Tag: Wordpress

By Posted on Posted in Blogging, Free, Not Workers Compensation, Open Source, PDRater, Technobabble, Website Updates, Wordpress No Comments Tagged with , ,
Wordpress Upgrade
WordPress Upgrade

Since updating this website to WordPress v2.8 in the middle of June they’ve released two additional security updates.  Unfortunately, the latest update also required a little extra tinkering and work on my part.  I look on constant security fixes for this fantastic (free!) open source software as a small price to pay for increased security.

Again, the calculators should all be completely impervious to changes in the WordPress program itself.  However, its theoretically possible you might notice a little weirdness in how the website looks/acts.  If so, please drop me a line and let me know so I can take a look.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled rating…

By Posted on Posted in Not Workers Compensation, Open Source, PDRater, Website Updates, Wordpress No Comments Tagged with , , , ,
Wordpress Upgrade
Wordpress Upgrade

Last night I updated this website to use WordPress v2.8.  There’s a lot of new features under the hood.  One that I really like is the ability to browse new website themes.

The calculators should all be completely impervious to changes in WordPress.  However, its theoretically possible you might notice a little bit of weirdness in how the rest of the website looks/acts.  If so, please drop me a line and let me know so I can look into it.

Enjoy!

By Posted on Posted in Business, Free, MySQL, Not Workers Compensation, Open Source, PDRater, PHP, Search Engine Ranking, SEO, Technobabble, Wordpress No Comments Tagged with , , , , , , , ,
Wordpress
Wordpress

A friend of mine owns and operates a number of websites – all of which run on ASP/.NET/MS-SQL servers.  He knows what he’s talking about, but he’s fairly dismissive of WordPress, PHP, and MySQL.

All this time I’ve been raving about WordPress, telling him that you can basically do anything with it.  I’ve mentioned how easy it is to use, how easy it is to maintain, its open source, how many global corporations use WordPress to build their websites, how its the tool of choice for so many designers, and how huge the WordPress community is.

In the meantime, he’s referring to his millions of rows in his “real-SQL, MicroSoft SQL” database.  I believe he’s been stuck thinking of PHP and MySQL as “kiddie” stuff, just not ready for big time.

That is, he’s been dismissive of WordPress until about two months ago.  In the last two months other people (SEO consultants, professional designers) have been raving about WordPress to him too.

I think he’s finally coming around.

By Posted on Posted in PDRater, Technobabble, Website Updates, Wordpress No Comments Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Refresh for updates
Refresh for updates

In no particular order: ((Photo courtesy of RandomChu))

  • I often refer to myself as a Workers’ Compensation nerd.  The other day I realized that would be a GREAT website name!  Unfortunately, WCNerd.com is already taken by “white collar nerd.”  Bummer, no?  What a great e-mail address that would have been, too!
  • With well over a 100 posts and counting I thought it was time to include a “tag cloud.”  Its on the bottom of the right sidebar of this website.  Its basically a grouping of the common words I use to tag various posts.  The more common a word is the larger it appears.  The top contenders are pretty telling
  • To help with the website navigation and use of the “tag cloud” I’ve started being more liberal with how I tag my various posts.  Its actually kinda fun.
  • I’m  using a new e-mail contact form.  I was using “Contact Form 7,” which has a truly impressive feature list. While effective, I didn’t much care for this plugin because of its complexity.  What I really wanted was a quick and easy way for website visitors to send me e-mail.  Recently I found “Tiny Contact Form” by Tom Braider to be exactly what I needed.  It is small, simple to configure, and easy to include.  I’m actually using a modified version of the really fantastic “Tiny Contact Form” plugin.  I’m rather proud of my modification on this plugin and even sent Tom Braider my changes which he ended up incorporating into the next version!
  • Google recently swallowed up Feedburner.  I was using Feedburner to manage the RSS feeds for this website.  The only problem was that it was causing all kinds of problems.  My RSS reader wasn’t picking up the new posts from my own blog!  So, I scrapped the Feedburner management of my RSS feed and went back to the native WordPress support for RSS (which is pretty damn good).

By Posted on Posted in Free, Not Workers Compensation, Open Source, PDRater, Technobabble, Website Updates, Wordpress No Comments Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Wordpress Upgrade
Wordpress Upgrade

I upgraded to WordPress v2.7.1 as soon as it came out (after testing on another website, of course).  I can honestly say WordPress is the only software I use that I actually look forward to upgrading.

Since version 2.7 RC 1, upgrading to the next version of WordPress has been this easy:

How to Upgrade WordPress
How to Upgrade WordPress

You click “Upgrade Automatically” and wait about 5 seconds.

You’re done.

Not entirely off topic: a friend of mine asked me yesterday about the best way to put up a new website.  She had thought about using Yahoo Site Builder or some such.  Yahoo and its like are great at building free, quick, and ugly websites.  If you’re going to publish on the internets, why not just opt for something just as easy and that has hundreds, if not thousands of possible totally free themes to choose from?  I say, go with WordPress.

I used to code sites by hand – that’s a chump’s game.  Just install WordPress and call it a day.