Early this morning, I took the Lab up to Wordpress 2.2. I did the 5 step process as recommended.
- Backup all the files
- Deactivate all the plug-ins
- Install the new files overwriting the old ones
- Run upgrade.php
- Re-activate the plug-ins
I will say this upgrade has been the one causing the least issues of any major upgrade I’ve done. The last one was a disaster from the sense it changed all the permalinks and made the pages disappear from the search engines if not fixed quickly you would have bots crawling and not finding and then finding under a new name and address. This upgrade didn’t go there thankfully.
Gottcha’s so far
Widgets
This new version has built in support for widgets, so you won’t need to or be able to activate the sidebar widget. Don’t stress over it. When you go the presentation tab it now has the word widget for the link.
MyBlogLog Plug-in
If you have the mybloglog plugin installed, you will need to add it to the sidebar again even if it was there before, it is now down in the options to add section.
Remember you will have to modify the code or it will produce W3C errors. I think this is more a wordpress issue, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t fix the code every time you save the widget settings it reverts back and produces the errors.
Spell checker
The spell checker (at least for me) with both IE 6 and FF just hangs. Once I got a message about ajax something or other. I hope they fix this soon, I like the spell checker feature. You can recover from it by clicking on the save or save and continue you won’t loose anything, it is just scary seeing it hang up with a ghostly pale screen.
New Stuff So Far
Preview
The only new thing I’ve noticed besides the built in widget support and something called “lots of ajax” is the preview window is now full screen and the link is at the top of the edit window. You now get a full WYSIWYG preview which is nice for those wanting the format to be just right when published. No hanging words around images, etc.
The blog seems to load faster, but maybe that is just wishful thinking.
I’m sure there will be more things appear in the next couple of days. I’m going to go ahead and upgrade the Oro Valley Real Estate blog, but wait a little while longer on the Tucson Real Estate in The News.
If you run into anything that other might want to know, please leave a comment.
Running a Wordpress upgrade is always a hold your breath experience. Going to a new (dot) is even more so.
If you are just noticing your avatars are missing from your comments, it isn’t related to the upgrade. Read MyAvatars are Missing!
Sometime on May 18th I noticed all the avatars for mybloglog suddenly disappeared from all my blogs comments.
Oh, My!!
I quickly changed from IE to FF and they were still missing. I changed to another computer, gone.
- I un-installed
- re-installed
- upgraded to 0.02a
Nothing, they are gone. I’ve left the plugin creator a message that the avatars have escaped. If anyone has seen them suddenly show up on your blog let us know.
Someone needs to get them rounded up and back on the blogs where they belong.
The links are still active and functioning in the comments but all you will see is this pathetic emptiness where avatars once ruled.
This is a 911 alert for the missing avatars.
As to my knowledge at this time there have been no ransom demands made.
Will Someone, Anyone Please return the missing Avatars!
This is a public blogging announcement.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog posts.
Almost everyday I hit the links at the bottom of the dashboard page and check the new plugins and themes available for Wordpress.
On May 16 in the plugins post there was an archives plugin mentioned.
I had just been setting up a new theme one of our listings and found it had the ability to create a new page, select archive theme and publish. Up popped an archive page of all the pages and posts.
I thought that was great, and then running into the archive plugin for my exisiting sites was a must have.
I followed the link to the Clean Archive Plugin downloaded and installed it on this blog and the Tucson real estate blog.
It didn’t appear to function as it was supposed to, actually it didn’t function at all. The author Sean, I don’t know that he has a last name, made it easy to contact him by email on his Geek with Laptop blog.
I told him how I installed it and provided links and relevant information and moved on to another project.
In about two minutes the phone rang and it was Sean on the phone calling me about the issue. I’ll admit I was in total shock. We figures out I had downloaded about the time he uploaded a minor adjustment to fix an issue with the plugin and the wordpress visual editor. He had visited both blogs and suggested I download and install the plugin again and see if it worked now.
Sean had a very busy day on this release date and was tweaking and fixing on the fly and took the time to find our sites, get the contact phone number and call to get it working. Incredible, talk about impressed . . .
After uploading the new file all worked perfectly.
I now have an archives page on this site and the Tucson Real Estate in the News site.
Follow Sean’s instruction at the download and install link above and you will have a great additional page to your blog making it even easier for your readers to check your archives and adding a nice SEO feature to your blog.
Sean is one Geek with Laptop I’m bookmarking and adding to my blogroll.
That’s Sean’s avatar from MyBlogLog at the top of this post. Look for it around the blogosphere.
Thanks again Sean for a great plugin, and follow-up that totally blew me away.
Keeping three blogs up and running on a weekly basis keeps me hoping along with trying to work in the Tucson Real Estate market.
I’ve been reading some posts lately on SEO for your blog and one of the interesting suggestions I came across was making sure you only put a post in a single category.
This way it won’t create duplicate content pages under both categories.
I’ve started to notice a pattern with regard to posts that are in more than a single category, (which I did often in the beginning of this blog) they don’t seem to be indexed.
I read on Matt Cutt’s blog about duplicate content, and there was no such penalty for having duplicate content on the same site, you could have a page for “print” and one for “screen” which creates duplicate content. The issue according to Matt has to do with which page do they index.
Having looked back over the posts for this and the Tucson Real Estate in The News blog it appears that the posts no longer indexed are the ones that are in more than one category.
I’ve also noticed that pages that have no outgoing links in the content of the page also seem to be more susceptible to being de-indexed or in supplemental results.
And posts that link to other posts on a similar topic have a better chance of remaining indexed.
A quick conclusion:
- Post to only a single category
- Include quality outbound links
- When applicable include links to other posts on topic
Getting your blog post indexed quickly by Google is wonderful, keeping them indexed is what we all really want.
The sidebar widget is a wonderful thing. It makes it so easy to change the layout of your sidebars and add additional widgets without having to write a single line of code.
I wrote about the Sidebar Widget on single property sites. Included in with the sidebar widget is the del.icio.us plugin.
I use this little plugin on all the blogs I author. It is very handy. But I don’t think many other people use it or even give it a thought.
I was reading a thread over at Real Estate Webmasters on social bookmarking. One of those replying stated they never used del.icio.us.
I use it as a repository for all the sites I want to bookmark and comeback to later. I also use it in conjunction with the plugin.
- set up a delicious account
- add it to your browser toolbar
- activate the del.icio.us plugin
- enter a tag for the plugin
- enter a title for the plugin
When you tag something in delicious with that tag it will automatically show up in your sidebar as soon as you tag it.
I know that might not make sense so here is an example of how I use it.
I have the del.icio.us plugin set up on the Tucson Real Estate in the News blog to tucson-real-estate-news. If I read an article in the paper about Tucson real estate I go to that article on the paper’s web site and I tag it with the tucson-real-estate-news tag.
The link and title immediately show up on the blog. If the title is longer than I want I can go into my del.icio.us account and edit the title.
The Oro Valley Real Estate blog has it’s own tag of oro-valley-news. You saw that one coming.
I also have it on this blog. It is down at the bottom of the right hand navigation titled “Items of Interest”
It is a handy little plugin. I’m sure many of you can come up with a way to use this plugin on your blog. It is a quick and easy way to share a list of links where you want your readers to go.
As an aside, the paper makes these article free to search for a couple of weeks, but after that you have to pay per article to get them out of the archive, but if you have the link already, it always works. This is another advantage to this little plugin and del.icio.us.
ReBlogWorld 2010
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.Yeah Right !
