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Complete, Concrete, Concise » Entries tagged with "wordpress"

WordPress – Preliminary Impressions of Photon in JetPack

JetPack for WordPress now includes a feature called Photon: Photon works by using wordpress.com to cache and serve up images from your site. Since I am always looking for ways to reduce my bandwidth (and speed up performance), I enabled it. I have observed a reduction in the bandwidth: The 20th, 21st, and 22nd averaged about 3% fewer page hits than on the 25th – but it is obvious that (with Photon enabled) I used less bandwidth on the 25th . The 23rd and 24th are the weekend, so there is always a drop in traffic. I suspect the spike seen on the 24th is related to enabling Photon. Based on very limited data, Photon appears to be working well and is saving me some bandwidth. It does not require me to change anything about my … Read entire article »

Filed under: Blog, Web Tools, WordPress

When Your Website Stops Working Properly, it may be a Corrupt Database

This tutorial is for people using a web host that uses the cPanel interface (version 11.34.1). Instructions may be the same for other versions or interfaces, but not guarantee is made. When we set up a website, we expect it to keep working. Maybe we have to apply periodic updates and patches, but, in general, we expect it to keep working. Unfortunately, after a while, you may find your website, powered by Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal or some other CMS, stops working correctly. Common symptoms include: I have experienced all these on Joomla! and WordPress powered sites I run. Some or all of the comments disappear Some or all of the content disappears You get database connection errors Your layout / template starts looking a bit funny Pages you know exist start generating HTTP 404 Not Found errors URLs start looking funny A … Read entire article »

Filed under: Web Tools

WordPress – All Your Content has Vanished / Error 404 on All Pages

These instructions are for WordPress 3.X that is being hosted on a web server that provides access via cPanel version 11.34.1. The instructions may be the same or similar for other version combinations or interfaces other than cPanel, but no guarantees are made. Possible Symptoms You may encounter one or more of the following symptoms: All content and comments on your WordPress site have vanished: All content and comments show as having vanished in the dashboard: Trying to go to a particular page (that you know exists) results in an Http 404 Not Found message: You get a database connection error message: Possible Cause – Corrupted Database While it is possible that you have been hacked, it is far more likely that your WordPress database has become corrupted and is no longer able to serve up content. I am not … Read entire article »

Filed under: WordPress

WordPress – Jetpack 1.2 Broken on IE 8 and IE 9

I just updated to Jetpack 1.2 on my site and find that the Site Stats module is broken for Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9. It works fine with FireFox 7.0.1. Here’s Site Stats as seen in IE 8 (click for larger image): Problems are: it looks ugly, nice tables and formatting are all missing the bar graph at the top doesn’t display the Yesterday tabs do not work – clicking them does nothing while the weekly tab does work, again the formatting is ugly and broken IE 8 reports Errors on Page It renders and functions fine in FireFox. The formatting is nice, the graphs show up, and the Yesterday tabs work. This is Site Stats as seen in FF (click for larger image): If you use IE 8 as your primary browser (since my main computer … Read entire article »

Filed under: Blog, WordPress

Does Your CMS Affect Your Traffic?

This site began on December 16, 2009 with an article on getting Windows Live Writer to recognize your Joomla! theme – as far as I know, it was the first article on the web describing how to do that because I’d searched and searched and couldn’t find any tutorial on how to do it. After figuring it out, I decided to share that knowledge. I don’t do any advertising or marketing of this site, I rely on search engines to provide me with traffic. I have always used what are termed “SEO friendly URLs” – i.e., my urls look something like http://complete-concrete-concise.com/friendly-url instead of http://complete-concrete-concise.com/article?id=0126334. Originally, this site used Joomla! 1.5 as the CMS (Content Management System). I used Joomla! because I was familiar with it and use it on some other sites. … Read entire article »

Filed under: Blog

Jetpack Site Stats can be Misleading

I have the Jetpack plugin installed and use the Stats module in it to monitor activity on this site. It gives the following notice: Keep in mind we don’t count your own visits. Unfortunately, this is not completely true – if you are not logged in, it will count your visits to your site. To avoid counting your own visits to your site, you (1) must be logged into the administrator panel before browsing your own site, (2) must have Jetpack set to ignore logged in visitors (of course, this means it will not track any other logged in visitors too): 1) Click on Site Stats from the Jetpack menu. Then click on Configure on the WordPress.com stats module: 2) Ensure the Count the page views of registered users who are logged in. is NOT … Read entire article »

Filed under: Blog, WordPress

How to Install WordPress into a Folder Other than \wordpress under XAMPP

These instructions are for WordPress version 3.1, 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.1.4, 3.2.0, and 3.2.1 into a folder other than \wordpress under XAMPP 1.7.3 running on Windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed. You may want to install into a different folder for various reasons, the two most common being: (1) you want to have multiple WordPress installations, or (2) you want control over where the files are installed. These instructions should be the same for other versions, but no guarantee is made. Assumes you have XAMPP installed. To install WordPress to something other than the default wordpress directory, you need to (1) install WordPress into that directory and then (2) move all the files found in the wordpress directory up into that directory and, (3) delete the wordpress directory. These instructions assume Windows is … Read entire article »

Filed under: WordPress

Installing WordPress Under XAMPP

This tutorial describes how to install WordPress version 3.1, 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.1.4, 3.2.0 and 3.2.1 under XAMPP version 1.7.3 on Windows XP. The procedure should be the same for other version combinations, but no guarantee is made. Assumes you have already installed XAMPP. (Installation instructions can be found here.) created a MySQL database. (Creation instructions can be found here.) I do not recommend using XAMPP 1.7.4 because of configuration and functionality issues with that version. NOTE:Under certain conditions, 3.1.3 may not work correctly and generate errors. Most commonly this is happens when trying to manage Media in the back end of WordPress. There is a patch called Hotfix which may resolve the problem for you (it did for me). NOTE: WordPress 3.2 has been released. Currently, I am on holidays, so I can’t test out the … Read entire article »

Filed under: WordPress