Snoskred on Blogging

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Oi! Lurkers De-lurk & Comment Day

21 Comments Posted on July 21, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

According to my various stat gathering programs, there are on average a good couple of hundred of you reading this blog via your feed readers daily. That does not count those subscribed by email. Today I would like to give you an excuse to de-lurk and say hi.

Please Drop By And Comment!

I am about to update my reader and blogroll over the next week or two, and I would love to add the blogs of any of my blog readers, so if you are reading please comment with a link to your blog so I can return the favour and read/link to your blog.

If you are on my blogroll already, make sure to comment so I know you’re still reading – I would hate to delete anyone by accident. I do have to make some serious cuts in my reader as I am up to over 200 blogs, so I am going to be deleting a fair few blogs.

I am still procrastinating – cutting blogs from my reader is not a job I enjoy doing.. I love adding blogs, which is how I keep ending up with more blogs than I can keep up with. ;)

commenting on blogs

WordPress 2.6 Warning – DO NOT upgrade.

19 Comments Posted on July 19, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

Yesterday I mentioned a somewhat serious problem with permalinks in the just released 2.6 version of WordPress. Now there is a new issue which is an even bigger problem. Users have reported not being able to log into their blog once they upgraded to 2.6 – there is currently no fix for this problem.

There is a work around that _ck_ on the support forums has figured out – Otto42 says in this post that the work around reduces your blog security and he highly recommends against using the work around..

This problem may not affect you – maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones – but if it does affect you these are your two somewhat unpleasant choices –

1. Stop logging into your blog until there is a fix.

2. Use a workaround which may open a security hole.

The problem with option one is – who knows how long a fix could take – there is a six page thread and they haven’t worked out what is causing the problem yet, in fact Otto says there will be no resolution until someone gives them the info they need to fix the problem, and as yet nobody has been able to do that.

Also, there is the somewhat huge problem of not being able to log into your blog – no posting, no moderating comments, no nothing until someone works out how to fix this problem.

And option 2 isn’t a great option either – what if this workaround allows spammers and hackers to get into your blog?

The best option for now –

Don’t upgrade.

Spread the word about these issues to other bloggers.

Want to help spread the word?

Give this post a stumble.

wordpress

WTF, WordPress?

14 Comments Posted on July 17, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

Ok. So I was pretty negative about the 2.5 series of WordPress. I was hoping that 2.6 might solve all the massive problems involved with 2.5, might actually work properly rather than break things, and might be worth looking forward to.

2.6 has now been released a month early. And what a surprise to find out that they should have used that extra time to actually solve problems with the software. I’m not talking about small, insignificant problems. I’m talking about major substantial problems. Oh, like upgrading only to find none of your permalinks work anymore.

Many people have reported permalinks not working after upgrading to 2.6. In all cases, these people have permalink structures that contain “index.php”. This is a bug, detailed here.

Sorry Matt, but this is not what I would call “a solid release“. Not unless you’re taking some serious hallucinogenic drugs. This is more like catastrophic explosion after a very drunken night out on the town and a dodgy 3am kebab that goes straight through you and leaves you in great need of bleach and the toilet brush. Fun for everyone – NOT!.

I mean, that is a pretty big deal. If you have this problem, not only does it mean links to your blog don’t work but it is surely going to affect the search engines and SEO etc. How many people have installed it and not realised they have this problem? Not everyone goes about checking all their links once they upgrade. Not everyone checks the support forums to see what the problems are.

Surely someone could have spotted this problem during testing of the beta, before it was released to the entire universe. And now that they have spotted it, how about stopping people from being able to download it until you have fixed it? Because they’ll download it, install it, find out it is broken, turn up on the support forums to ask for help (not noticing there is a sticky about it at the top) and then post things like this. And this. And this.

What I am about to say may come as a surprise to WordPress, who clearly think we the users have all signed up to be a part of their major mind-f**kery of constant updates and tweaking combined with the occasional complete overhaul. But maybe they’ll hear us if I say it out loud.

WE JUST WANT TO BE ABLE TO BLOG.

We don’t want to upgrade to find things broken. We don’t want to be told that we need to upgrade because of security issues. We just want basic, simple blogging software that works. So how about you quit this insane “software development by torture” that you seem to love inflicting on your users, go away into a room, shut the door, create something that BLOODY WELL WORKS and then come back and release it once you have tested it A LOT.

And hello, how about you start listening to your users. Because there are a lot of them on the support forums who are trying to tell you how annoyed, frustrated and in some cases upset they are about your treatment of them. This post is a good example – but who knows how long it will stay there.

