Wow! Things just keep getting better and better with every Wordpress Update.

Wordpress 2.8  ’Baker’ is now available for download. If you follow that link you can watch a video outlining the updates that you’ll experience in the new release.

The first thing I noticed was the speed. As usual, and the extra features that allow you to adjust the look and feel of the admin interface.

The only real extras that are visible are the Widget Interface, and the way you can customize the layout of each admin page. And obviously the faster load times too.

The automatic update feature upgraded the newer version and installed flawlessly. The only issue I had after the install was complete was that one plug-in malfunctioned and would not work with the new Wordpress 2.8 version.

The ‘No Follow Links In Post‘ plug-in is the only one that barfed up error code after the Wordpress 2.8 upgrade. Which is unfortunate because it was a plug-in that I wanted too, and it is no longer supported. I hope somebody decides to take over the trouble of updating it.

The appearance is a little different, but not by a whole lot. A few things have moved, like the ‘Plug-in/Install’ link is now located in the top right corner of the plug-in page on the help tab. So far that’s the only things I’ve noticed so far.

Well, I guess I have to go find a replacement for the No-Follow Plug-in. Any ideas/suggestions?

UPDATE:  Socialite doesn’t work either.

I would like to strangle the living shit out of whoever decided that the server functions file_get_contents() and allow_url_fopen() are not important over at Top Hosting Center.

Ever since they turned these features off, I have had to deactivate several plug-ins. At least the ones I’ve notice barf up error code when they try to do their things. So far Socialite, Slickr, lolcats, and even Google XML Sitemap Generator all had to be deactivated.

The tech people keep saying that the scripts need to use ‘curl’ in place of the for-mentioned server features. But if it’s a script using an API like the ones I had to deactivate, that’s not an option, as I’m told by one of the plug-in developers.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that the Google XML Sitemap Generator had to be deactivated. That happens to be a plug-in that pretty much every Wordpress user uses. It properly indexes your entire site so Google can index it better on the search engine.

I wrote a few angry messages to their ticketing center and they said they will be sending them up the ladder to whoever has made this terrible decision.

I don’t think it’s right to start removing things that were there when I gave them my money. Although it a priced for life package, I feel that when I paid my money, that was a contract, and by removing shit that was working great, is a breach of that contract.

The saying, “If it ain’t broken then don’t fix it.” obviously has never made it to these people I think. Seems they’re always doing something to fuck things up. They say they removed the features for security reasons, but I find that a load of crap.

It’s using CPU usage, so they cut it off to save CPU usage instead of facing the fact that they might need to boost it instead.

They keep taking these steps backward, they will soon find themselves only able to host basic HTML sites. Then out of business because nobody makes basic HTML web sites anymore.

This has got to be one of the dumbest decisions I have ever seen yet.

So far I can’t say I would recommend, Top Hosting Center, I’m only with them because I can’t afford to pay for anything so I’m on their Rudolf Priced for life plan.

UPDATE:

After much debate and constant back and forth troubleshooting ticket sending. Top Hosting Center has reinstated the file_get_contents() and allow_url_fopen() functions again. I believe they come to realize their mistake and how much of an impact it had on their users. I saw on several other users that use their service were effected by this poor decision and they must have been complaining also.

So the good thing is they put it back the way it was and everything is just peechy again. It’s a new hosting company, I’m hoping that there arent many other lessons to be learned on my account. Got my site looking the way it was, and everything is fine now.

You got to admit though, the support is there when you need them and with a little bit of common sense and reasoning, they make the right decisions, and you can’t beat the speed of their servers, they’re nice and fast!

I found this nice little plug-in called LifeStream for WordPress.

If you are a user of several social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and the hundreds of others you can find on the Internet these days, you just might want to slap this little plug-in on your WordPress Blog.

It has more than one feature where you can display all your updates on a full page, or add a widget to your sidebar. I’ve chosen the latter as you can see on the left sidebar.

What it does is shows my updates and status from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. So when I update any of them, it will show in the widget.

The settings are very customizable and easy to use, although I had to tweak my Facebook feed to show both my status and subscriptions. I’ll add that to the bottom of the post for those who want to know how I did it as I’m sure a lot of people who try this out will probably want to know.

You can add almost any feed you want to this nice little plug-in. Below is a list of feeds you can add (Click image to view larger one)

I’ll probably add my Digg and other social networking feeds later on.

So if your looking to get your Facebook feeds to work like mine where it shows both status and subscriptions just follow the following steps.

1. Log on to Facebook and go to you Notifications page: LOG IN HERE

2. On the right-hand side you should notice the ‘Subscribe to Notifications’ area. Click the ‘Your Notifications’ link.

The link will open a page and the URL address will change to something like this:

3.To add the feed that updates your status, go to the URL in your browser and replace the word ‘notifications’ with ’status’ like in the example below.

