I’ve often sung the praises of WordPress as a blogging platform. Particularly its functionality, flexibility and ease of use.

My blog’s been running for a couple of years without as much as a hitch. Adding themes and plugins, and upgrading to new versions were always a 1-click breeze.

But complacency sets in, and perhaps you don’t back up for a while. And, as everyone knows, that’s generally when disaster strikes.

The upgrade to 3.1.4 reminder popped up and, as usual, I clicked ‘upgrade automatically’. Yes, it reminded me to backup my database. Yes, I knew I hadn’t done that for quite a while. But hey, it’s never gone wrong before. So I clicked ‘proceed’. #fail

I did get the ‘upgraded successfully’ message but on returning to the dashboard, I got nothing but a white screen. “Strange”, I thought and tried a few things but nothing; completely blank, no errors, no spinning icon, nada. I tried the site itself, equally blank. “Now, that’s most definitely not good”, I reckoned.

Google had nothing. So I left it for a couple of days to see if it would heal itself, but surprisingly not. It was well and truly gubbed.

So I had a dig about behind the scenes and backed up the bust instance of the WordPress install. Then I deleted and reinstalled WordPress and went for a trial and error approach to getting it all back up and running.

I seem to have managed to get most of it back, the only missing bit being the categories, tags and view-counts on the individual posts.

I’d always thought my ‘Shame of Shamu‘ and ‘Is Disney Eco-Friendly?‘ posts were doing pretty well, beaten only by older posts. But they’ve been overtaken by one particular, more recent, post…

Well, it looks like it’s the whole branding thing that’s getting the hits and that Pepsi, beats Disney (or SeaWorld) in the search engine stakes.

Out of 76 posts in total, my top 20 (below) make up 50% of my total hits to date.

So, here’s my top 20 posts, by number of hits.

Here are a couple of Arrow Frogs, at Deep Sea World in North Queensferry, which was good for passing a couple of hours on a cold and windy afternoon.

In the wild, each one of these little blighters contain enough poison to kill 200 men. That’s where they got their ‘arrow’ name from,; the natives used to utilise the poison on their arrows for more effective hunting.

The frogs apparently mellow out on toxin the front when in captivity, due to less exposure to some of the more interesting things in their natural habitat.

One cool thing I learned was that they carry their tadpoles around on their back. If you look at the nearest frog in the picture there, you can see them custered on its back.

With regards to the post, I had to do a bit of editing on WordPress proper, to tidy it up after the initial publish, but a pretty good feature for blogging on the go. Chalk another one up to WordPress.

But this post has nothing to do with Ian Dury, or indeed music. Its about a new look for the blog.  I decided that after sticking with the iNove theme for a few months, it was time to move up a gear.

So I hooked myself up with a new, free WordPress theme from InfoCreek.com, it’s called Aspire, hope you like it.

The simplicity with which I switched themes was great. Maybe I’ve lived too long in Microsoft land and have become a bitter and cynical twisted techie, expecting that almost nothing works first time or at least requires a modicum of fiddling.

Pretty much everything in WordPress land seems to work out of the box. My plugins are all still working fine.  All I had to do was revisit the posts and see that the layout was still OK around the images.

The only bits that aren’t working are the bits I hacked myself in the iNove theme (obviously). Ill need to re-read those posts and decide if I really want those features and reapply where necessary. However, I suspect some of the grief may be removed as this looks to be a more ‘standard’ theme.

So I think there will be more theme changes in the pipeline over time. Since there’s about a million of them out there and it’s so easy to do, like changing my underwear.

I feel a Mac moment coming on (I’d like a MacBook but they’re far too expensive for my budget). Apparently everything works first time on there too.

I’d seen a couple of better looking ones in use on some of the tech sites I’ve come across, so, after pinging Pro Blog Design (thanks Michael) I’ve replaced my previous plugin with a new one – wp-syntax.

Much nicer looking, in my opinion, and easy to implement as I’ve come to expect of WP plugins (why should I be so impressed by something that should be the norm?), but unable to resist a couple of little tweaks to make it fit in just right. So, I made the following changes to the wp-syntax.css file the plugin puts automatically in your theme’s root directory.

First, to put a border round the code display since my pages have a light background and it doesn’t stand out enough, I added the following:

.wp_syntax {
...
	border:1px solid silver;
...
}

Then to indent it a little from the edge of the page and roughly center it, I changed:

.wp_syntax {
...
	width:100% !important;
	width:99%;
...
}

to…

.wp_syntax {
...
 width:95% !important;
	width:95%;
	margin-left: 10px;
...
}
 
Sweet!

This time I’m including a count of search results in the search page. Thanks to Pro Blog Design and their article 3 codes for a far better WordPress search page for this.

I now realise the theme I’m using seems a little bit out of whack, when I looked in my search.php page only to find a single line to include the contents of archive.php, so need to have a proper dig sometmie and understand how it all hangs together.

