Tag Archives: WordPress

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Please take a quick survey – Related posts and social bookmarks

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A little while ago I added the Sphere Related Content plugin to my blog, and I’ve been using the ShareThis plugin for social bookmarking links for a while now.  The former should theoretically benefit users who want to read more about a topic I’ve written about, while the latter should make it easy to share my articles with others.

WordPress makes it easy to add plugins but I wonder if these are actually useful my readers.  Please take a moment to fill out this survey and let me know.

I used a Google Docs and Spreadsheets form to make the poll.  Later I’ll post about how you can do the same on your blog as well.

Update to Altocumulus WordPress Tagging Plugin – version 0.2

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Screenshot of my tag cloud WordPress plugin in action

Everyone has tag clouds all over the web, but are they really useful?  Altocumulus is an attempt to use tag clouds as a real navigational system in WordPress blogs.

Install the plugin and it will automatically put a cloud of related tags at the top of all your Category and Tag pages.  Hopefully this will serve two purposes:

  1. Users who end up on a general category page can click through to a more specific (or more relevant) tag page, and
  2. It should give users a general idea of the topic of the posts on that archive page, increasing the information scent.

Next version I’ll add an options screen where you can change the number of tags, placement, etc.

Please drop me a note if you run into any bugs or are using it on your blog.  Let me know if you have any ideas you’d like to see implemented, too – I am all about implementing and studying folksonomies.  The more folks who are interested, the more likely I am to add features.  Thanks.

Download the Plugin Here

Problem with WordPress 2.6 upgrade – 404 errors

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Just a quick note – if you’re about to install the WordPress 2.6 upgrade, make sure you don’t just check your homepage and then call it a night. On a site I help manage for some friends I ran into a huge bug – the upgrade went smoothly, the homepage looked fine, but all the posts returned 404 errors.

It’s apparently very common if you are using “index.php” in your URL structure, which many sites use because IIS doesn’t have an equivalent of Apache’s mod_rewrite or because their host doesn’t allow mod_rewrite for some reason.

The solution can be found in this thread on the WordPress support forums. Basically the solution is to get the latest copy of rewrite.php and copy over the version for 2.6. Here’s another post with a technique for category and tag pages.

There’s a lot to like about WordPress… the open-source codebase, the templating system, the extensible plugin architecture. But I’m starting to feel like I’m squeezed between a rock and a hard place – delay an upgrade and you run the risk of getting hacked; go forward with an upgrade and you run the risk of throwing 404s for your entire site.