Today I took the plunge once again and upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress 2.2.1 here at the lab. I don’t know about you but these things make me nervous every time I do them. As you can see I’m giving roses for this mini upgrade, for all except the spellchecker.
There were a series of small fixes to behind the scenes issues as well as a couple of security upgrade issues in this release. You can read about those at Wordpress 2.2.1 Upgrade
This one was smooth and easy and I still found I had a bug with the spellchecker.
I’ll do a separate post on the Wordpress Spellchecker issue. There is a workaround. I really like it when it works.
I’ve got the other two main blogs I run which I need to upgrade. I’ve been putting that off but really need to do it. The full preview window makes it well worth the time and effort to upgrade.
For a complete look at the process read Wordpress 2.2 Upgrade for The Real Estate Blog Lab.
PS. I received the roses from my wonderful wife for the annual rite of passage on the 23rd. The roses don’t look this good now that’s why I take pictures. After the post on photo envy I figured what the heck, give Wordpress some roses.
The other night I was getting the Scoop on Michigan Real Estate when I noticed Maureen had a new IM thingy (technical term) on her blog.
Plugoo isn’t a plug-in. It is a script that I put in a text box in the widgets setup screen once the Plugoo account was setup.
You can see it at the bottom of the navigation on the right side.
Plugoo Getting Started
Go to Plugoo.com and setup a user account. Now I know that usually is a no brainer and maybe I was exceptionally tired last night when I did this. Tired or not one thing I hate about Plugoo is the user interface. It is not intuitive at all.
I’ll try and make this process easier for those older than 7. Anyone younger just keeps clicking at the speed of light till something they recognize pops up.
Here is what I mean look at this screen capture of the right side of the Plugoo screen. If you have an account it is obvious where to register.
Step one says to create and activate an account. Where do you click to create an account?
What they don’t tell you. You have to already have an IM account and you pick one of the six IM logos and click on the arrow at the bottom.
Then you get to the create an account. Perfectly clear RIGHT!
Number 2 it somehow did on its own. I said yes that was it.
Number 3 again was quite the challenge. But I managed after several tries to get it to save, that is once I found the save buried in the details of the page.
The setup screen looks like this but there is no save button. I found out you can’t just get the default setting because you have to make a change to get the save button to even appear.
Since I was testing I didn’t care about fancy setup I just wanted to get the thing and see if it created errors or not; if it did, GOODBYE PLUGOO.
But, it didn’t create a single error; thus this post.
Once you have it setup copy the HTML code at the bottom and copy it where you want the plugoo window to appear. I created a new text box for the widget and copied the script code into it.
Plugoo Cool Stuff
One thing I think is really cool about Plugoo. If someone starts to type in the plugoo IM box and I’m not online, it opens a conversation in my MSN Instant messenger (which is never off on my computer) and I can type in the MSN window and it is sent to the blog Plugoo window.
I can put Plugoo on all the blogs and the websites and if someone starts a conversation I know it immediately. This is a great feature.
The little boxes in the upper right on the Plugoo window will let you detach the Plugoo window from the blog and open in it’s own window. It is possible for a user to detach the Plugoo window, close your blog and continue the conversation.
Plugoo Beta Caveats
Here are some things I wish they would change for the next upgrade.
- I have it set to the widest setting they have, I wish it would go wider for those blogs t hat have wide navigation. I like to be able to read more than just a couple of words per line.
- I don’t like the single line interface for user input when communicating with you.
- Put the save button on the setup screen and don’t be so cute with the programming to make it only visible when you save.
- Make the save button more prominent in a typical location not in the middle of the selection options.
- Explain the home page create account process for those that don’t know you have to have an existing service.
I honestly believe that more people would us Plugoo but they get frustrated trying to set up a user account or the Plugoo screen and they simply leave and move on.
In conclusion:
- It is at the bottom of my navigation because I’m only testing it on here for errors not functionality. I don’t expect anyone to ever find it down there.
- It will be difficult for a blog with a single navigation column to find a place for plugoo above the fold. Much easier on a blog with two column navigation one column for the post.
- No you can’t get your image to appear in the Plugoo window like it shows at the top of this post. I did that because we just had a new set of photos taken and it was a place I could see what a small version of one of them looked like. : )
Meebo have an easier process and setup. I like the look of the interface better. But it creates error and you have to remember to log in. Plugoo requires no log in. It will send messages to your existing IM account if you aren’t online in the blog.
Hopefully Plugoo will improve with the next version incorporating some of the nicer things from Meebo while maintaining code that is W3C compliant.
Overall, it gives you a means to communicate with people on your blog and you don’t have to deal with W3C validation errors.
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!
Have you ever done a Google search and when you clicked on a link it went to the homepage of the site and not to the information you were looking for.
