Tag Archives: Wordpress

Where in the World?

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Reblogged from WordPress.com News:

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If you've ever wondered where on Earth all the visitors to your site are coming from, this feature is for you!

Mosey on over to your My Stats tab on the WordPress.com homepage:

...and check out the brand new "Views by Country" panel.
Now, you can see at a glance exactly which countries comprise your audience:

When you click on or hover over a country name, the map zooms in so you can really get a feel for all the parts of the planet your content has reached:

Read more… 60 more words

It's only been a couple of weeks since I moved the self-hosted Wordpress blog to Wordpress.com, but I'm already liking all the nifty tools that make it easier to blog. It's not just the nifty tools, but the tools seem to interact better on Wordpress.com. Well, now Wordpress has added another tool to the mix. Apparently someone's been snooping around my site from the Netherlands!

K

December 12, 2011

Just updated the blog to WordPress 3.3 (previously 3.2.1). I like the new welcome screen detailing the updates to look out for. The fly-out menus are a nice touch. But simpler media uploading by using the single icon or drag-drop might be my favorite. It amazes me that WordPress is able to build an open source blog, continues to push out relatively frequent updates, and (most of all) makes it free to the world. Thanks WordPress!

Best way to link social media?

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Using my various social media accounts, I’m struggling to figure out how to best link each of them together. Should I post to the blog, then have the blog update Twitter and Facebook? Or should I post to Twitter, then have Twitter update Facebook and the blog? Until recently (about an hour ago) I used Twitter to update both Facebook and the blog. I like this option, but have found a couple of limitations that bug me. First, as much as I like Twitter, I don’t like being limited to 140 characters. And second, when posting a picture to Twitter, the blog update only includes a link to the Twitter update/picture. The blog post doesn’t include the picture, which I would like it to do. Sometimes I even go back to include the picture in a blog post, as I did earlier today with my picture of the Jets cup. On the other side, I used to go in the opposite direction, but found I didn’t like the automated options, which limited the tweet to just the subject line. In the end I want the blog to be the primary location for all my information. I figure the blog is the one account that will last beyond Facebook and Twitter. So I’m going to go back to having the blog update Twitter, while also removing the Facebook update (I’m tired of Facebook). Anyway, I was wondering if the blogosphere has an opinion on the subject. Have at it!

WordPress v3.2 "Gershwin"

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On July 4th a lot of you were probably celebrating the 4th of July holiday… and so was I. However, a big change occurred that day at poulios.com. The site was updated to WordPress v3.2. I’d venture a guess that none of the few readers here noticed a difference. The big change that I was excited about came along with the new theme, Twenty Eleven.

Something I’ve tried a few times in the past is to have a seamless flow of data from Facebook or Twitter to the blog. However, most of the time it just didn’t look right. Tumblr actually does a really good job with this concept. Well, I think that’s changed now. WordPress v3.2 includes post formats like Standard, Link, Quote, Status, Image, and Gallery. The Twenty Eleven theme was created along with the most recent version of WordPress to make use of post formats. The previous post was actually a tweet which, when imported into the blog, showed up as a Status. The best part is it looks clean, which was my pet peeve with other options I’ve tried in the past. It did take a little hacking to get to this point though. I use Twitter Tools, a plugin created by Crowd Favorite. However, the plugin doesn’t have an option to create a post from a tweet with a post format. A quick Google search got me the answer I was looking for. With just one line added to the code tweets now turn into clean blog posts with a Status format. Anyway, we’ll see if this continues to work in the long run. I’m interested to see how it looks when I check into a location with foursquare, which then updates Twitter, which will then create a blog post.

Also, you may have noticed a little change to the header image, which I change every now and then. The picture is from my 2005 sailing trip to the Greek Cyclades islands. This specific picture is of the windmills on Mykonos.

Enjoy.

