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Fundamental Website Setup Links



Display A Random Sidebar Image From Your Gallery

I’ve been asked a few times if Pixgallery will eventually get some sidebar widgets to display images on your index page from your galleries. The answer is yes, but I’m not sure exactly when. However, for the moment, I’ve discovered a sidebar widget Plugin which might help out for some cases. The Display Random Images plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-image-widget/ seems pretty straight forward and only requires that you give the folder path for the selection of images you want it to pick from. I may even ask the developer about a specific Pixgallery mod for it to make it even easier to use. If anyone tries this out please let me know how you like it.

iPhone Mobile Web, Finally Usable

This post is slightly off-topic, but still a major concern for any serious blogger/webcomic/whatever WordPress admin. What do you do if you are out and about and you discover that your website has been hacked, or has malicious spam displaying, or whatever you don’t want there? If you are lucky (and rich) you might own a portable laptop that you can use to connect to your site using wifi or a cell network. But in most cases, you won’t have that. So what will you have? Maybe a phone.

Until recently I primarily used a combo of a Nokia N800 internet tablet connected by bluetooth to a Samsung Sync cellphone. This worked ok, but wasn’t very fast. It had other negatives also which would be worse for non-tech oriented people.

Then came the iPhone. It works pretty well on it’s own. However, as most people who have one have discovered, it doesn’t always work well with advanced javascript or other related programming. So it’s not easy sometimes to log into a WordPress admin area using the phone. There are some plugins out there for WordPress that make this better, but it still doesn’t replicate what you can do with other devices.

The biggest drawback of the iPhone was that it couldn’t tether to other devices to be used as a modem. It doesn’t have a dial-up networking or PAN bluetooth profile, and it didn’t have a wifi connection tool built in.

Until now. Yes, a new program out there called PDAnet for iPhone is available, and it turns your iPhone into a wifi router. So now any device that uses wifi (like a laptop or my n800) can connect to the iPhone and use it just like any other wifi hotspot. With a 3g iPhone this makes the connection pretty snappy–I’m actually using it right now with my Macbook pro to post this.

The best of all is this is free once you jailbreak your iPhone. So now I can use my iPhone for most tasks and set it to router mode when I need to use my n800 or laptop for more advanced needs. It’s a system I would strongly suggest to anyone searching for a convenient out and about system for internet use.

Slow Verus Fast Access For your Visitors

A recent article about site access speed posted over at Lorelle on WordPress started me thinking about my own path of site development over the last 7 years. The article talks about how up until recently most people were using dial up phone connections to reach the internet, and most sites needed to be optimized for this slow speed in order to be successful. This is true with sites I’ve developed, especially the first generation version of the Stupid and Insane Defenders Against Chaos webcomic site. The new version of the site is based now on WordPress and has many new features, but it’s also much larger and “slower” to load if you were to use a dial up connection. I think I subconsciously resisted moving to a new platform for a long time based on my thought that we’d be dropping support for slower connections, but as times change you do need to move on eventually. I’ve tried to keep the new site to a loading time that makes sense and isn’t really too bloated–I still find no need for unneeded flashy AJAX stuff or flash movie embeds, but I think most new site developers really have no desire to be restrained at all. And while cell phones and wireless systems are getting faster, mobile devices, and many libraries and school computer rooms will still feel like dial up in some ways when loading sites, a key thing many new developers forget about. It’s a balancing act and you need to think about your audience and what things are really needed for your site. I’d definitely suggest checking out Lorelle’s post to read more about the subject.

“Hidden” AWSOM Plugin Features: Creating default cache and gallery folders

The AWSOM Pixgallery image gallery plugin for WordPress is designed to be an easy way for users to get a gallery of their images loaded into their site with a minimum of work and time. One of it’s “hidden” features is the ability to go in and create default folders on your web server to hold both your thumbnail images and an initial gallery folder to hold your images. When Pixgallery is first activated it will attempt to create these folders in your WordPress uploads folder (this is the same folder that holds your images that get uploaded through the image upload function when writing posts or pages). In some cases this may not work, usually due to a permissions issue on your uploads folder or wp-content folder that prevents new files/folders from being written.

In these cases Pixgallery will detect that the folder wasn’t written and present you with options to create the folders later. On the settings/options page for Pixgallery you’ll see a link at the bottom of the page to create and switch to the default cache folder. If the folder was originally created properly there will be a statement there saying that the cache folder was already created.

On the Manage Pixgallery Galleries page you’ll see a button at the top of the page that says Create Default Gallery Folder. If this folder was created properly during plugin activation there will be a statement that the default gallery has already been created and will list the gallery path.

This ability is just one of the small hidden ways that Pixgallery has been designed to make your life as website admin easier.

How To Change the Language Used in a WordPress Plugin

This is a brief tutorial on how to update your AWSOM News Announcement database table to display any language type you’d like. It’s actually pretty straight forward. It’s best if you do not have any news posts saved since changing the language type might make them display incorrectly.

First thing you need to do is go to your web server and go to your MySQL administration tool. Typically this is a program called PhpMyAdmin (which I’ll be using to demonstrate–but any program will work as long as you can access the same areas I’ll be showing).

Start by selecting your WordPress database. This is the database you input into the wp-config.php file when you originally set up WordPress. You can select from your current databases by using the drop down menu on the left side:

database select image

Once you’ve selected the correct database you need to go to the AWSOM News Announcement table that’s in the database. It is named awsomnews but has a header prefix that’s typically wp_, but could be a custom one that you added to the wp-config.php file. click it’s name in the list under your database name on the left and it should open a new page in the main area showing details of that table.

select field image

Notice that there is a column called “collation” and it lists “latin1_swedish_ci”–this is the default language type that MySQL uses unless specifically told to use a different language type (MySQL is originally a swedish product). This language type does not display Asian or other non-English lettering based languages well (and honestly has issues with regular English also). What we need to do is change this to the correct language for you.

You can do one of 2 things at this point. You can mark the checkbox next to “newstext” and click the bottom pencil icon or more simply click the pencil icon in the same row. This will open up the individual field for editing.

select language image

Now, the difficult part. In the collation drop down select the language type you’d like. Yes, there are a very large number of them and it’s not always easy to know which one to use. For regular English “utf8-bin” is good. You’ll need to look this up for your own language since I have no idea what’s good for any other specific language. Once you know which one you want make sure it’s selected in the drop down box. Then click the “save” button.

That’s basically it. Go and try it out.

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