Most of us take 1 millionth of a second to see it isn’t there and rather than try and find navigation to the page we click back and move on to the next search result. I wanted a way to keep them from hitting that back button and moving on.
I like the site search on our blogs and went looking for something to do the same on our web site. I found Google Site Search.
Google Site Search is a great way to let people enter their search term and this time it will only search your site. There is a good chance they won’t be so quick to click away once they see this search option. I’ve tested it on our Tucson Real Estate site and it returns the exact page reference that came up in the original search taking your visitor to the page they wanted in the first place.
Here is the process to put Google SiteSearch on your Homepage:
- Go to the Google Site Search Page
- check the agree to terms of service
- click the get code button
- Scroll down to the bottom option code window
- Reread 4. There are three sets of code, you want the bottom one.
- Copy it.
Here is the catch, yeah there always seems to be a catch doesn’t there. This code will produce 35 WC3 Errors on you homepage.
I found this on a routine check of our homepage on the WC3 validator page. It took me a few minutes to clean up the code so it would validate.
Here is the process:
- Change all CAPS to lower case ex. INPUT to input
- Make all lines of code self closing including <br> to <br />
- Put all values in quotes ex. input type=”text” NOT input type=text
A rule of thumb is after = close in quotes - remove the </form> at the end
it isn’t needed you’ve made all lines self closing - change checked to checked=”checked”
Here is the code as it should changed to validate.
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
<form action=”http://www.google.com/search”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ie” value=”utf-8″/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”oe” value=”utf-8″/>
<table bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”><tr><td>
<a href=”http://www.google.com/“>
<img src=”http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_40wht.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Google”/></a></td><td>
<input type=”text” name=”q” size=”31″ maxlength=”255″ value=”"/>
<input type=”submit” name=”btnG” value=”Google Search”/><input type=”hidden” name=”domains” value=”yourdomain.com”/><br /><input type=”radio” name=”sitesearch” value=”"/> WWW <input type=”radio” name=”sitesearch” value=”yourdomain.com” checked=”checked”/>
yourdomain.com <br /></td></tr></table>
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
You can’t copy this code from the page it won’t work.
I’m not the brightest bulb in the pack when it comes to this code in a post stuff. Here is the googlesitesearch.pdf file.
- Once it is open
- select the I bar select function
- swipe the code
- copy it.
You can now paste it into your web page, changing the three references to “yourdomain” located near the bottom of the code to . . . . . you got it, your domain.
DO NOT CHANGE names=”domain”
Once you have added and saved you can use the validator page to check for errors on your homepage.
Assuming you didn’t have any errors before adding this code. 
I really like the functionality of this piece of code. It is just too bad that Google would provide a piece of code that is so obviously out of standard coding practices for today.
And if anyone can tell me how I can start putting code in a post that can simply be copied and applied. Please let me know.
Setting up the wp-configure.php file
Before you can install Wordpress you have to have a valid MYSQL database setup and you have to create the wp-configure.php file.
Here is the current place to go to get The latest version of Wordpress.
Wordpress comes with a wp-sample-configure.php file. You can open this using notepad if you don’t have a file editor for html or php files.
In the previous post Single Property Sites – Hostingwe had you write down the MYSQL database number for our example we are using 159 as the database number.
Here is what it looks like and the highlighted words are the ones you need to fill in.
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'mystreet'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'mystreet'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'listings'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'mysql159.secureserver.net'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
$table_prefix = 'wp_'; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-includes/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-includes/languages and set WPLANG to 'de'
// to enable German language support.
define ('WPLANG', '');/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/');
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');
?>
Once you have filled in the information for the database you just created save this file as wp-configure.php
When we set up the hosting we created a folder called “mystreet” this is where we want to upload the Wordpress files including the wp-configure.php file you just edited.
Don’t upload the wordpress folder, just the files inside the folder to the “mystreet” folder you created for the property.
Installing Wordpress
Now comes the easy part of the installation process.
Go to your browser and type in the following
“http://www.domainname.com/foldername/wp-admin/install.php”
If it is a subdomain it will be “http://subdomain/domainname.com/foldername/wp-admin/install.php”
If the configure.php file is right it will install. If not go back and check your database, username, description and password to the database. When it installs you are given the login which is always “admin” and a password to enter.
Write down the password and go ahead and login.
- Change the password
- Fill in your email address
- Change the blog description
- Save
The next thing I do is immediately delete the “about” page and “hello world” post and comment. You want to get rid of these right away before they get picked up on the web.
Here is where we are headed
It won’t be long and you can have a site up that is your time shifted 24/7 open house.
Setting up Wordpress now begins. Here are some of the things we will be covering.
