wordpress - Semantically driven

Problem with RSS feed being over 512k

October 9, 2012 by Jen

One thing about being a blogger is having to rely on technology. It’s great when it works but when it doesn’t it can involve a bit of time to troubleshoot. Luckily I’m persistent and can work out most things myself.

I subscribe to my own RSS feed and noticed that it hadn’t updated since my Sensitive Tony post the other day. I was mucking around with embedding a Storify story and I think this made the feed too large and the technology that spits out my feed spat the dummy.

So I’ve found a solution on the WordPress.org help forums by “rcdiugun”:

If anyone is still having trouble with this thing, I finally solved it. It’s the strangest thing.

First, go to the setting of your syndication feed (under “Reading” options/settings) and make sure that it will only show one post.

Next, create a new post and publish it. Just a test post so that WordPress will generate a new feed. Once that is done, you can use feed URL with feedburner.

When feedburner has finally accepted your URL, go back to your wordpress install. Delete the test post. Set the syndication feed number to the value of your choice.

I hope this works. And if you are reading this you might also like the post I did yesterday with some ‘tell it like it is’ photos of my son.

The circle of blogs

August 12, 2011 by Jen

Friday, 5 August 2011, Day 255/365.

I’ve changed templates on my blog. I’ve yet to pay for a theme and free themes quite often don’t get updated so there were some aspects to the old one that annoyed me.

Anyhoo, pop on through, have a look and leave me a comment. I like to reply to my commenters and have done so via email but that doesn’t carry on the thread of conversation on the blog so I’ll give a go to the replying on the blog instead – especially now that this theme allows threaded comments.

You can also subscribe to the blog via RSS or email (see the button on the right of the blog).

I still want to muck around with the footer but that’s not urgent.

Oh, and check out the new Project 365 page. I’m not completely happy with that but I’ve got a question on there that I’m hoping someone can help out with.

Makeover

August 6, 2009 by Jen

I’ve been wanting to change my theme for some time now. It takes a LONG time (for me anyhow) to find a theme that I like to start with and am confident enough to change. I’ve installed quite a few themes, had a bit of a play and just given up. Using the theme test drive plug-in is an absolute godsend.

I even mucked around with a theme framework but gave up on that because it was too hard. After all the playing around I did, I still wasn’t convinced that it was a long-term good thing to do for me. I probably just don’t understand how they work or there isn’t enough documentation to support them – the free ones anyway. And that’s quite understandable because I know from experience that documentation takes time and effort. (Upon looking at the above website I note that they’ve now got documentation for creating a child theme which wasn’t there earlier. Still, I didn’t want to create a child theme, but use someone elses.)

I did contemplate paying for a premium theme but I didn’t even find one of those I liked enough to shell money out for and the more expensive (to me anyway) themes like Thesis just isn’t warranted for a hobby blog like this.

Anyway, I finally settled on this Blogwerx theme. I’d found it a couple of months ago, played around with it and moved on, but after unsuccessfully mucking around with theme frameworks I went back to it. I’ve changed it a bit and I still have the three column layout with the content on the left and sidebars on the right. I like this layout because if something stuffs up with loading in the sidebars at least the content is available due to the order of the page loading.

I even used the widgets this time, and made a new widget area for my Reviews and Giveaways section because I can’t show BlogHer ads there due to their ads policy. I was very proud of myself.

Now that I’ve implemented this new theme hopefully I’ll be more motivated to get back into the content side of things. If my blog was seven years old (and not five) I could blame the seven-year-itch for wanting something new and exciting to happen and inspiration to hit me in creating some exciting content. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

I’d like to know what your favourite WordPress themes are, or even if you care about them. In the meantime I’ll stick with this for a while.

Blog disappeared

April 13, 2009 by Jen

Thanks to one of my gorgeous readers – Jeanie – I found out that my blog had all but disappeared. Any page I tried to view gave me a 404 page error. Everything else was there, just no content. She emailed me first thing this morning and I didn’t read it until I got back from my mini Easter break this afternoon.

I immediately panicked and wondered when the last time I did a backup was – too long ago I’m sure. Once my little panic was over I thought I’d better fix it.

Knowing that WordPress runs from databases I logged into my blog’s Cpanel and went to view the post database to see what was there. A message informed me that I had a “WordPress MySQL database error: Table is marked as crashed and should be repaired.”

After doing a quick search I came across this very helpful post, and within a minute had repaired my database and was back in business. So if this ever happens to you, it’s probably a database error. I’m thankful that it wasn’t someone hacking in which has happened to me before too.

Naturally I’ve now done a backup. I was imagining having to manually redo my last few week’s worth of posts since my last backup but it’s all sorted.

Scheduling posts in WordPress

January 13, 2009 by Jen

I’ve been having trouble with advanced scheduling of posts so this is a test. I think it’s something I’ve been doing wrong, ie not selecting published as the publish status while also setting a time in advance for when I actually want it to publish.

UPDATE: Yes, it was indeed me. In WordPress, select Published as the Publish Status. Edit the time you want to publish the post and then select publish. It will schedule the post for publishing at the allotted time. Make sure you’ve set your local time settings in your Settings though.

I was going to delete this but thought it might be useful info for someone.