Consumer News / Opinion on JetPack
I’m looking at my blog’s visitor statistics today (the day I wrote this) and noticed this big blue and green banner notice saying that all future updates to the WordPress.com stats package for your self-hosted blog will only be included in the JetPack add-on package.
I’m not reacting well to this enforced method of retaining my statistics package in my WordPress blog.
Finding yourself forced into a package that is overly redundant with processes that I already employ feels very much like I’m using a Microsoft product and being told it’s this or nothing. I have always preferred the power of choice myself.
Show me something that makes me want it, and I’ll be there. But not this way.
As if my day isn’t already busy enough, I now have to decide to either blow off my WordPress.com stats package or look into JetPack to see what plugins I have to dump to adopt this thing that I originally did not feel that I needed when it first came out.
The verbiage for JetPack is the same as the WordPress.com stats package… it will put “no additional load on your server.” Yet I’ve proven to myself, that my own interaction (loggin in and editing) with my site is slowed down considerably when the stats package is in place. When I disable it, my response time is easily 1/2 that. But then again, I don’t use a CDN right now. (That’s for another day… CDN’s.)
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For the longest time I’ve been tinkering with how to speed up my WordPress based blog. (IE WordPress.org) I’ve been looking at where to place the CSS code, when to call handles, etc, etc. I’ve also taken to minimizing various features and pulling off some other awesome little tricks that I’ve hit on and I’m pretty sure not too many have tried yet. (Nope, mum’s the word on these sneaky bits) But what I will share with you is how I noticeably sped up my blog. The trick (prerequisite) to this process though, is if you have ‘WordPress.com Stats‘ plugin installed.
I’ve been having a bit of a bog-down of late and though I’ve done things that should have improved my site’s speed, it just wasn’t happening. It’s not horrible, but it’s been slightly annoying. I want to make sure you folks, my visitors, have the best potential experience when you get here.
So I had an idea… I have the plugin ‘WordPress.com Stats‘ installed. I know that it interacts with WordPress.com to get its numbers. When I went over to that site to look at my stats there, I noticed that it too lagged at about the same rate that my own site lagged.
That’s when I thought to myself, “Self. Huh?”
So I tried the following bit:
I deactivated the plugin on my site. Doing that brought the speed back up to a very acceptable level for my personal requirements. It seemed to at least double the speed in which the website loaded.
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Fatal Error … undefined function
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I just recently updgraded to WordPress 3.4 while still on Thesis 1.6. Everything seems smooth, more or less, while I tool around on the site but I encountered an error when I tried to use the Thesis Custom File Editor.
I received the following error in my WordPress admin window:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function use_codepress() in /…/public_html/wp-content/themes/thesis_16/lib/admin/admin.php on line 57
A quick look around the web let me know that I could comment out the following line:
if (use_codepress()) add_action(‘admin_print_footer_scripts’, ‘codepress_footer_js’);
and things would work wonders once again. Sure enough, I put a ‘//’ (without the tickmarks) in front of the offending line and the Custom File Editor worked once again.
This would seem to be a conflict between WordPress 3.+ and Thesis 1.6.
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2010 meant a lot to a lot of people, but most importantly, social media stepped up and took a grab of history and made its mark. In 2010 there were more and more references to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on TV than I ever remember… but then again, it was more than likely product placement. Still, these entities made enough money to pay for that product placement and that means that the services are maturing as they learn to make money from their stance in the community of the services they offer.
Facebook had some issues about its privacy stance with its users while Twitter is trying to still formulate a plan for making money so it can stay alive. But as of this moment, Twitter is very alive.
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WordPress and ‘Beta 6′ DO NOT Like Each Other!
(Make sure to see the update below on the status of this issue with future Beta’s.) Gang, for any web denizen out there running a WordPress powered blog and are also helping test out FireFox 4, Beta 6, I think I’ve found a slight snag in this build of FireFox 4 that’s forced me back to FireFox 3.x for the time being.
What happens is that as I create an article, everything is fine. But when I click on the HTML tab I find I’m looking at multiple events of my article. That includes all images.
For instance, if I had a pic and a word in a post, like this:
Image
text.
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I am really getting sick of trying to tackle Simple Tags for WordPress aggressive new nature. It’s version 1.7.4.4 and it just wants to help way too much and words / tags are autofilled before you can even finish writing.
The other day I was trying to fill in the tag “opening movies” on one of my weekly posts over on Cinema Static on SoB. I ended up with open, opening, opening movie before I finally was able to polish off the tag I wanted. Now I have 3 tags I don’t need from that one effort alone!
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This is a fascinating experience of a product review that I’ve got to tell!
Up until recent months, I had 3 web sites that were rather stagnate in traffic growth. It was frustrating and at one point I was considering just giving up on blogging my own sites.
I also started having issues with GoDaddy with site load times. I didn’t think that you, my visitor, liked waiting 15 to 90 seconds for a small site to load up. Their inability to detect the issue drove me to another host provider. I found another host and moved but I couldn’t install plugins or add pictures. (Long story)
But after I moved, my web traffic increased by a factor of 10. Literally! I went from 1 to 10 visitors a month. Woo hoo! Not only did I get an instant increase in traffic, I had a very consistent growth slope! Things were getting fun. (See New Host point in time on image)
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I found a fascinating function of my new version of WordPress 2.9.1. They declare that it has a photo editor on board, and for all intent purposes, that is what it seems to be.
But what it really is, is just an appearance manipulator!
On one post I wrote the other day, [http://brusimm.com/2010/01/07/a-bit-about-jeff-gluck-nascar-fan-power-twitter/], I uploaded a photo, then cropped out what I wanted for the article.
And for all intent purposes, it looked like WordPress did just that. But if you click on the image in the post, the entire image shows up.
This tells me that all it’s doing is framing the image for a section to be seen. That also possibly means that when your site visitors load up your website, they’re not loading that cropped image you worked so hard on, but the entire image. That kills bandwidth in the long run if you “crop” a lot of images for your site.
Me, I’m sticking with cropping before upload so I know that my visitors aren’t using extra bandwidth that they don’t need to use.
Alert to all WordPress Users: WordPress 2.9.1 is out and in the wild! If you’ve made the tragic or fatal error of installing version 2.9 and have been cussing a lot lately, GO GET 2.9.1 and UPGRADE. upgrade yesterday! Or not!
To be honest, no one is at fault for the greivous existence I’ve lived over the last few weeks. S* happens!
Let’s see what my pain has been:
- Publishing, though successful, gave me a blank page in response.
- Adding links gave me a blank response page.
- My control panels would disappear from the right side.
- My right side columns would disappear.
- Images would load, but not center, if they showed up.
At times, if FireFox didn’t work, Internet Explorer would. If neither worked, then Google Chrome would work.
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The other day I was tooling around trying to find if there’s a reputable tool (WordPress plugin) out there that can tweet to different Twitter accounts, depending on the ‘category’ chosen.
I didn’t find one that satisfied my concerns of robust suitability but did settle on the Twitter Tools plugin. I’ve used it before and had great luck with it.
I also have a Bit.ly account and for compressing jump links in your ‘tweets,’ you can apply your Bit.ly username and the API key Bit.ly provides.
I did that, and had no luck for some reason. The tool would tweet, but not provide a link.
What I did find out after much fumbling with verbal expletive distributions was the following:
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