: for Movable Type, Type Pad, Blogger, …
• A new “default” theme, possibly based on Sandbox or something similar to it. This will be replacing the current Kubrick theme.

Some features that he thinks are likely for version 2.8 (taken from the Trac Tickets) include:

• better page managment: select page order, hide pages
• expanded template functions: users, comments, attachments

We can look forward to seeing more CMS features, more social networking features, better widget management. Perhaps even OpenID (that would be sweet).

Documentation was brought up and he stated that there has been a big push (internally) to get the functions (I’m assuming he means the Codex?) better documented, updated, etc.

SEO For WordPress

The next speaker was Donna Fontenot, who had some really good insight on SEO for beginners. You can view her slides here. It is also available on her website in HTML format.

She started with a very simple recommendation as a first step for blogging: think first, write later. This can apply to so many aspects, and I admit it’s one that I don’t practice enough. You should actually USE the phrases you want to rank well for in blog posts. For best results, use them in prominent places:

• Document Title
• Body Headings
• In posts

Another stickler subject: Blog Visibility. In covering the WordPress Settings, she states that you should always make sure to have the privacy option set so that your blog is visible to everyone, including search engines.

Moving on to Permalink structure, the optimal setting is /%category%/%postname%/. For most blogs it’s ok to be different though. Dates, which are useless for SEO, are useful for users and are most generally preferred. It’s best to make sure that %postname% in there somewhere.

She talked a bit about URL canonicalization. Blog owners must make a choice: www or no www. Whichever you choose, you must consistently use it everywhere:

• Linking to your site
• correspondence
• email and IM signatures

Donna then moved on to categories. This is another thing I am doing wrong, LOL! She says it’s best to keep them as top-level important concepts, as opposed to tagging. Me, I tag and categorize all willy-nilly. Guess I’ll have to work on that. :mrgreen:

One of the plugins she highly recommended was All-In-One SEO Pack. I’ve heard about this plugin from several different people and from what I understand, it takes all the guesswork out of SEO for your blog. Donna says that the default settings work well.

Another plugin mentioned is: Excerpt Editor. This one gives extra control over excerpts, autogenerates excerpts (but allows overriding), prevents duplicate content between excerpts and full post, replaces the_content() with the_excerpt(), and more…

She spent a bit of time on two other post elements:

• Post titles:
  • use H1 or H2
  • Ok to use other tags, but H1 or H2 are best (use whatever suits your theme)
• Post slugs:
  • these should contain only most important words
  • and you should strip out “stop” words like ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, etc. These dilute the value of other keywords in the slug (permalink)

Other topics covered were:

• Post Image Optimization
• Interlinking
• Encouraging Sharing/Linking
• Participating and Reciprocation

Donna’s presentation not only had a lot of good information, she also made recommendations as to customizations to themes and various plugins that could help improve the “SEO-ness” of your site. I highly recommend checking out her site. You’ll find a LOT of useful information there that she covered at WordCamp, and a lot more!

Merging your work life with your blog life

The next speaker was David Griner. His presentation was pretty comical, poking fun at himself (he’s not even a WordPress user *gasp* hehe) and his profession. While this wasn’t really one of the topics that first piqued my interest, it did have a lot of useful information for anyone whose ever wondered what it could take to make blogging a full-time job.

It’s not something I could do, but I admire anyone who does it!

Topics included:

• Pros of Freelancing
  • schedule your own time
  • stockpile blog posts in advance
  • decent extra pay
  • very minor level of celebrity
  • opportunities for guest editing/posting
  • work in your underwear
• Cons
  • most people suck at time management
  • you’ll starve
  • no benefits or security
  • can mess with your taxes
  • easy to lose steam
  • neighbors get tired of seeing you in your underwear
• Finding the right blog
  • you’re probably already reading it
  • who owns it?
  • how many writers?
  • Whats the output?
• Getting the gig
  • get to know the writers or editors
  • comment often under the same name
  • write response posts on your blog
  • if you like the site, help drive traffic there
• Asking for the job
  • no harm asking about openings
  • always write at least three sample posts that they could run that day
  • make sure your e-mail is colon-rupturing in its awesomeness
  • get across your enthusiasm for the blog
  • talk about how it has evolved
  • say why they need you
  • what is the blog missing?