So, in search.css or in my case, somewhat bizarrely, in archive.css, I replaced:

<h2 class="pagetitle">Search Results</h2>

…with:

<h2 class="pagetitle">Search Result for post_count; _e(''); _e('<span class="search-terms">'); echo $key; _e('</span>'); _e(' — '); echo $count . ' '; _e('articles'); wp_reset_query(); ?&gt;</h2>

Nice and easy and the results now come back with a count. Next up, make it a proper search results page, instead of full posts…

Another couple of new tweaks built in to the blog, to make it easy for readers to tweet about a post they are currently reading on the blog, with a handy link included.

Inspired by a very nice article on Wp Recipes (thanks catswhocode) that I found via one of may fave tech online magazines: Smashing Magazine.

The method is simple, the best things always are; generate a tiny url for the current post and attach that to a button that calls Twitter itself, providing it with a pre-compiled tweet.

I amended the original code a little, as you do, building the link in php and then displaying it in an extra span after the date span on each post. Hitting the little Twitter icon beside the date on a post takes you to the twitter page and pre-fills the tweet field with a comment and the tinyurl. Nice.

Want the code?  Well here you go:

First, some CSS jiggery-pokery in style.css to position the icon

.post .tweet {
background:none;
float:left;
}

Next, include the tinyurl generation code in function.php

function getTinyUrl($url) {
$tinyurl = file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=".$url);
return $tinyurl;
}

Then some code to generate the link – add to index.php (main posts), archive.php (categorised posts) and single.php (single posts).  I put it just after the just after the php call to get ‘the_ID()‘.

$turl=getTinyUrl(get_permalink($post->ID));
$timg='<img title="Tweet this post" src="http://www.bimbogami.co.uk/wp/images/Twitter-16x16.png" alt="Tweet this post" />';
$tweet='<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Check%20this%20out:%20'.$turl.'" target="_blank">'.$timg.'</a>';
?&gt;

And finally, stick the following where you want the button to appear. In my case immediately after the post date span in the above three .php files.

Sweet.

The thought occurred to me that maybe I should come up with a method of splitting it up into manageable chunks to make it easy for the reader.  So, how to do…?

First off, I went for a straight forward “next page – prev page” option.  So, after the intro, and after every 4 tracks, I split the post and inserted a next/prev page option at the top and bottom of each page.  However, I wasn’t mad about that method because you couldn’t tell how much was still to come to the end of the post.

Next, I used the same split, but went for the ‘prev  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 next‘ style option to select, again at the top and bottom.  Again, it wasn’t knocking me out because, while you could get an idea how much there was to see, you couldn’t tell what was on each page without going there.

Then, it occurred to me that for either of these options and, in fact, any split, the user ends up with more work to achieve the same result and therefore were less likely to stick with it.  ie. they’d have to scroll to the bottom and click a total of six times to get to the end of the post. Steve Krug would be spitting feathers.

So, I’ve come to the following conclusion(s);

• Web users browsing blogs know what they are doing and can navigate.
• If they are interested they will stick with a long post, if not, they will navigate away.
• Blog readers prefer less clicking/page loads to get to what they want.
• Blogs aren’t printed on paper, ergo traditional paper rules don’t apply, so why paginate?

So, I’ve put in some occasional “Top” option in the post, to allow quick navigation to the beginning of the post.  Short, sharp and effective.

And that reminds me of another book review I need to do…

Buy it at Amazon

I had to do a reasonable amount of digging to find an Amazon Associate plugin that would do the job. Google comes up with many links, and a few WordPress widgets that looked promising.  But, here’s a bit of info to save anyone following this blog for WordPress tips the hassle of hitting a couple of dead-ends.

The first I tried was “Amazon Widgets Shortcodes”, install and setup was OK, but following the instructions didn’t produce the desired effect.  Not sure if I missed something, but was getting nothing from it, so had another look around for something better.

Next I tried the very well touted and apparently popular “WP-Amazon” widget looks great in the blurb, it installs and configures just fine, but the ‘button’ to do the business didn’t appear as promised by the readme.  It turns out, on further investigation, that the widget has stopped working on more recent versions of WordPress.

Finally, after much searching, I found “Amazon Reloaded for WordPress” which installed and configured, with your associate id,  just fine.  It creates an area at the bottom of the posting page where you can search for the book you want to link to, then select the size of image you want to display and the code is automatically inserted at the cursor position.

I just enclosed the result it in a custom div to allow it to be floated and otherwise formatted (more on that later) and to stick a text link below the pic.  Nice.

I’ve included an example of the outcome in this post, hope you like it.  In this case I’m delighted to recommend a book from a budding new Scottish author.

Added the ‘add-to-any‘ button to allow social bookmarking. A great implementation, easy to include and configure. I went for a bit of repositioning of the default location for the button, to slip it in on the same line as the post footer.

I followed the instructions on manual deployment, but found that I had to modify 3 of the php files from the theme, as opposed to the two mentioned in the ‘readme’.

Maybe it’s the theme I’m using, not altogether au fait with all this yet. I had to modify (i) index.php as that displays all posts, (ii) posts.php as that displays single posts and also (iii) archive.php as that displays posts batched under an archive, or otherwise grouped by category.

That said, once I found the necessary locations to mod, it was a simple paste of the code into the file and all was good.