Wordpress

Jetpack Social Removes Twitter Auto-Share

Received an email today from the folks at Jetpack Social informing me as of April 30th (tomorrow) they will be removing the auto-share functionality to Twitter. First off, being Twitter is the dumpster fire it has been since the changes last year we nuked our Twitter account earlier this month. So losing this functionality is not really a disappointment. The reasons they sited is Twitter’s removing free access to their API and them unable to reach an agreement (which likely means Twitter never even attempt to negotiate with Jetpack Social). The auto-share functionality to Facebook, Tumblr and Linkedin will remain…

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Blog Update: August 2022

Over the past few days I been making a lot of updates to this blog both visual and behind the scenes. Here are a few of the changes with further details below: New Theme with new images and color pallet. Changed the order of the side bar widgets. Corrected a coding error with the Collapsing Categories widget which was causing the site to display a PHP error. Purged 95% of the ‘Categories’. New social posting, follow and notifications.  Receive notifications via email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Most noticeable is the new theme images for the background and header. Updated the…

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Choose Windows 7 at “your own risk and your own peril”

This very odd statement is from Microsoft MSFT 417,32 +0,90 +0,22% Marketing chief Chris Capossela. “We do worry when people are running an operating system that’s 10 years old that the next printer they buy isn’t going to work well, or they buy a new game, they buy Fallout 4, a very popular game, and it doesn’t work on a bunch of older machines,” Capossela stated. “And so, as we are pushing our ISV [Independent Software Vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to…

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Dealing with WordPress White Screen of Death

A White Screen of Death in WordPress occurs when PHP has crashed. Usually this is caused by malformed coding which causes the interpreter to stop processing the page. Most common reasons include installing incompatible plugins or themes. Remember many years ago troubleshooting a White Screen for someone and determined that they had installed a Joomla theme in WordPress. While they both used the same file structure there are vast differences between WordPress and Joomla.  WordPress has made several enhancements over the last couple years that greatly reduce the likelihood of there being a White Screen of Death such as performing…

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The Perils of Flash

Adobe Flash is one of those browser plugins that a lot of people can not live without, with Java being a close second. Problem with Flash (and Java) is there are major security exploits that are being discovered daily. Adobe just release an updated for Flash last week and already has plans on releasing another update this week to patch an exploit just discovered in the last fix. Some people such as Grand Stream Dreams blogger Claus have opted to do away with Flash (and other Adobe products) on some their systems: Taking Flash Player out to the Bins. Unfortuantly,…

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Favicon Bug

This is a really an odd one and it affects both Chrome and Firefox (possibly Safari as well), but NOT Internet Explorer. If you have had unexplained crashes while/after visiting a WordPress (WP) site, it is possible it could be caused by this bug. The good news is this bug has been reported to Mozilla [Bug 1174811] and it was patched on Wednesday (June 17th). Just not sure yet when it is going to be pushed out. Firefox 39 is due out in less than two weeks (June 30th), but then there could also be a 38.0.6 release between now and then (though…

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Gallery Working Again

It has been over five months since a plugin update broke the Gallery. During those past few months when I had some free time I would try to make the needed updates to restore the gallery to its full functionality. Unfortunately, I did not have much free time so little had been done. I had decided to set aside some time this weekend to update and repair (if needed) all the sites I maintain which included starting to work on fixing the gallery again. Saturday afternoon I logged into the gallery and noticed some plugins (including one of the two gallery…

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Restoring the Gallery

Earlier this month I went through the process of installing theme and plugin updates for all the WordPress sites I host. I actively try to keep the sites updated as a I learned the hard way the damage and out-of-date plugin can cause. On the old gallery site I was using ZenPhoto which unlike WordPress, is not an easy application to install updates. So I had neglected to update the site for a while. One morning a couple years ago, I get online to find dozens of emails from my Firefox Blog followers (and a couple from my hosting company)…

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WP SuperCache Plugin Danger!

Up until recently I’ve been using the WP SuperCache plugin to help speed up my WordPress sites. I was working on one of the sites the other night and had Weaver II run a diagnostics to see if there were any problems with the theme. It came back with a warning that I was using the WP SuperCache plugin and that this would prevent the automatic mobile device version of the theme from working. They did suggest a couple other caching plugins that would work without issues. The first one I tried was very complicated to setup and it actually slowed…

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New in 2013

It has been a while since I’ve done much with this blog. That is going to change this year, call it a ‘New Year’s Resolution’ if you will. Most of what I plan on doing with this blog is going to be more Computer/Internet related. To be more specific: WordPress. Been doing a lot of work with WordPress for the past few days. I currently have around 10 WordPress sites four of which are actually blog, the others are ‘websites’. The Weaver II theme is one the best themes out there on WordPress. I’ll be doing a more in-depth review later on of this theme. There are…

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