October 15, 2008 – 7:00 am
This is the first installment of “WordPress Wednesday”, which I mentioned in my previous post about making changes to my site. This first one is going to be a little long, and I’ve been editing the draft off-and-on for over a week. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in WordPress
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Also tagged .net, app, article, Atom, avatar, avatars, branding, categories, CSS, Design, dom, feedburner, Google, gravatar, gravatars, howto, improve web site, improve website, plugin, Plugins, Programming, redesign, RSS, Search Engine, search engine optimization, SEO, social networking sites, stickiness, sticky, subscribers, subscription, Syndication, Tags, Themes, traffic, WordPress
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If you run a busy WordPress site, or even if your site just has a lot of processor-intensive plugins, then you probably already run the WP-Cache plugin (plugin directory, original announcment, recent security update info). Even though my site isn’t super busy, my server is a little light in the RAM department, and using WP-Cache helps the box keep up with requests better.
One minor annoyance, however, is that with WP-Cache enabled, my syndication feeds aren’t delivered with the correct Content-Type. [...]
WordPress 2.2 “Getz” is now official. I’ve listed some of the changes previously, but here’s another quick rundown:
- Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0
- Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol
- Widgets are now supported in core
- Protection against activating broken plugins
- “Deactivate All Plugins” button. Sadly, my “Reactivate All Plugins” patch didn’t make it into this release. Hopefully you’ll see it in WP 2.3.
- Improvements to comment management
- Code optimizations and speedups
- Future WYSIWYG support for the Safari browser
- Post Preview moved into a popup window, rather than an iframe on the Write page
- WordPress-specific XML-RPC API
- JQuery support
You can find a list of changes for version 2.2 on the WordPress Trac site. [...]
That’s right, two shiny new bugfix/security updates. One for the 2.0 branch and one for the 2.1 branch. There are some small bugfixes in both of these versions, but the main reason to upgrade is for the security fixes (I’m going to write more on that subject later).
Visit the downloads page for version 2.1.3, and the Release Archive for version 2.0.10.
Watch later this month for the release of WordPress 2.2. [...]
Socializing a WordPress site
For this week’s WordPress Wednesday installment, let’s look at a few changes I’ve made here on this site in the past few weeks. As mentioned previously, there were several areas that I knew I wanted to go ahead and improve in the short term, as interim measures until I put a whole new theme in place. One of my primary goals here is gain and retain readers. I want to make the site “sticky” by providing several ways for visitors to keep up with my updates, and to spread my links to other potential readers.
Of course, the first part of gaining readership is to provide quality content. [...]