Posts Categorised: Wordpress

0Wordpress LogoWordPress updates progress

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I’ve had an issue for a while now where installing word­press updates does­n’t show any mes­sages or pro­gress. The updates gen­er­ally do install but it is tricky to know when the updates have fin­ished. There are a few threads online with pos­sible solu­tions but most of them haven’t been help­ful in my case.
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0Wordpress LogoWebsite testing tools

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I am con­stantly work­ing on both my web­sites and my web serv­er stack with the aim of it being fast, reli­able and secure. New tech­no­lo­gies and new vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies mean a con­stanyl mov­ing tar­get and some­times things that have been pre­vi­ously fixed can recur. As well as main­tain­ing art­icles about many fixes, and a site updates log, I use a range of web­site test­ing tools. As this list has grown it has reached a point where I felt the need to doc­u­ment the ser­vices I use
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0Wordpress LogoWordPress visual editor not working

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I’ve had an issue for a little while where the word­press visu­al edit­or but­ton stopped work­ing. The code edit­or was fine, and the but­ton for the visu­al edit­or is present but click­ing on it has no effect. After much fid­dling around I finally dis­covered it was being broken by my Con­tent Secur­ity Policy!
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0Wordpress LogoFixing wordpress visual editor

Posted by & filed under Wordpress.

I’ve had an issue recently where the word­press visu­al edit­or stopped work­ing. The code edit­or worked fine, but the visu­al but­ton just did­n’t do any­thing at all. I knew it was­n’t a serv­er set­ting because it impacted 2 of 5 word­press sites on the serv­er, but the oth­ers worked fine. I tried delet­ing and copy­ing fresh cop­ies of “wp-includes” and “wp-admin” in case some­thing had got cor­rup­ted but this did­n’t resolve the prob­lem either.

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0WordPress Local Gravatar cache

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I like to have avatars shown for people who com­ment on my blog. Word­Press sup­ports the gravatar ser­vice nat­ively so enabling this is very easy. How­ever it comes with a cost — access­ing extern­al files from anoth­er domain adds lots of extra load time in the form of new DNS look­ups, new SSL con­nec­tions to make, etc. Would­n’t it be nice to have gravatars stored loc­ally and served from your own serv­er. Well that’s what I’ve been doing for some time now, if you’d like to know how, read on…
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0Localisation of Amazon Affiliates links

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I occa­sion­ally ref­er­ence products on my vari­ous web­sites, and usu­ally link them to Amazon for any­one inter­ested in buy­ing them. A long time ago I used to link with an amazon affil­i­ates link but nev­er earned any­thing from it as my typ­ic­al read­er­ship is well dis­trib­uted around the world. Unfor­tu­nately Amazon don’t provide a way to redir­ect vis­it­ors to their loc­al amazon site whilst retain­ing to affil­i­ates pay­ments. There are vari­ous solu­tions out there but all the ones I found had issues with them, so I developed my own.… Read Full Art­icle

2Wordpress LogoFixing Rich Snippets Testing Tool for Microdata

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

Over 2 years ago I pub­lished an art­icle on how to fix prob­lems with Word­Press themes which did­n’t pass the Google Rich Snip­pets Test­ing Tool. Since then lots has changed — Word­Press and most themes have bet­ter sup­port, HTML5 and CSS3 have arrived, and Google, Yahoo and Bing got togeth­er and decided to focus on Microdata, via schema.org. At the time micro­formats seemed the easi­est way to mark up pages, and the test­ing tool had the most com­pre­hens­ive sup­port for these. The move to Microdata and the changes to Word­Press required a new art­icle: this is it!

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5Wordpress LogoAdsense ads above the last paragraph of a post

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

You may have noticed that we’ve tweaked how we dis­play our adsense ads.  We wanted some small text-only ads near the bot­tom of each art­icle, which would be added auto­mat­ic­ally.  This took a little bit of tinker­ing, but even­tu­ally we developed a solu­tion which works well and does­n’t seem to knock page pro­cessing times much.  Simply add the fol­low­ing code to your theme’s functions.php (don’t for­get to change your adsense IDs) … Read Full Art­icle

0Comment bubbleEasily set the parent of a WordPress comment

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

As is doc­u­mented in the site update log, for a while we had a prob­lem with our theme where it was­n’t pos­sible to reply to a com­ment so that the reply would appear cor­rectly in a threaded way.  We have no fixed this prob­lem, but have been left with a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber of com­ments which really need edit­ing so it is easi­er to see what they are in reply to.  With a stand­ard word­press install this requires going into the data­base and edit­ing there, which is very tedi­ous.  Instead, we’ve used some simple func­tions to add an option to the com­ment-edit admin page, to set the com­ment par­ent there.  Even­tu­ally this will be developed into a prop­er plu­gin to enable this func­tion­al­ity.  For now the code is below, just add it to your theme’s functions.php

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1Comment bubbleJetpack-style comments without Jetpack

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

One of the best things about word­press is the built-in social aspect provided by com­ments.  Get­ting your com­ment sec­tion right can be very import­ant to any web­site, includ­ing ours.  Over the years we’ve exper­i­mented with vari­ous com­ment plu­gins includ­ing Dis­qus and more recently Jet­pack.  How­ever, we’ve always ended up bring things back in house for man­age­ment, per­form­ance and pri­vacy reas­ons.  When I moved back from Jet­pack com­ments I really missed some of the slick fea­tures provided by Jet­pack, both the social-net­work logins and the gen­er­al slick styl­ing.  Any­way, to cut a long story short I finally had time today to take a good look at how word­press “does” com­ments and fig­ure out a way to build an in-house sys­tem which looks nice and slick like the com­ment inter­face provided by jet­pack.  Best of all its sur­pris­ingly simple and does things the “prop­er” way…
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