Dave

More Plug-In Fun…

I have installed a couple of extra WordPress plug-ins – one seems to work nicely, the other, well, less so.

First up is Comment Quicktags which adds little buttons above the comment form to help people out with formatting HTML in posts.

The other one is Simple Recent Comments, which you can see in the sidebar on the right. Only, those aren’t the most recent comments for this blog. Oh, no. They are the last comments left on davebriggs.net, my old blog. Useful! Hopefully the chap behind the plug-in, Raoul, will get back to me soon, as it is a nice little addition to the site.

Update: All sorted. The recent comments plug-in makes explicit reference to tables in the database, and assumes that the prefix for the tables is “wp_” which is the default for all WordPress installations. But those of us that run more than one blog from one database, like me, then t just picks up the comments from the blog that uses that prefix – which is my original blog. All I had to do was edit the plug-in file and change the table prefixes to those for this blog. Phew! I was seriously freaked out for a while!
[tags]WordPress[/tags]

Zoundry

Following all the recent discussion about offline blog editors, I thought I would give Zoundry a pop, following a recommendation that appeared in my comments from Dan Masters. It’s another free one, and I’m using version 1.0.18 to write this post.

I may as well get it out of the way now: I don’t like it. I genuinely believe that one’s initial reaction to a piece of software is the most important, and from the off I just didn’t get Zoundry. Part of the problem is the cluttered interface:

zoundry.png

And the image handling is a bit of a nightmare too. I selected the option to use my blog’s file upload feature rather than Zoundry’s own FTP system, and to be honest, writing this now, I haven’t a clue what it is going to do. The screenshot file I inserted above was automatically reduced down to a thumbnail, but I don’t think it is linked to the original, so I am guessing I will have to sort that out manually later. Update: to be fair to Zoundry, it inserted thumbnails and added links to the full size originals. Using the WordPress filesystem is also an improvement on what BlogJet does – as it keeps all uploads in the same place. Shame the UI doesn’t make it clear just how good a feature this is!

Another user interface problem is in the link box. I select the word I want to link from, hit the (tiny) link button, type in the URL, and the link title, and hit return. Nothing happens. I sigh, and move the mouse to click on ok.

The joy of BlogJet, my #1 offline editor, is it’s simplicity. It has some pretty good features, but the interface is clear and clean and much more pleasant to use:

blogjet.png

But Zoundry does have some nice features: being able to tag posts with a number of services, rather than just the standard Technorati, Qumana-style automatic insertion of links from the clipboard, downloading your blog’s entire history to a local backup (it would be interesting to know if this could be used to run two blogs, say one at your normal location, and a ‘backup’ blog at a hosted service, like WordPress.com, say).

But it is the interface that does it for me. Too cluttered, too ugly and the text formatting buttons are way too small. So for me, BlogJet is still my favourite, with Qumana a useful backup option.

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Blogging Days

I seem to have made an awful lot of posts today – certainly more than most days. Maybe it is something about a lazy Easter Sunday, but I have had a bit of a burst of inspiration – though one was probably due after a glut of one links for… post after another.

But is it really a sensible thing to do, blogging one thing after another? After all, not many of my posts are exactly breaking news. Couldn’t I have held back on publishing that one on images and Qumana till tomorrow morning? Is having a flood of new posts in an RSS feed a good thing for readers, or is it just annoying? Would more attention be paid to posts if they came in one’s and two’s?

(By the way, those apostrophes are actually correct. I found this out last week. Apparently, the only time you can apostrophise plurals is when that word would never normally be in the plural. The example given was "if’s and but’s" so I think it works for "one’s and two’s". This discovery was during research to attempt to win an argument on whether abbreviations in the plural should have an apostrophe (say, CDs or CD’s). I said not, a colleague vehemently thought they should. Turns out, we were both right, in that it is acceptable to apostrophise abbreviations, but that it does look a little ugly. A moral victory for me though, eh? Anyway, I digress).

So, should I plan my blogging out a bit better? Save up posts for lean times? Or just let it all flow?

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Images and WordPress, Qumana

Images

Inserting images in a blog post can be a tricky thing. This hit me when I set up a WordPress installation for some friends who wanted to have their photos on the site. There a few ways of doing it, I suppose, in WordPress (and probably others):

  • Resizing the image manually with a graphics editing program, making thumbnails, FTPing them to your server, and linking to them as normal
  • Using an offline blog editor to upload the files to the host and resize them for you (BlogJet does this – I don’t think Qumana does)
  • Using the facility built in to WordPress to upload a photo to your server and produce the thumbnails on the fly
  • Using an image hosting facility like Flickr or Photobucket to host, resize and link to your image. Flickr allows you to blog images straight from its own interface. This is the only real option available to a hosted blogger, unless they use Blogger and Google‘s godawful Hello thing.

In the end, I chose the third option, despite the fact that I ended up writing some pretty lengthy instructions on the topic. WordPress’ inbuilt image uploader and handler works really nicely, the pop-up image options are pretty easy to use. The obvious problem for real technophobes is that while WordPress generates a thumbnail for you, you may have to resize the original anyway, especially if it originated from a digital camera.

The next problem in WordPress is arranging the damn things once they are there. The only real way to do it is tables, and it is a real pain. I found the best way to do it was to insert each photo one by one into the editor, then open the HTML dialogue and insert the table tags around them. For my friends, I just said that if you have more than one image, then drop me an email. Writing up that one would just be a pain in the neck for all concerned.

Clearly, WordPress needs to have some sort of built in table manager, or some other way of arranging images in a post.

Qumana

As you can see from the tag at the bottom of this post, I am giving Qumana another try, for the odd longer post now and again. My interest has been piqued again after the various posts from people like Neville Hobson, Lee Hopkins and Allan Jenkins As Tris from Qumana knows, I usually find things to moan about. There are a few of things it is still missing in Beta 3:

  • The above mentioned image handling thing
  • An autoreplace function. This is present in BlogJet, and allows me to type, say, WordPress, which is automatically replaced with the HTML to link back to the WordPress site. The camel-case means this is unlikely to happen by accident!
  • Ctrl-backspace doesn’t delete whole words. Can it, please?

One thing I love: adding hyperlinks. Qumana automatically copies whatever is in the clipboard into the dialogue, meaning I just have to hit return, as invariably I have copied the link from BlogLines or somewhere. And if I haven’t, the text is selected, so I can just type over it.

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