- Set your category names
- Set the permalink structure
- pick a theme
- upload your plugins
- activate the plugins
For now:
- Go take some good photos of the place
- Scan the documents you want to link to
- Seller Property Disclosure Statement
- Lead based paint of if built before 1978
- Run a CMA and convert to pdf if desired
- Create a full color flyer and link to it.
- Find the places and activities of interest near the property
That’s enough for now. We will go into each of these in post to follow.
Hey, it might seem like a lot, but in just three posts you’ve learned
- why single property sites are worth the effort.
- how to purchase a domain if you need one and purchase a hosting plan.
- how to create a MYSQL database.
- how to install Wordpress.
That’s not bad for three short posts.
UPDATE Here is a great plugin for changing your Permalink structure. It creates 301 redirects when you change the permalinks.
I’ve noticed lately that Google was showing a lot of missing URL and URL’s not found and HTTP errors.
I thought most of those were due to the change in domain names mentioned in other posts here.
Today I noticed that when I installed Wordpress 2.1 it set my custom permalinks back to default. This causes the search engines to get errors when looking for pages previously indexed.
If you have used any permalink structure besides the default structure and have upgraded to 2.1 you should check your permalinks structure.
Personally, I like the custom set up described in this Permalinks Post. If you chose carefully the names of your categories using keywords and use the custom setting of /%category%/%postname%/ you should recognize a boost in your search engine results.
I would also recommend you check your google account diagnostics summary page.
I catch a lot of things by looking at that page, unfortunately there have been too many changes lately to domain names and the Wordpress 2.1 upgrade.
The trials and travails of this little experiment have take their toll on sleep and other things in life the past couple of days. But in barely two month of existence. Lots of help from 2000 bloggers project and others linking here we broke the 100 barrier.
It does pay to keep track of these things. One way to know you have an issue:
If you start seeing links back from yourself. You have an issue.
I’m not going to miss this little experiment in the Lab. I certainly hope others will benefit from this little stinker of an exercise.
Ever Find Your Self in a Pickle?
(UPDATE!) I SEEM TO HAVE HIT THE RIGHT COMBINATION AND ALLOWING TIME FOR RESET. I HAVE TO CHANGE THE URL FOR IMAGES IN POSTS. IT SEEMS OTHER THAN THAT ALL IS WORKING AS IT SHOULD.
I’M LEARNING TO HATE IE LIKE SO MANY OTHERS THAT HAVE GONE BEFORE.
THANKS TO ALL, I’ll leave the post for any others that are searching. Part of my problem was impatience. It takes a little time for a 301 to make it’s way through the system at least as far as IE is concerned.
I’m in a self made pickle of sorts. And I don’t know what to do, or how to fix it. So I’m asking for help.
Please read the post on Your ULR – Technorati Ranking Google PageRank.
I made the change yesterday of the url from:
http://www.barbaralasky.com/realestatebloglab/
to http://www.realestatebloglab.com
I put a 301 redirect in the htaccess file
redirect 301 /realestatebloglab http://www.realestatebloglab.com
Here seems to be the issue.
It works fine in Firefox but IE 6 gives me a 404 page not found for everything after the main page.
I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if it is the syntax of the 301
If I have to create a 301 for every post and page.
I’m grasping at straws at this point.
I got the lab in over my head on this one and I really want to get it back up and running on IE and not just Firefox.
I will greatly appreciate any help on this one. I feel pretty helpless right at the moment.
Meebo hit the RE Blogging community last week when it started showing up on a lot of the real estate blogs I read everyday.
I found this Meebo post at 3 Oceans Real Estate by Kevin Boer
quickly followed by seeing it appear on:
Phoenix AZ Real Estate Blog Jonathan Dalton
Transparent RE Pat Kitano
Tucson Real Estate
I put it on the Lab blog to take it for a spin. It requires you to install a code snippet which I put in a text box in the side-bar widget. It also requires you to log into your Meebo account in order to appear online and ready to chat.
You don’t chat in the same window like Gabbly you can see it in action at Sellsius
When someone comes to your blog Meebo goes out and checks to see if you are available. This does effect the load time of your blog and it repeats the process every time a user clicks to view a new page or post.
The downside I discovered is the Meebo code causes 6 wc3 validation errors. At least it did on both my blogs. Once I removed the meebo code snippet the validation errors went away.
I’m very particular about staying WC3 compliant. I like seeing the green screen of validation instead of the red screen of errors.
If it doesn’t bother you to be out of WC3 compliance Meebo might be for you. For I’ve removed it from both blogs. If I get time I’ll try and see if there is a fix for the code to bring it into compliance like the fix for the MyBlogLog Widget posted here.
Tiga, of all themes in all the Wordpress world I had to pick you. You had what I wanted, three columns and most of all a post column 600px wide. I like large images and room to write. I’ve looked at many other themes, three column, but just can’t find one with the width for posts; even 550px would be good.