Here’s another good idea – organise your forums better. Why not have a forum for each version of WP that you release, so people can go in there and post their 2.5 questions in a 2.5 area, and people can put their 2.6 questions in a 2.6 area, rather than the absolute clusterf**k that currently exists.

Going in there and reading those forums, with the arrogant pissy bitchy “helpers” and on occasion moderators (other than Otto42, who seems to be a saint directly sent from Heaven, though I have seen that he still loses his cool from time to time and understandably so – I hope they’re paying you some serious money Otto and if not get the heck out of there fast!) gives me a major migraine. No wonder the helpers are bitchy – I don’t even know how they can stand to hang out there.

Even so – can’t these so called helpers try being nice to people? Can’t they understand that peoples blogging worlds are falling apart because WordPress released another broken version of their software? They don’t want something broken – they want something that works, and they’ve likely been scared into upgrading rather than sticking with what they already have that does work, and then they come to the support forums for help, and they are treated like they are the ones with issues. They’re not the ones with issues – other than the fact that they have installed software that sucks. Why don’t we look at the creators of the software that sucks to see who really has issues?

The fact that I now have to start testing yet another broken version of WordPress because people will likely want me to install it for them (and heads up guys, no freaking way am I doing that anytime soon) makes me want to shoot myself in the head. Good thing I don’t have a gun, huh people?

So yeah, looks like I’m in a bit of a bad mood today. It is just really frustrating to watch. :( And I only visit the support forums occasionally – in this case to get an idea of what the problems with 2.6 are before trying to test it myself, but when I do visit I leave with a splitting headache and a desire to start up my own wordpress wank blog.

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Enablers.

18 Comments Posted on June 11, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

There is a blog I know where the blogger regularly has these dummy spits about people not commenting on her post quickly enough. As in, within a couple of hours of a post being posted. When she spits the dummy she posts something basically accusing everyone of ignoring her, or saying that she’s going to quit blogging. Then a few hours later she deletes that post and replaces it with a post where she apologises for spitting the dummy. It is so regular it is almost like a cycle – if I bothered to go back and look I could probably tell you exactly how many days are in between each dummy spit. Some of you reading this may know who I am talking about if you read the same blog..

There’s a bunch of people who read her blog who are essentially enabling her in this cycle – they comment with things hoping to make the blogger feel better. I spotted it as a cycle early on and I called her on it. Ever since then she hasn’t taken my comments very well. I actually stopped commenting entirely on that blog a few months ago. I kept reading, hoping that she would eventually realise it herself and get the help she needs, whatever help that might be.

But then the cycle repeated itself again, and I came out of comment hiding to say exactly what I felt – though I can’t repeat the comment exactly to you now because surprise surprise – my comment got deleted, and all the comments on that post also got deleted. In fact comments got removed from that post entirely. So I emailed her to say hey, I can’t believe you deleted those comments, I give up – now I am going to unsubscribe and stop reading. I just wanted her to know I was done. I was very surprised by one of the comments that came back to me.

She told me “Those comments were for me – and I will do whatever I choose with them”.

So I didn’t reply – I don’t think I even know what to say to that kind of ego – and I mulled this over for a little bit. I wonder what you think – once you press submit on the comment form, does your comment “belong” to the person you wrote it to? Are they then allowed to delete them, or remove them, or even edit them to say whatever they like?

I would never assume that your comments were “for me” and therefore I can do what I choose with them. You leave a comment partly “for me” and partly “for you” because you want to have your say on something. Sure, if your comment is offensive or contains swearing (which my comment to this blogger did not) then I might have to edit it or delete it as per my comments policy (which says – Snoskred reserves the right to delete any comment which is vulgar, contains profanity, or is generally offensive. Please note that this occurs very rarely – it is only if you use a swear word or if you were to use a word which resulted in unwanted search engine traffic.) But that happens so rarely.. and I would always choose to edit out the offending words rather than delete entirely.

For me, deleting stuff you wrote on your blog is a deal breaker. If you can’t stand by your own words then you shouldn’t be blogging them. I’ve also known people who have deleted things on forums and I have lost all respect for them. I have known bloggers who did it and I unsubscribed. The only things I have ever deleted from this blog were my old paid reviews – however those do still appear on the old blogspot blog where I was paid to put them, so they aren’t deleted from the blogosphere, they’re just not over here.

