Sorry folks we had a few ours outage there, due to a theme issue. I have been working building various templates and themes for some sites in Artisteer. It seems I got something wrong as the one I  created as a Joomla template and is working on the main site didn’t export correctly, most likely operator error, but will update this post if I find it is otherwise.

The good thing is WordPress is very easy to recover from such an error, I just had to do some sleeping for a few hours before coming back on line.

If you ever change a theme and it takes down your site and makes it inaccessible go to the wp_options table and find the template and css field and change the those to the theme you want to use. As then value in that appeared to be the theme directory name I used that and we were back online in a few seconds.

Just an aside the wp_options can apparently grow to be a problem and there is a plugin that can assist with cleaning out the rubbish A post here has a link to one such tool and some help.

So we are back online

See ya round

Peter

I have been working on building a new website over the last few days for a business and had a problem that I found isn’t well answered in the forums. The problem appeared when I went to install the first of the plugins I use to optimize the site for Search engines or doing SEO. The blog site is all up so I logged in as the administrator went to the plugins install and tried to upload and install the plug in and then found that I couldn’t do it. The problem was I was getting an error “cannot create directory” I couldn’t find what I was looking for as most of the information in the forums seems to be related to hosted server services. I was building on a self hosted service. I tried a few of the things such as changing owners on directories and files and found that nothing was working. Log files were a bit ambiguous. Then I started thinking about all my hosted sites I had built and came to the conclusion that this was not a WordPress problem and it wasn’t a problem with the WordPress plug in, but it was a problem with Apache. The problem it turned out was permissions that are default set in Apache to secure directory access in Apache. The fix was to create an entry <Directory xxx/xxx/xxxx/wp-content> Order Deny,Allow Allow from all </Directory>

Hopefully this is useful to someone in the future building WordPress on their own server or troubleshooting a hosted service that may not have been fully set up correctly and not compromise their system using bad choices for file and directory permissions at the operating system level. There is still an issue here that I resolved with 777 on the upload directory, I will be researching that more before allowing the site to go live to determine that there is no security issues with that. It is something I am not so happy about, maybe 775 will be enough.

Otherwise WordPress itself was a flawless installation as usual, Only have a plugin that has a problem but it might just need an update for 2.9 all my other plugins seem  fine

See ya round

Peter

As for what I use for SEO tweaks well check out this site here I also use a good SEO template as a starting point.

Wow yes its true, Dainis Graveris has created the following blog to show what is a good set of plugins to use on a blog. I am not sure they are all you might wish to have. I do agree with a lot of them, however some seem to share a common purpose, so might have issues co-residing on your blog. Is it a good list yes, I think for someone who is starting out then you are staring at a great collection,

130 WordPress Plugins You Could Ever Need: The Best Of: Part 1 | 1stwebdesigner – Love In Design

What I have installed is some of these with some not mentioned Nofollow Reciprocity – it identifies if a blog has nofollow on and then blocks its follow links. You can check it out and download it here Advertising Manager, everyone needs Google ads or from some other ad network this is the update for Adsense that is listed in the 130 list Related Websites is another good one, initially you can only see other sites that are related, once you are of a suitable size then you can apply for a API key, you will need at least 30 blogs depending on activity and quality, thats not my call. Once you have an API key then your blog will show up in related websites elsewhere.

Another one I use of which Dainis was not likey to list is GWA Autoresponder for a newletter manager, the free one is great I use it for this site and the Pro version is a bargain which I use for another site.

I would say to anyone with a blog that they experiment with this list and see if you can utilise any or all, and then blog your own list of amendments to the list and why they are useful. Just take your time and understand each as you add them so that you dont have any really unexpected behaviours, that become a problem as you have overloaded your blog

So I am sure all the wordpress experts are going to say, what the H#$3 did you do that for, and well it seemed like a good thing at the time. Ok this is one i did as a stuff up while trying to resolve issues with this site over the last few days. I found how to really screw up without actually breaking a thing. I had edited a couple of files simple enough, but failed to see the effect it was having or would have. If you change the setting define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true); to false in the index.php, the site works fine but you can’t see a damn thing. Lesson learned,  and now I know a bit more about wordpress and its activities

So in the end I am finally upgraded to the latest WP 2.71 and can get down to making things work, and writing more in my blog.

See ya round

Peter