A Pipe and a Keyboard

I don’t profess to be a complete expert on WordPress and its finer workings.

Whenever I want to do something like a bulk modification or something like that, I tend to search around for some kind of plugin or some other solution on the Internet.  I am rarely disappointed.

I have been doing some modifications over on Head Rambles where I have shifted the links (Blogroll) onto a separate page.  I wanted to go a little further with this and to do this, I needed to place the links into the database rather than have them hard coded on a page.

I am a great fan pf PHPMyAdmin, so writing up an SQL textfile to insert a batch of links into the Links Table was relatively simple.  The Links Table had some legacy stuff in there so the result was a refreshed table with 147 entries.  So far so good.

I wanted to set all my Links to a particular category, and this is where I ran into a problem.  The last thing I wanted to do was to have to manually edit 147 entries and it would have been extremely slow and tedious.  I searched high an low and found quite a few others trying to do the same thing, but no solutions.  I had discovered the numerical identity of the category (it was 2) and tried a bulk change of the field ‘link_category’ to 2.  This didn’t work, for some reason.

On delving a little further, I found that in fact the relationship between links and categories is held in the table Term_Relationships.  As an experiment, I went back to my text editor and built up a series of inserts for this table –

INSERT INTO `term_relationships` (`object_id`, `term_taxonomy_id`, `term_order`) VALUES
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0);

where X is the ID of the link. 

On running this file, I got several errors indicating duplicate fields.  These represented the legacy entries, which was fair enough.  I just deleted the relevant entries from the text file.

Ultimately, my batch fix worked, and all the links are now entered under their correct categories.

I strikes me though that this would be a fine opportunity for someone to develop a plugin that does batch jobs on Links?

Filed under: Blogging, Tech stuff on April 27th, 2010 | No Comments »

I always felt I had a small problem with the theme for this site.

It was a lovely theme, but I always had a feeling that because it was so good, it somehow got in the way of the content.  Was the site here because I liked the look of it, or because I had something to say?

I have decided to switch to a new theme.  I’m not saying that this theme is any worse than the last one, but I feel it concentrates more on the content, rather than just shouting “look at me, amn’t I beautiful”.

I have a few tweaks to do to it yet.  I have already darkened the text, and I want to increase the font size a little.  I had an interesting time setting Windows Live Writer to reflect the new theme as it is a complex one.  It is essentially two themes – the base theme is Desk Mess Mirrored, but there is a child theme installed on top of that – Desk Mess Multi, which provides one or two extra knobs.  I had to revert to the base theme before I could get WLW to reflect the theme, and then set the site back to the child again.

So far, I like it, but then it has only been up for a couple of hours.  Time will tell.

Any thoughts?

Filed under: General on April 24th, 2010 | 20 Comments »

The most important aspect of any website is to facilitate the reader.  Blogging has the additional factor of providing a two way conversation, so an easy to use site is essential.

I visit many blogs in the course of a day, and some of them make the very business of interaction so complicated that I tend not to revisit.

The most important aspect is to allow commenting to be as easy as possible.  Blogger [the free service] is a nightmare in this respect as it involves popups and Captchas which I hate.  In general, most blogs are easy to comment on, but they lack a couple of features which I think are rather irritating.

When I leave a comment on a site, I consider it to be part of a potential conversation, and I therefore have to revisit the site on a frequent basis just to see if there is a reply.  A very simple plug-in which helps here is ‘Subscribe to Comments‘.  This enables email notification, if the subscriber wants it.  It is one of those plug-ins that really ought to be part of the core code.

Another thing which I find irritating is to write a comment, submit it, and then find a glaring typo or omission when it is too late to do anything about it.  A very simple solution to this one is to install ‘WP Ajax Edit Comments’.  Unfortunately, I see they are about to start charging for updates to this, so I will either stick with my current version, or find an alternative.  In the meantime, this allows the commenter a pre-set period of time to revisit and edit their comments.

One plug-in I like, though it is not essential is ‘MCEComments’.  This embeds the TinyMCE code and adds the ability to format text in the comments, such as Bold or Italics.  The plug-in can be fairly easily tweaked to provide a huge range of facilities such as justification, image embedding and link embedding.  Most of these are best left off, but it is nice to have the facility if required.

Filed under: Blogging, Tech stuff on April 11th, 2010 | 9 Comments »