Sometimes it amazes me how deluded people can be about themselves. This person actually thinks that people are sitting out there in the blogosphere waiting for her to write something so they can all arrive and comment on it. I think we all know that people have lives, and they are generally living them. I’m not going to be upset when I don’t get any comments on a post. I don’t have that kind of insanely low self esteem that comments = my worth in the world.

Deleting things helps people stay deluded, because they never have to take responsibility for what they’ve said or done and people can’t go back and grab quotes and say here you are, this is where you did this before. It also helps the commentors stay and enable, because they don’t get to read what the person said and they can’t spot the pattern.

Sephyroth and I were once members of a forum where there was this lady (someone over the age of 50, I might add!) from Canada who had to have drama in her life. Once a month she would pull some kind of stunt – whether it was something she did herself, or whether she caused an over-reaction to something someone else did. It got so that we could predict the exact date that the next “drama” would occur. Both of us ended up leaving the forum in the end. We got tired of the drama.

This blogger reminds me a little bit of that situation – I think she feels the need for validation and she feels that comments give her that validation. But imagine if you were a reader being held hostage by this need – some readers would feel like they had to be there regularly to make sure they could comment on anything that has been posted. Some readers would put up with it for a while and then drift away.

Some readers – like me – would feel the need to point out the obvious pattern. But you can only point it out so many times before you realise the person involved is getting off on it – and has no intention of changing the behaviour. So I’m done reading that blog. It’s not like I don’t have enough in my reader already. :)

I wonder what your thoughts are about who comments belong to once you hit submit. The comments section is open, so feel free to comment. ;)

commenting on blogs

WordPress 2.5 – I hate it.

24 Comments Posted on April 2, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

Sephy wrote a great post about WordPress 2.5 – Not coming here soon. A lot of his thoughts on the subject are similar to mine. It is highly disappointing to see a huge step backward in so many areas. :(

I’ve been playing with it on my test blog for a few days now and the more I use it, the more I despise it. That’s a strong word to use, but seriously that is how I feel. I utterly despise it. I am truly angry that anyone would do this to the WordPress I know and love. Whoever is behind it needs to spend some time with normal people who actually use WordPress on a daily basis, watching what they do and how they do it.

Next week I will be setting up a test blog for those bloggers who I host blogs for, so you can go in and see if you like it and then make a decision on whether to upgrade or not. For me, the decision is made. This blog, and the Scam Warning blog, and probably the other blogs I write for will not be upgrading anytime soon.

Apologies for vanishing the last few days, but I have wanted to spend some serious time with 2.5 and see if I could maybe grow to like it. It seems I can’t go backwards – that is what is making it difficult. I mean I can’t even tell you what is supposed to be happening on that widgets page, or why anyone in their right mind would suggest this was an easier way of doing things than the current drag and drop.

Not to mention the fact that the new upgrade plugins automatically system opens some massive security holes. I mean huge. We thought the previous versions were unsafe.. this truly could allow unscrupulous people to write plugins that have back doors in order to get in and add links to your blog, and all kinds of stuff like that. :(

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How To’s From Sephy

Leave a comment Posted on February 17, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

How to –

Password protect a WordPress post

Insert a poll into your WordPress post

Put Gravatar on a WordPress site

Change the address of your feedburner feed

In case you missed them. These are excellent posts Sephy! :)

Wordpress Training Wheels

How To – Easy Blogroll Linking With WordPress.

1 Comment Posted on February 12, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

I’ve learnt a nifty little trick which can save you a lot of time. ;) Here tis. Some of the following images are thumbnails – click them for a larger view.

1. Click on Blogroll (light blue menu) and then Add Link (dark blue menu)

2. You’ll find yourself in the Add Link screen. You can manually add a link by copying and pasting the link, and then putting in the title you would like the link to have. But there is an easier way. Though it may not seem easier, it is once you have it all set up.

3. Just a little way down the Add Link screen, you will see “Add Link Bookmarklet”. This is basically a quick way to add links to your blogroll. You put it into your favourites (Internet Explorer) or bookmarks (Mozilla Firefox and other browsers). When you are at a website and you want to add a link to that website, you simply choose the “link this” favourite/bookmark and it makes the “Add Link” window pop up – already with the link and the title of the website all filled in for you.

So what you need to do is rightclick on Add Link, and then select – “Add to Favorites…” (Internet Explorer) “Bookmark This Link…” (Mozilla Firefox and others)

4. This box will pop up, asking you to choose where you would like to put the bookmark.

5. Me personally, I use a “Bookmarks Toolbar” so that I can have the bookmarks I use regularly accessible by one simple click. So if you do the same, you can put “Link This” in your Bookmarks Toolbar. More info on customising toolbars with firefox can be found here as well as in the help section within your browser.