You can see these and more in his slides here.

Break!

At this point, we broke for lunch. Jim and I didn’t go back for the late afternoon sessions. I was nursing a migraine and football would be on soon. (Hey, I’m a ‘Bama fan first and WP geek second! )

I went back Sunday for a couple of the sessions: Brett Bumeter’s “Windows Live Writer — Blogging with any Blogging Software Has Never Been Easier” and Mitch Canter’s “Making WordPress Dance.”

Brett’s presentation covered the Windows Live Writer application. It’s not really my cuppa, but would be a great interface for anyone intimidated by the web UI for most popular blogging software/services.

Mitch’s presentation covered several topics I had previously researched and I was impressed with the amount of helpful information he covered. He also had a great list of plugins that he recommended. I would like to see more of him next year, if he attends. You can find his slides here.

The Media

From watching the WordCamp Bham twitters, I can see that a photo pool is available on Flickr, as well as a handful of the presentation slides gathered on SlideShare. I also see that WordCamp Birmingham also made the local news. You deserve it guys, great work!

Good stuff. Can’t wait until next year.

(Updated to include slides links, thanks Don @ authorize.net!)

Fried pickle foolery

As a reward for helping him with his blog upgrade (read: snafu) last week, Jim took me out Saturday to my favorite restaurant, Cajun Steamer. I am absolutely enamored with their red beans and rice and my new favorite deep fried delicacy: fried pickles. I’ve tried those at several other places and IMO, nobody beats “the Steamer.” A close second would be the fried pickle spears at Porky’s Pride in Fultondale. (they have GREAT bbq!)

So yeah, I’m a fried pickle eating fool … maybe one of these days I’ll buy a deep fryer and start making my own. (I like ‘em spicy!)

Our internet has been doing going up and down for the last week or so, plus there’s been a lot of static on the line when we used the phone. This weekend we bought a new router (found that the old one was fine), several replacement splitters and panels for the phone connection in the living room (those were probably fine as well), replaced the phone line (well, that was probably needed), and finally found that when we unplugged the kitchen phone the static stopped and the internet connection seemed to stabilize.

Weird.

So with the internet connection back to somewhat normal, Jim was a happy camper and spent most of yesterday playing Conan. Me, I had a persistent headache — complete with nausea and dizziness, so I did a little cleaning, but spent most of the day lying in bed. Luckily, I don’t get these often. My migraine pain meds did little for the headache and because I was so nauseous, I didn’t eat (which usually just makes the headache worse). Ugh.

I seriously wouldn’t wish this upon anyone … except maybe the idiot neighbor who decided to let his dog yip for 6 freakin’ hours straight!

I don’t think I went to sleep until after 2 am this morning. Unfortunately the only things on tv at that hour are infomercials for anything from Proactiv acne cream to ‘magical’ body slimmers to Girls Gone Wild. Ugh. Lucky for me, Jim had just picked up a copy of last season’s The Closer dvd set, so I watched that instead.

So today I’m making a point to stay hopped up on caffeine just so I can stay awake. ;P

WP Auto Updater … my thoughts

I had a chance this afternoon to sit and play around with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin. I decided to upgrade my other problem-child second most troublesome blog, my recipe site (Now We’re Cookin’).

Overall, WPAU is impressive. It automates some of the most tedious parts of the upgrade process and I think it would be a very handy tool to recommend to those who aren’t as comfortable mucking around in WordPress’ inner guts.

I took a myriad of screenshots and uploaded them to my Zooomr account here.

