Published 6th Mar 2013 by filed under WordPress

WordPress articles.
Posts Categorised : WordPress.
0WordPress updates progress.

Published 30th Dec 2019 by filed under WordPress

Last updated 3 Jan, 2020.
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.… Read Full Art­icle nginx, php, updates, wordpress, zlib compression 0Website testing tools.

Published 24th Dec 2019 by filed under WordPress

Last updated 29 Dec, 2019.
I am con­stantly work­ing on both my web­sites and my web serv­er stack with the aim of it being fast, reli­able and secure.
New tech­no­lo­ gies 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 update s 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… Read Full Art­icle gtmetrix, mozilla observatory, security, ssl labs, testing tools, validator, w3c, website 0WordPress visual editor not working.

Posted 24th Dec 2019 by filed under WordPress

I’ve had an issue for a little while where the word­press visu­al edit­ or but­ton stopped work­ing.
The code edit­o r 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!… Read Full Art­icle classic editor, content security policy, visual editor, wordpress 0Fixing wordpress visual editor.

Posted 26th Nov 2019 by filed under WordPress

I’ve had an issue recently where the word­pres s 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.… Read Full Art­icle 0WordPress Local Gravatar cache.

Posted 12th Nov 2017 by filed under WordPress

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…… Read Full Art­icle avatar

cache, gravatar, wordpress 0Localisation of Amazon Affiliates links.

Posted 2nd Mar 2017 by filed under WordPress

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 affiliates

amazon, php, wordpress 2Fixing Rich Snippets Testing Tool for Microdata.

Published 10th Mar 2013 by filed under WordPress

Last updated 15 Mar, 2013.
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!… Read Full Art­icle authorship, google, hentry, microdata, microformats, rich snippets, schema.org, updated 5Adsense ads above the last paragraph of a post.
Published 6th Mar 2013 by filed under WordPress.
Last updated 12 Nov, 2017.
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 adsense, automatic, functions.php, wordpress 0Easily set the parent of a WordPress comment.
Published 6th Mar 2013 by filed under WordPress.
Last updated 7 Mar, 2013.
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… Read Full Art­icle comment

edit, id, parent, php, reply, wordpress 1Jetpack-style comments without Jetpack.

Published 13th Feb 2013 by filed under WordPress

Last updated 7 Mar, 2013.
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…… Read Full Art­icle comment_form_defaults, comment_form(), comments, comments_form_top, jetpack, wordpress 1.
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