For the last few days, I have been following the instructions in this post by Dennis Howlett: How to migrate a monster WordPress blog.
This method is only needed if you don’t have full server access to take a MySQL dump and a wp-content dump in order to migrate a blog using PHPMyAdmin or equivalent.
Continue reading “Migrating a HUGE WordPress blog”
Posted in WordPress | Tagged large blog, server migration, tips & tricks, WXR splitter, XML, zomgtheeyeglazing
This is coming up for me every now and then as a question from the perplexed.
It’s obviously not quite as obvious as it could be.
Continue reading “How to change your display name on wordpress.com”
Posted in Web 101, WordPress | Tagged blogging, display-name, tips & tricks, user-name
If you see this pop up in your RSS feed, and you have a few moments to spare, could you hop on over with your smartphone’s browser and see how it all looks? I’m testing out the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin.
Posted in Accessibility | Tagged mobile
I’ve added a dictionary plugin so that I can go mad with acronyms, initialisms and jargon to my heart’s content and still let newbie webtech readers understand what I’m going on about – I’d appreciate some accessibility testing from those using screen readers. I think it needs some better styling to indicate which words have a dictionary link for a start.
Here’s some of the terms that I have defined:
- SEO
- Information Architecture
- HTML
- JPEG
- CSS
How does that work for you, dear readers?
Posted in Accessibility | Tagged definitions, dictionary, plugins
So far pretty slick. It doesn’t seem to have broken any of the multimedia plugins and I’m enjoying some of the new features – the theme editor that remembers where you were at last save is long overdue!
As per major new release SOP, there’s an announcement post listing all the new features for 2.9 up at the WordPress Dev Blog (video too).
P.S. Heh, I just added a new category for “wordpress” all in lower case – and the category list autocorrected that to the official capitalised “WordPress”! Warms the cockles of my pedantic little heart, that does.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged new features, theme editor, WordPress, WP 2.9
I see otherwise well-done amateur websites ruined by a lack of knowledge about images on the web all the time.
Too many people take an image straight out of their digital camera (or an image meant to be sent to a printer at high resolution) that is huge (1000-3000+ pixels wide), upload it directly to their server and insert it into a page as-is, using HTML to shrink the display to only 500 pixels wide, or maybe only 150 pixels wide. When you first realise that browsers can shrink or expand images to any size you like, it seems like a cool trick, and it is. But it’s also a trap. Browser-shrinking very large images creates the following problems:
- it always looks horrible, with the image distorted and grainy
- chews through the website’s allocated data storage as more and more are uploaded – when your webhosting plan has 100MB storage and you keep on uploading 5MB images, it doesn’t take long to reach your data storage limit -> increased webhosting costs
- chews through the website’s allocated monthly data transfer as people access the page (similar to above, can lead to increased web host costs)
- chews through the internet user’s bandwidth allotted by the ISP (can lead to increased costs to them)
- worst of all, it slows down the loading of the page, leading to users losing patience and not clicking through to further content
- And yes, if you are sending huge images straight from the digital camera to other people via email, that creates similar problems.
Solution:
Continue reading “Common website mistakes #1: Images”
Posted in Web 101 | Tagged amateur websites, bandwidth, common website mistakes, descriptive name, host costs, image management, image managers, resizing, SEO, storage limit, webhosting plan, website images, website mistakes
Basic HTML for bloggers
Every now and then I get asked about this, by both authors and commentors, so I’m listing a few good resources here so that they’re all together in one place.
For Blog Authors:
Continue reading “Basic HTML for bloggers”
Posted in Web 101 | Tagged blogging, commenting, HTML, tutorials, XHTML | Leave a response