Backing up

I haven’t had a chance to dump the backup files into a test site, but did take a peek to see how thorough the backup process was/is. The database backup looked pretty thorough, and prior to WPAU running the backup, you are given the option to backup just the tables necessary to WordPress or any (or all) of the accompanying tables (from plugins, bbPress, etc.). In the file backups however, I saw one thing that concerns me a little. The wp-content directory is skipped entirely. Anyone who’s upgraded a few times knows that you almost never overwrite anything in this directory. That said, I would always recommend backing it up just for shits and giggles.

Experience has taught me never to assume that my existing backups have everything in them.

I did notice that the entire root was backed up, not just the WordPress files, so that’s a good thing. I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve accidentally deleted files that were critical to their site (outside of WP obviously) because they weren’t paying attention!

My personal gripes

I was under the impression that WPAU would keep any existing customized WordPress files and update if needed. On this particular site, I use a very customized quicktags.js. Granted, I have a million copies of these and it’s no big deal to just throw in a backup to overwrite the one that was installed in the upgrade process. But still … shouldn’t it have kept my customized file?

Also, and this is just my personal pet peevery, it copied the license.txt and readme.html into the site’s root directory. Personally, when I’m snooping around a site, those are two of the first 10 or so files/filetypes I would look for…

Not a big deal, like I said, just my personal peeve …

Last but not least, I didn’t see any changes to the wp-config.php file. Granted, I had already updated it prior to the upgrade, so maybe the app recognized that … I don’t know. However, that is something that concerns me considering that there have been several significant changes in the WP-Config during the last 2-3 version releases.

In closing

Like I said before, I like WPAU overall. I think it will come in very handy for several people I know, and I will most likely use it on my “non-custom” sites. That said, I think I would still feel more comfortable handling my more “customized” sites by hand.

A big thanks should go out to Keith Dsouza, the author of WordPress Automatic Upgrade. That’s a very highly complicated plugin — much more detailed and elaborate than any of my own hack-jobs!

WordPress updated

It’s over with, and it wasn’t too painful. At least I remembered to update my WP-Config this time.

That said, I’ve been hearing horror stories from others who’ve tried to upgrade, so I guess I’m counting myself lucky. So far I’ve updated this site and BYKYC. I’ll most likely be doing the others later this week (or whenever time allows).

My darling Jim passed this gem to me and I know there are a couple readers here who’ve asked me if I knew of such a thing: WordPress Automatic Upgrade. The website says it’s compatible with the latest version of WP, but I have not yet had a chance to try it out myself. (may do so on a less ‘popular’ site, LOL!)

An update on things …

New Orleans was fun, but like all vacations it wasn’t long enough. Work has been absolute Hell lately, and the insurance company that we’ve been trying to settle with (remember my wreck, going on 2 months ago?) is giving us the run-around, so I’m stressing a bit more than usual.

To those who’ve asked about the Lunarpages WordPress Theme Design contest, no I didn’t win anything. But I am VERY grateful to those who voted for me! There’s been some speculation as to how the deciding votes (LP staff?) really came out, but in all honesty I’m just happy being nominated … for now. ;P

Speaking of theme designs, I’ve submitted a handful of mine to the new WordPress Theme Directory. So hopefully those will show up soon.

SA on the slow track …

I feel pretty bad that I haven’t gotten as much done on my Soldiers’ Angels stuff as I’d hoped. I am beginning to think that maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew in helping the warehouse/donations tracking, Walmart grants, all the websites, and even my own projects here for SA of Alabama. I’m feeling VERY overwhelmed, and frankly a little disappointed because the local response hasn’t gone as well as I’d been hoping.

There is a glimmer of hope though. A gentleman waved at me while stopped at a redlight last week and told me that he saw my bumper stickers (Soldiers’ Angels) and that he just had to thank me for supporting our soldiers. I’m not in SA for any kind of recognition or personal glory, but it IS nice feeling appreciated, and reminds me of why I want to do so much …

Geekery

About three weeks ago I heard from one of my old Neopets buddies, Rose. We talked for a bit and caught each other up on how our families were doing, and the usual. She nudged me about possibly re-joining Neopets, so on a whim I did. My character name this time around is BamaAngels so if you’re on, look me up!

