Dec
13
WordPress 3.3 released
WordPress 3.3 has been released, bring on the awesome. I hope the new media manager works as great as it looks.
Dec
06
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
We’ve got snowspray on the windows,
it started snowing a bit further up in our country and
now we have snow here on the site.
Let it snow!
Nov
19
Improve your WordPress search
WordPress’ standard search isn’t all that good. One could say it sucks.
It sucks for several reasons; results come back in reverse date order, which makes sense for a blog but doesn’t exactly use any relevance. There’s no indication in the search results which words matched. The search just takes all the terms and does a basic sql query for any of them, so if you search for ‘i like cheese’ you get posts with the word like and then posts with the word cheese. You have no idea how many results you got.
Enter Relevanssi, a WordPress plugin which I just added and now;
Search results are ranked based on relevance.
Instead of an excerpt showing the first x characters of the post your get a relevant excerpt showing the part of the text that contains the search terms you used, and they’re highlighted in the text.
You see the search score which tells you which words were found in the text and how many time they were found.
A list of Relevanssi features:
- Search results sorted in the order of relevance, not by date.
- Fuzzy matching: match partial words, if complete words don’t match.
- Find documents matching either just one search term (OR query) or require all words to appear (AND query).
- Search for phrases with quotes, for example “search phrase”.
- Create custom excerpts that show where the hit was made, with the search terms highlighted.
- Highlight search terms in the documents when user clicks through search results.
- Search comments, tags, categories and custom fields.
- Adjust the weighting for titles, tags and comments.
- Log queries, show most popular queries and recent queries with no hits.
- Restrict searches to categories and tags using a hidden variable or plugin settings.
- Index custom post types and custom taxonomies.
- Index the contents of shortcodes.
- Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions based on successful user searches.
- Advanced filtering to help hacking the search results the way you want.
The plugin comes in 2 flavors, free and premium. I’m half tempted to buy the premium just to support the free one as it is already quite feature complete. It’s also rather flexible and offers a lot of tweaking if that’s your cup of tea.
Nov
14
WordPress plugins used, 2011
Here’s a list of all the WordPress plugins I’m using at the moment in case anyone is interested.
Read more…
Nov
10
Smart 404
Now here’s a great plugin I wish I’d discovered several years ago.
Smart 404 intercepts standard 404 messages and looks through your posts, tags and categories to see if it can come up with a match of what the visitor to your site was looking for. If it finds it, it will display it as a standard archive view displaying the posts.
Example: http://x111.com/azumanga doesn’t exist, Smart 404 however finds a tag for Azumanga Daioh and thus displays http://x111.com/tag/azumanga-daioh/ which is a HELL of a lot better than giving your visitor a blank ‘oops, it’s gone’ page.
If Smart 404 doesn’t find anything, at all, it goes to your standard 404 WordPress page, in which you can add some code to have Smart 404 generate a list of posts with the keyword a visitor was looking for (example). Again a big improvement.
I’m very impressed with this plugin, I only wish I’d have come across this years ago when I was moving all the old reviews into WP, that would have saved me from the big nosedive in daily traffic.
Oct
30
WordPress for iPhone 2
And here we are testing the new version 2 of the WordPress for iPhone app. So far so good, it’s a big improvement over the previous version. Who knows, I might even start posting again now. ;)
Maybe. I’ve been thinking about adding some more iPhone related stuff around here and tweaking the layout a bit to make it more phone friendly seeing as that’s my main method of browsing these days.
Hmm, joy, sorry to say but the new iPhone app is still a pain in the ass for me. I saved a draft, added a picture and a lot of text and hit publish and tada, an ugly picture published without adhering to my thumbnail settings and more importantly; all the text from after the first save was gone.
Yeah… I think I’ll stick to ye good olde web backend to write my posts.
Jan
04
GreyBlog theme for WordPress
Gotta love open source; Design by David Herreman, WordPressed by Ericulous, Widgetized by me. I loved the look of it but our WordPress MU bloggers all want their widgets. So after modifying it I figured other people might like it as well…
Nov
06
Blogs & gallery
The last remains of b2evolution have been cleaned up & deleted today.
I’ve imported my old blog from there on this one and spent a considerable amount of time deleting & tagging old entries.
Mmmm, WordPress how I love thee. Sadly all the old comments are gone as well, but that’s life. Unfortunately a lot of spambots still love b2evolution so I saw a lot of hits on ye olde blogs dir. Therefor I dropped a .htaccess file in there with the following code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://X111.com/$1 [R=301,L]
That makes them get automagically redirected to the front page and keeps my apache error log from filling up with crap.
The gallery has also been updated. WinMerge saved the day by allowing me to update the templates in a fraction of the time it would normally take. We now have captcha spam protection in there and at last… RSS feeds! Something most of you will probably not care about but I love it to bits as it’s one step closer to my ultimate dream of building a newsfeed which contains all the updated bits from everywhere on the site.
Jul
04
WordPress μ at last
Release Candidate 2 of WordPress μ, or MU, or Multi User has arrived. And that means the day has come that we’re saying goodbye to our b2evolution blogs and hello to μ.
If you still have a b2evo blog you can signup at the new one and give me a poke, I’ll help you move the posts over. Comments will sadly get lost in translation. Eventually the old ones that have been abandoned will be removed.
The new section is still very much work in progress, but I’m sure you’ll all love the end result. It’s just one of the stages for improvements I have planned around here over the next couple of months.
And if you’re one of our regular members and you want a blog… sign up here.
If you’re unsure whether you qualify as one, feel free to ask.
Thoughts of Imbalanced Mind