4. To add your modified feed just click the facebook icon in the LifeStream/Feeds setup screen as seen in the following screenshot.

5. Then add your modified feed to the form on the screen that follows after you have clicked the Facebook icon, as seen in the following image.

 

That’s it. You’re done. Just add the two or whatever one you want to show up in the plug-in settings.

I installed a new plug-in that allows me to add PHP code on the posts for future projects that I have in mind. So this is basically a test.

The following code here is what I placed in this post

<span style=”font-family:Arial; font-size:20px; color: #000000;”>
I knew you would be here on <?php echo date(’l jS \of F Y’); ?>
<?php $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$url = “http://www.ipmango.com/api.php?ip=”.$ip;
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
echo “in the City of {$xml->city}, “;
echo ” {$xml->region} “;
echo ” {$xml->countryname}. “; ?>
</span>

Which resulted in the following bold text.

I knew you would be here on Saturday 4th of July 2009 in the City of , United States.

Hopefully I can manage to get a new Hard Drive for my good computer sometime soon. I know, I keep saying that, but I’ve been so fucking broke and never have the money to buy one. But until I get one, nothing spectacular will be done. I need my good computer to do my Flash Animations and Photoshop work, and some projects will be cartoons of Buddy and Brain.

So, this is a test and it seems to be working.

Plug-in used is PHP Execution.

I’m kicking this plug-in to the curb. Intense Debate was just something I wanted to try out and after a week or so the clutter it managed to have me go through was not worth it one single bit.

What it did was take control of the WordPress comment system and that was one thing I didn’t like at all. But on the day I installed it, my traffic spiked to double I was normally getting. I had over 1200 unique visits on that night. Apparently it was just a fluke. Traffic has gone back to it’s original flow. Maybe something popped up on the search engines people were searching for on that night.

It was a nightmare trying to get rid of the spam comments that made it through both it’s filter system and Akismet’s filter. So it was terrible at filtering out the spam. Akismet alone did 100% better than it did on it’s own. I guess the easy comment submission form made it easy for the shitheads to spam. That alone is just cause enough for removing the plug-in.

Unfortunately, a few comments were lost. I know Teeni, made a couple that ended up in a parallel universe never to be seen again, but if anybody else did also, I’m sorry, I didn’t delete them on purpose. And I read your comments Teeni, just cant reply to them now because they’re gone. Go ahead and re-comment if ya want, that way you’ll keep your comment rank.

Another reason I didn’t like the plug-in is because it didn’t work in unison with the current Top Commenter and Recent Comments widgets on the sidebar, and if you wanted that feature on your side bar, you had to use their javascript widget that caused Google Chrome to either crash or freeze, plus it slowed down loading time.

Bottom line is that although it is a good concept in gaining readers and comments, it still needs a lot of work. The fact that it practically takes over the entire WordPress comment system is something that I don’t like at all, it is also the fact that it will not work with other comment widgets and forces you to use a very clunky javascript one they provide.

It’s not worth the 2+ hour installation.

I’ve installed the IntenseDebate plug-in. It’s an interesting one to say the least.

It took about 2 hours to install, but that was because I have over 12 thousand comments that the plug-in had to copy to the service.

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Full comment and account data sync between IntenseDebate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!

The South Park avatars will no longer be available, nor will the smiley icons. If this new plug-in becomes something that people don’t like, I’ll remove it. But just last night there has been a huge difference in traffic. And that traffic also generated some AdSense revenue for me too, and I like that.

So if ya wanna take part, just comment, and rate other people if you wanna’.

Have fun!

I’ve been going crazy over the fact that my site takes forever to load on my Blackberry. 

It was always loading some scripts which made it take forever to load the damn mobile page.

I knew that a simple 5K page shouldn’t take so long to load up on a mobile device, so I went snooping through the MobilePress plug-in templates and realized that it was loading the WP tag code that loads all the bells and whistles that would normally be just for a desktop browser.

I removed the tag ‘<?php wp_head(); ?>’ in the header template so it wouldn’t try and load all the JAVA goodies that are only meant for the regulanr desktop browsers. Now that it is gone, my posts load up nice and fast like they should. 

Now I just need to figure out how to make the images re-size so they fit right, and have the author of the plug-in ‘Why Do Work AdSense‘ make it so Google Mobile AdSense ads are displayed instead of them over sized regular ones.

I also installed another plug-in that will allow me to view my Admin pages on mobile and eliminate all the fancy graphics that kill loading speeds and Data Usage when approving comments that get stuck in limbo, or if I want, Post from my Blackberry. That plug-in is called WPhone.

So if you have been trying to access my site on your mobile device, but gave up because it was taking so long to load. I apologize, it’s safe to try again though. It’s working a lot better now that I removed that WP Tag.