WordPress Theme: Twenty Ten

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As noted a few days ago, a new theme was added to the most recent version of WordPress, named Twenty Ten.  This theme is now running here at poulios.com.  My original hesitation on using the theme was I hadn’t figured out how to remove post titles from posts using the “status” category.  Turns out the functionality was included in the theme, just with a different category named “asides.”  A quick name change of the “status” category to “asides” and voila.  There are a few things that still need to be cleaned up with the theme, but will play with it here and there until I figure it out.  Next on my list is to figure out why posts have different font sizes.

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”

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WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” was released earlier today and I wanted to give a little kudos to the WordPress team.

Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies.

And for the first time in years a new theme has been added to the release to replace the Default theme, this one named Twenty Ten. I’m hoping to be able to spend some time with the new theme, but until then you’re stuck with the one I’ve been using for the past half a year, P2. Although I like the new theme, I’d like to figure out how to customize the look of posts based on the post category. For example, when I post using the “status” category in P2, the post title is left out, giving the post more of a Facebook status or Twitter look to it, which I like.

Testing out a new theme here on the blog…

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Testing out a new theme here on the blog. It’s called P2, a microblogging theme (think Twitter), and developed by the same group as WordPress. There are a few bugs I’m dealing with, like the fact that the photo albums don’t show at the top of the page. Since I’ll have some time off during the next few weeks I’ll play around with it. If you have any ideas, feel free to add them here.

Browser Wars

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Over the past few days I’ve come across a few topics in the browser war category. To start, last night I downloaded the new version of Safari (for Mac). At first I was impressed with the new “Top Sites” functionality. It uses a similar concept to Cover Flow in iTunes to show the top sites the user visits. After that, there wasn’t much that it did beyond what I already get from Firefox. One thing I did notice was that it’s a memory hog. With 5 tabs open Safari was using just under 600 MB RAM. I quit Safari and opened Firefox, my usual web browser, opened the same 5 sites and noticed it was using less the 200 MB RAM. That’s a big difference. Safari still doesn’t have extension capability, which is another downfall.  Although it’s installed on my Mac, it get’s about as much use from me as IE does when I’m using Windows.

And then, earlier today, I read this and got a good chuckle.  Apparently Microsoft is proposing an option to the European Union to sell Windows 7 without Internet Explorer because of antitrust regulations there.  This raises the question, how does one surf the net without a browser installed with the OS?  Constumers would have to use a second computer, download a browser, transfer it to the new computer using a CD or flash drive, then install.  Sounds backwards to me but, then again, it does seem the European Union is taking this a bit far.  IE is no longer the lone browser and anyone that uses their computer even the slightest bit knows there are other browsers available that are better than IE.  Even with Safari and IE installed during the default installation on my computer, I still use Firefox for both Windows and Mac.

A few side notes, WordPress v 2.8 was released last night and updated on this site today. If you follow me on Twitter or over on the right side of the blog, you probably knew that already.   The best part was updating the site from the admin panel using my iPhone.  It’s a luxery, I know, but still fun to talk about.  Speaking of Twitter, it has recently moved ahead of Facebook on my online priority list, both are still way behing the website.

Theme Update

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Welcome to the new Poulios.com theme.  There will be slight changes to the layout of the theme here and there, especially the header image.  This new theme allows readers to reply to specific comments, rather than just adding a comment to the end.  And these small random posts allow for comments, just click the title above.  Enjoy!

All over the place…

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This post is going to be all over the place. Hopefully they’ll be something in here for each of my millions of readers:

  1. This past week, for the first time, a friend asked me to set up a blog.  Most of you know her as Mary here at poulios.com.  To start, we purchased a domain name using godaddy.com.  Then we set up a blog using wordpress.com.  A few changes to the name servers at godaddy.com to forward the domain over to wordpress and now we have twohig.me for your reading pleasure.   We were also able to set up email for Mary using gmail.  If you’re not using gmail, you should be.  I’ve used hotmail (or whatever they call it these days), yahoo, and other sites here and there, and gmail is easily the best of the bunch. Continue reading →