You can also do the same thing with Internet Explorer – here are the instructions for IE7 – and by the way, if you are using anything less than Internet Explorer 7, you should upgrade. Most websites do not look as they should in Internet Explorer 6 and below. For more info on that see this thread on the Aussie Bloggers Forum.

What this all means is, when I want to add a link, I simply click on link this in my toolbar.

6. When you click on link this, you will see a new window pop up, and it will contain the link and the title of the website. Sometimes you may not want to use the full title, so you can edit that before you click on Add Link. If you are using categories within your blogroll, you can also choose what category you would like the link to be placed in.

I Don’t Have A Bookmarks Toolbar?

In case you don’t see your bookmarks toolbar – you may need to change a setting in your browser. For those using Internet Explorer – click on View –> Toolbars –> then make sure that there is a tick next to links.

To see your bookmarks toolbar in Mozilla Firefox, click on View–> Toolbars –> and make sure there is a tick next to bookmarks toolbar – if not then select bookmarks toolbar with your mouse and the toolbar will appear on your browser screen.

Questions? Comments?

I’ll try to answer any questions you may have – leave a comment with your question!

Wordpress Training Wheels

Top Commentators Plugin – Rolled Out To Blogs I Host.

11 Comments Posted on February 5, 2008May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

One of the bloggers I’m hosting asked me to find a top commentators plugin for wordpress. Let it be known that I do not take adding plugins lightly. I want to test them thoroughly on my test blog before they go near the blog of someone else and that can take a bit of time given how busy I am. I eventually found one that did not break the blog or any of the other plugins, and I have uploaded this plugin to all the blogs I host.

I have already installed this plugin on a couple of the blogs when I was in their Admin screen to do something else. If you have a top commentator widget in your sidebar you don’t need to follow these instructions but it is handy to know where you can edit the options, so read it anyway. ;)

Now you have to do a little bit of work to make it work. :) Here’s what you do.

1. Go to the Plugins menu in your WordPress Admin area.

2. Scroll down until you see Top Commentators Widget – when you find it, click on activate.

3. Go to Presentation – Widgets.

4. Drag and drop the top commentators widget to the spot in your sidebar where you would like to place it.

5. Click on the three lines underneath the blue line to bring up the pop up box.

6. Enter in the settings you want. Here you see my settings as they are – you may want to copy mine if you’re not sure what to put in.

7. Finally, click on save changes in the widgets screen.

And there you have it – you’re all set up. Enjoy!

Wordpress Training Wheels

Quick WordPress Training Wheels – Publish In The Future

2 Comments Posted on December 23, 2007May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

Undoubtedly this particular feature of WordPress is the thing that made me decide to switch over because I like to write things ahead of time. By the end of November I already had the first 3 weeks of the December Song For Today posts pre-published.

However I don’t just use it for that – I use publish in the future as a tool to check I got everything looking the way I want it in my post. Every post I write – including this one – will be set to publish 10 or 20 minutes after the time I hit the publish button. That means I can take a quick look at the post before it goes live and just double check it the formatting and the spelling for one last time.

So here is what I wrote down and have stuck to the side of my screen for easy reference. Write this down.

To publish in future –

Check edit timestamp box
Set date in future
Post status to published
Hit publish

And now you get a version with screenshots. :)

To Publish In Future –

Here’s a picture of the Write Post screen.

The bit of the screen you’re looking for is in the pink box with the arrow pointing to it. Once you have finished writing your post –

Tick the edit timestamp box and change the time to be the time you want the post to go live on your blog.

Change the post status from draft to published.

Hit the publish button.

And you’re done. Seriously!

But Just Remember –

If you forget to change the date and hit publish, everyone will see what you posted *now*. So be careful. ;)

Wordpress Training Wheels

All About FTP.

Leave a comment Posted on December 15, 2007May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

When we organise webspace for someone, we offer them the option of FTP access. Many people who I’ve offered it to did not know what it was or how to use it. So I asked Sephy to take a moment and write one of his great how to information posts. Sephy has a knack of taking something scary and changing it to something you can understand, so if you are one of the people we are hosting a site for you will want to read his post.

How-to: Upload files using FTP

Resizing Images

Image Resizing Made Simple – in case you missed Sephy’s explanation of how to easily resize images.

how to guides, Wordpress Training Wheels