But alas, Tiga you present a lot of problems for this blogger.
First was the issue with permalinks, if you use anything but the default setting the formatting goes up in smoke.
Then the incompatible blogroll for Wordpress 2.1 The author fixed that after a couple of days and we were happy campers again.
On a routine WC3 validation I discovered that if you put the blogroll in the sidebar widget it creates 4 validation errors. There is an issue in the tiga.php code replacing the links code. If you comment out the code to use the replacement code the errors disappear. But you are left with a theme that looks broken.
I’m using a trial version of the latest BlogJet 2.0 to write this post. It can’t import the links to manage the posts because of the way Tiga configures categories.
So it is time for me to let you go. I’ll pay you a visit from time to time, but for now I must leave you behind and hope for better days ahead with a theme I can live with. But you will always be my first theme to torn into and tried to make sense of the world behind the pretty interface.
I’ve spent so much time trying to get 2.1 up and running with the Tiga theme and various plugins I haven’t done much in the way of posting. Now I’m trying to post and the new editor is biting me hard. Of course I discover this after saying it might be ok to upgrade to 2.1.
IF YOU ARE USING THE BUILT IN TEXT EDITOR DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND DON’T UPGRADE.
I have a lot to write about today because for the past couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out how this new editor works. The old editor was pretty simple to use. For example
If I wanted to display an image to the right with text to the left. I inserted the image. selected the image and selected justify right. That would put the image inside a div and I was off and running.
However, the new version with the code tab doesn’t work that way, and when I try and put a div statement in by hand it removes it. And you might even notice that in code view, for the most part it isn’t like the HTML editor of the past there are no visible paragraph or break tags.
So instead of writing I’m trying to figure out the editor with no great luck. I’ve searched on Wordpress on changes to this thing, I’ve found nothing.
Now I’m trying to find an editor I can use that will allow me to do what I want and hope that someone will fix this stupid editor. I can’t believe I’m the only person out there that wants to display their images beside text.
Any suggestions on an editor? The only reason I didn’t try blogjet, no technorati tags. I really like that feature. I see there is a new blogjet 2.0 out there. I’ll do some more reading on it.
Again, any suggestiong. Trust me I am open, I just don’t want to give up any of the functionality like tags, technorati tags, images beside text. Tweaking from a code view when I want to.
I want a smart editor but not one that thinks it is smarter than me.
Things are rolling along nicely in the world of Wordpress 2.1 I reported just a few days ago that I didn’t thing this version was ready for prime time, it wasn’t. I think it is much closer now and most could update now following the upgrade guidelines from Wordpress and heeding some of the additional things I mentioned in the previous post.
I would no longer hesitate updating to Wordpress 2.1 but make sure you follow the above recommendations or you could regret it. Make sure you qualify or update all your plugins before you update.
Here is a look at the new post/page editor.
There are some new changes to the post/page editor.
- Preview tab is gone I DON’T LIKE
- The insert image now has Border, V & H space I LIKE IT
- You have to type the entire path for the image insert I DON’T LIKE IT
- If you have to downsize the image you can no longer simply replace it. You have to change the setting in code for size and style or delete and reload the image. UGH
- The “Insert” “Cancel” buttons are switched.
- Spell checker added, it is different and take some getting used to NEUTRAL
- Switch between Code & Visual mode with a tab I LIKE IT
- If you highlight and move code it breaks I DON’T LIKE IT
- It now has autosave I LIKE IT, but when the save is happening the category checkboxes all blank out. Don’t panic when the save is complete they are back.
- Things are all moved around on the page NEUTRAL, it just take some getting used to.
The blogroll is different with all references to links being gone for the most part.
Comments now have their own tab. That is nice in a way, but I can no longer see the spam filter for Askimet (4) without clicking on the comments tab. I liked it right out there where I could see how many were in the queue.
I would also recommend that when you log into your blog’s dashboard you scroll down and see what is new out there on Wordpress. There are new themes, plugins and fixes showing up daily in that section.
Plugin Updates.
Subscribe to comments I hope that fixes the error you all have been seeing when you post a comment. If you get that error, just hit the back button, you will see your comment.
Ultimate Tag Warrior The bug with the tags disappearing after a comment or trackback seems to have been fixed with the latest update.
Askimet The spam filter, there is a new version included in the 2.1 upgrade, you will need to install it by hand but it is included in the 2.1 files under plugins.
Be sure to check the 2.1 compatibility plugins list.
Would I upgrade now if I hadn’t? YES I would. I know some have said to wait a year. A lot happens in a year. I think a lot of good things happened in a week. If you are still hesitant, wait another week, I’m sure there will be more fixes and updates coming this week. But I no longer see any deal breakers out there and the wordpress blogging community is responding very quickly to any issues that do seem to pop up, or jump out and bite.
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 !