(boy, what I wouldn’t give to have all that NP stuff I gave away, LOL!!!)

Also, I am now an active Editor for Addons.Mozilla.org again. I feel badly for neglecting those duties for so long, but am happy to say that I’m now back and trying to do a little each week to help out the AMO gang.

I think I’ll sit this one out

I saw that WordPress released an update over the weekend. It’s now up to 2.5.1. There’s a ton of fixes, but among the highlighted are:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

I doubt I’ll be upgrading because I hear some users are having trouble receiving their password emails (e.g. when it’s recovered), so I figure it won’t be too long until 2.5.2 will come along. I’ll upgrade then.

Besides, I already have a lengthy “to do” list for each of my sites as it is … don’t these WordPress people know I’m busy?!!?

Seriously though one thing about this release did pique my interest: I was reading about the addition of SECRET_KEY to the wp-config file (edit: this was added in 2.5). From what I understand, it helps secure your WordPress cookies — nice.

More security is always a good thing, right? :mrgreen: Like Fenphedra to a speed freak, heh!

And speaking of WordPress…

Have I mentioned that the upcoming South by Deep South conference will have a full-on WordCamp?

They are looking for speakers, so if you’re going to be in the area and are interested, be sure to drop by the WordCamp Birmingham wiki and leave your info!

I’m definitely looking forward to that. Mark your calendars, people!

Performancing slams WordPress over v2.5

Via BloggingPro, I was reading Raj Dash’s recent post explaining why he hates WordPress 2.5 with a pretty in-depth list of reasons. I have to admit, many of those he listed I can identify with and offer some sympathy … to a point. While there are still a handful of things that I’d change if I had my way, I feel Automattic worked in their users’ best interests, taking in many requests, most of which I’ve seen with my very own eyes on the forums, and now see reflected in these recent — however dramatic — changes!

Raj began to close his post with the following:

Automattic, you seriously dropped the ball on this. WordPress 2.5 is an enormous disappointment in the simplest of features. As an experienced (but retired) programmer, I can say with confidence that you don’t release significant interface changes in mid-version software. People that are expecting minor fixes might be shocked. V2.5 should have been renumbered to V3.0. If it had, more people might think twice before making a “big jump” from 2.x to 3.0. I’m so glad that I didn’t install WP 2.5 on a production site, but I do have to use it on several client sites – something I don’t relish.

You’ve now lost one of your most active WordPress evangelists…

He’s certainly entitled to his opinion. In the comments, he notes that power users ‘like him’ will hate the new WordPress. What’s more, new users seem to like WP 2.5 — wait, isn’t that a good thing? ??:

My two pennies on the matter

I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but I like to consider myself a WordPress “power user” and while it took me a day or so to learn my way around and where everything is in the new layout, I’m finding that I rather like it and now prefer it! On top of that, the dashboard is everything I have wanted for SO LONG! Almost every single one of my most frequently visited options/configurations/things-needing-changing are right there and I don’t have to click 2 or 3 links deep to find what I want. (something that used to piss me off to NO end!)

Isn’t this what progress is supposed to be like?

So what I want to know now is…

What do you think? Is Raj right? Has WordPress screwed the pooch on this one? Or is he over-reacting?

WordPress updates and a new perk for commenters

I noticed this morning when I logged into my admin panel that there’s a new update out there for WordPress. It’s a security release, didn’t see any changes to the database or anything, so the upgrade itself was quick and painless. (Just the way I like ‘em! )

I discovered a new plugin via Jo’s Cafe. I was leaving a comment on her post this morning (get well soon, Jo!) and noticed that she was using CommentLuv. When someone posts a comment on your blog, it places a link to their last blog post under their comment. Instant link-love!

Me likes. :mrgreen: