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Category Archives: Website Administration
WordPress.com versus WordPress.org
It appears that some people are a bit confused about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.org is the website that hosts the WordPress CMS development files and is where you can download the WordPress setup files to utilize the program on your own server. WordPress.com is also part of the overall WordPress organization, but is a place where you can sign up for a free account and use a copy of WordPress that is hosted by them. It’s works sort of like Livejournal or MySpace, but utilizes the WordPress engine. If you want to get a blog site up quickly and want to do a test of the WordPress system without having to do much work, it might be a good idea to sign up for an account at WordPress.com and try it out.
There are differences of course. You are much more limited when using a WordPress.com account than if you set up the program on your own server. They have a limited selection of approved plugins and themes–though the benefit is they usually just work and don’t require much if any set up. Unfortunately my plugins are not a part of their service (yet!). Also, they pay for allowing you to use their service by selling ads on your account site–money which you don’t get– and you aren’t allowed to add your own ads. Ultimately if you plan on really making any money you’ll want to transition to your own server set up.
If you don’t have webspace purchased yet and are still in the decision making stage, go get an account, it can’t hurt. It’ll get you an understanding of the basic workflow of posting.
Flock: A New Blog Friendly Web Browser (UPDATED)
I’ve been looking at the Flock web browser (For Windows, Linux, and Mac) for some time now, but it finally seems like it might be getting developed enough to be useful. Flock is based on the Gecko engine that is used in Firefox, so it’s works basically as well as that browser. The major difference with Flock is that it’s designed to integrate directly into many popular blogging and social networking sites (like Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, MySpace, etc.) to make it easier to access your accounts and update your pages. Of course WordPress.com and a standalone WordPress install are both supported.
If you are tired of Internet Explorer and want to try out something different, give Flock a look. Even if you already use Firefox, you might find Flock to be an interesting alternative.
UPDATED: Apparently there is a Mac OS X version. It is strange though that they aren’t very obvious that that version exists if you go to their website–their “Versions” page is down also.
Little Tips 2
File naming. We all do it differently on our own computers. With Windows and OS X we have a large amount of leeway in how we can name our own files on our own computers. This is normally not an issue. It becomes an issue though when we want to use some of those files on a website. This is especially true of image or video files, though it can affect anything from documents to archive files as well.
As opposed to how personal computers work, most servers are fairly strict in how a file must be named in order to have it work correctly as part of a web page. The strict naming of files for linux servers only allows for letters, numbers, underscores (_), dashes (-) and periods (.) to be a part of the name of a file. You also must name the file as a continuous string of characters without spaces, so “my image.gif” isn’t valid but “my_image.gif” or “myimage.gif” or “my-image.gif” are valid.
This issue is particularly important for usage of WordPress with my AWSOM Pixgallery plugin, since incorrect naming of the image files can lead to issues displaying the images. The plugin supports custom names, so once you upload your images you can input a caption/custom name in the admin menu in any way you wish for display purposes, just make sure you leave the actual file name as something that is acceptable on the server.
WordPress 2.2.1 released
WordPress 2.2.1 has been released. This release has some important security and usability fixes and is a required update for anyone using 2.2 or the 2.1 versions of WordPress. Remember to back up your files and your database before upgrading. You can download it from the WordPress download page.
WPZipper updated, now with AWSOM plugins
I just received an email from the administrators of the WPZipper.com website to let me know that they’ve updated their site and also added the AWSOM plugins to their database. WPZipper.com is a website designed to take plugins and themes and add them to a WordPress install archive so that you have a fully set up file set to upload to your web server (instead of having to add all of the stuff yourself individually).
If you happen to need to set up multiple sites with the same configuration it’s a real time saver. Heck, the fact that they have a ton of plugins and themes in one spot makes it a decent search database even if you don’t care about the archive building function.