Microsoft recently released a public beta of their newest web browser, IE9, that has quickly become very popular. In its first 48 hours of availability it was downloaded 2 million times. You know what that means – more users are visiting your WordPress site using IE9 everyday. So why not take advantage of a feature that combines new capabilities in IE9 and the Windows 7 Taskbar to ask visitors to place a permanent link to your site on their Windows 7 Taskbar? Some real quick background. On the Windows 7 Taskbar any icon that is placed there can be programmed by the software’s author to have interactive menu items on what is called a Jumplist. This Jumplist typically contains shortcuts to program features and commands to provide quick access to them. Well with the introduction of IE9 webpages can have code added to them that will allow a visitor to […]
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There are a myriad of reasons why people create websites and put them online. Some do it for fame and profit; others do it for passion and service. No matter the reason you put your work and effort into an online endeavor there can come a time in the life of some websites that the comment system becomes inconvenient for discussions. Now WordPress has done a lot to make it easier to follow along with discussions on a site based on that system. The threaded comments option allows replies to be underneath the original comment that prompted the reply. Even before it became an option in WordPress plugin developers were making it happen. So when you want to take those discussions to their own piece of your website and create a forum what should you do? Well there are quite a few options out there for forums and discussion boards. […]
[Continue Reading...]Just in case you missed it the default theme in WordPress 3.0 has been updated to version 1.1. If your running WordPress 3.0 you should find an update indicator in your admin panel under Dashboard > Updates. So when I saw this update a couple of days ago I went off in search of what was updated. Unfortunately there is not a changelog in the WordPress.org Themes Directory and a quick search did not yield very much at that time. However, today when I made that same search I finally got some results and although it is not a changelog with a detailed listing of what has been updated it is from one of the WordPress Devs, Andrew Nacin and appears in the WordPress Support Themes and Templates forum: Hey all — The only real change is that I removed the half-baked code using the wp_title hook in order to […]
[Continue Reading...]About a month ago I posted about how fast WordPress 3.0 was being downloaded and there was a terrific discussion about the sheer amount of data that was being grabbed to get at the 3.0 version of WordPress. We even had some comments as to why it was being downloaded at that scale. Well as of today the download counter reads that it has been downloaded just over 10.3 million times since it was released last month and the counter keeps rolling along! So what is it that makes the WordPress platform so popular? What is it that drives people to download it over 10 million times? If you had the opportunity to talk to a non WordPress user what would you tell them about it to show that it is worth downloading and putting to use for a website? What is your favorite thing about WordPress? What is your […]
[Continue Reading...]Actually this should not be a big surprise for those of us who frequent sites like this to see that the latest version of WordPress is moving out the door at this kind of pace. If you want to watch the parade of downloads then you should check out this site: http://wordpress.org/download/counter/ Personally I do not remember a similar download counter on past versions but that does not mean it did not exist. Maybe someone from WordPress can comment on how this versions download pace compares to past updates. I think that would be interesting to know and compare. I grabbed this screenshot at 8:20 AM EDT just to give you a frame of reference I did some very rough calculations and watched the counter for 60 seconds to get an idea of just how fast those downloads are happening: 50 downloads per minute 3,000 downloads per hour 72,000 downloads […]
[Continue Reading...]There are 119 plug-ins in the WordPress Extend site that have the words backup and database in the descriptions. That in turn makes for a lot of options when it comes to backing up your critical data for your WordPress based website. A recent addition to the mix not only offers you a backup solution but they offer you a backup solution in the cloud. The IDrive WordPress plug-in allows you access to your IDrive backup account and it works with either the free basic account or a paid account. The free account offers up to 2GB of storage which should accommodate most sites. If you need more space you can get their entry level paid account for less than $5 per month that allows you to store up to 150GB. Here is a description of the plug-in and its features from the developers: IDrive Plug-in for WordPress is an […]
[Continue Reading...]I have been thinking about this post for a while. It really started to come to me after I went through a server move of my own website which I discussed on this site last month – Moving Your WordPress Site and Database. I did a lot of manual cleaning of my database to get rid of orphaned tables that had been in the database since the day I first set up a WordPress based website. The majority of these defunct tables were from either themes or plugins that I had used at different points in the life of WindowsObserver.com. As you all know you try out a lot of stuff on your site – mine had 3 years worth of it in there! Of course I had uninstalled the theme or plugin but a majority of these do not remove the information they leave in your database. Now I […]
[Continue Reading...]There comes a time you may have to leave one web host for another. No matter the reason the idea of relocating an entire website – especially one that has been online for sometime – can seem very daunting. With a WordPress based site – I found it easier than expected – way easier. My WindowsObserver.com website has 1,100 posts, 9 pages, 4 categories, 2,436 comments, uses 17 widgets, and has 35 active plug-ins. On top of all those elements I use Windows Live Writer to create all of my content and I use a good bit of screenshots and graphics in my posts. As a result I have over 40MB of images (1,100 files) to go along with my 1,100 postings. Now for the purposes of this story I am not going to get into a comparison of hosting services or the like. The landscape is massive out there […]
[Continue Reading...]Last week I wrote up a post to review the Real-Time Find and Replace Plugin and the comments on that story about other methods to make site wide changes permanent sent me in search of another way to search and replace information in my SQL database. Now I consider myself pretty decent at geeky things but directly editing and messing with my site’s SQL database does not top my list of things to do. Neither does manually going through nearly 1,000 postings to make changes. What I found was a terrific plug-in that lets me perform a few different functions to make corrections or change info throughout my site. Caveat: Before I get started – this plugin does make changes to your database. Play it safe and back up your info to protect your original data. With that said let me now introduce you to the Search Regex Plugin written […]
[Continue Reading...]About the Author
- Richard Hay
I have served for 26 plus years in the Navy and am a Master Chief Petty Officer. My work background in the Navy is telecommunications related so my hobby of computers fit well in what I did for the Navy. I consider myself a tech geek and enjoy most things in that arena. My first website - AnotherWin95.com - came online in 1996. Back then I used GeoCities Web Hosting for it and have all the GeoCities “stuff” to show for it! I have progressed from a single page, link-filled, static html page to using PHP, databases and coding to make my pages.
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