» Fixing Google Redirect Links in RSS Feed
November 2nd, 2009 Sammy RussoMy friend, Internet Strategist @GrowMap, emailed me about how all her CommentLuv links were pointing to a feedburner redirect link. She wanted to know if I could tell her why the links were pointing to a Google redirect URL. I initially thought it had something to do with the CommentLuv plugin but I dug in a little to find her an answer and it actually turns out it has nothing to do with the CommentLu, but everything to do with a setting in Feedburner.
Not having used CommentLuv, I installed the plugin here on Search Friendly Web Design and on another blog. Turns out that the links get hijacked by Google if you have a certain setting enabled in your Feedburner account . To fix it you have to turn off the Feedburner Redirect link by unchecking the ‘Item Link Clicks’ setting of the Feedburner Stats menu. You can find this under the analyze tab.
» Managing Post and Page Revisions in Wordpress
May 6th, 2009 Sammy RussoWith the release of Wordpress 2.6 a new feature was added that tracks and retains all previous versions or revisons to Wordpress Posts and Pages. Many think this is a great feature and can be very useful. In the building of California Whitewater I used the revision feature several times to roll back to a previous version.
A Valid Problem With Post Revisions
If you sift through the Wordpress Support Forum you will find many Wordpress users griping about the revison feature because it tracks all revisions. If you have a 100 posts and you edit each post 2 or 3 times you will get an additional 200 – 300 records in your MySQL database. For bigger sites or blogs do the math. This makes for an unruly database size.
Being that California Whitewater took us several months to build and with 4 people making content edits over the course of 4 months we had an extra 2600 records of revisons in the database. We build the site in a development space and when it was time to move the site to the live server I couldn’t move the database in one shot… I had to split it into 4 parts, do a find and replace on each part to update the URL and image paths and then move the DB.
Before moving I did look through the forums for help on how to clean up the database but I wasn’t comfortable with doing a global delete of all revisions in the MySQL database to reduce the size of the DB.
Deleting Your Post Revisions
Database Cleanup
Now that site is live and all is good, I went back to the development space for California Whitewater and ran this MySQL command to clear out all the revisions. I did it on the dev site to test the process and ensure I wouldn’t break anything on the live site if something were to go very wrong.
Step 1. Back Up Your Database.
- You can follow the steps outlined here in Simple Maintenance to run a backup.
- You can also install a WP-Plugin like WP-DB-Backup or try anyone of the Backup Tools.
Step 2. Run a delete command in PHP My Admin
- Open PHP My Admin
- Select the database you wish to clean up
- Click the SQL Tab in the top horizontal navigation
- Copy and Paste this Command:
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";
Step 3. Test Your Site to make sure nothing broke in the process
Use a Post Revision Plugin
There a several Post Revision Plugins in the Wordpress Extend section. The one I downloaded “Revision Control” is great and has become part of my personal collection of plugins I use on all sites.
What I like about Revision Control is that you can enable or disable revisions on global bases as well as set the number of revisions to keep. I set Revision Control to retain the last 5 versions of both pages and posts. You can also control the revision process on a page-by-page or post-by-post basis.
There you have it.. an easy way to delete post revisions from the database as well as a great plugin to control revisions.
» Changing the Color Of Your Visited Links
October 28th, 2008 Sammy RussoA client recently asked me…
I notice that on our website the colors change from blue to purple after clicked on. My question is When some one enters the site are all the category’s purple and then when clicked on they turn blue. However when some else enters the site are all the colors purple or are some blue some purple?
I started to answer his question then thought it best to go beyond answering it and to also explain why.
» Wordpress 2.6.1 Is Nearing Completion
August 6th, 2008 Sammy Russo
I just popped into Wordpress Trac to check out the Roadmap on when Wordpress 2.6.1 will be available.
Unfortunately there is no estimated date set for the release of Wordpress 2.6.1, but the status is currently at 78% complete.. so I would expect a release sometime before the end of the month.
So why do I care when Wordpress 2.6.1is released? Typically I always wait to upgrade to the next generation release once they’ve reached the first round of bug / security fixes. Call me cautious but I’d rather be safe as I use Wordpress to run quite a few of my clients commercial sites & business blogs.. so if their sites don’t work 100%.. it falls on me.
Once a next generation release comes around I usually do a test install and copy over a database of some of the bigger client sites like Rafting.com, just to make sure everything is good to go.
What’s your upgrade protocol… do you automatically upgrade your Wordpress installation as soon as a new release is available, or do you wait it out like me?
» When A Deactivated Plugin Breaks Your Blog
June 6th, 2008 Sammy RussoI logged into my dashboard and saw a post in the WP feed about what to do if your blog goes down upon deactivating a plugin. I’ve had this happen to me a couple of times. The plugins I usually have this issue with are..
- Related Posts
- Breadcrumb Navigation
- Recent Posts
- My Category Order
When a plugin breaks my site.. if I know for certain I’m going to be reactivating the plugin anytime soon I go ahead and delete the PHP call for the plugin. If I think I’m going be using the plugin in question again I comment it out instead.
How to ID the Plugin Causing the Problem?
If you’re new to Wordpress and PHP, one thing the original article left out was how to ID the Faulty Plugin. The error message usually tells you. Lets say you deactivated al plugins and now your front page has this message..
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_breadcrumb() in /home/hostname/public_html/websitename/wp-content/themes/genesis-10/header.php on line 48
I have all the info I need to quickly find the bad code and either comment it out or delete it. I know that on line 48 in the header file of the Genesis theme i need to find the code get_breadcrumb(). Make sure to include the open and close php brackets that enclose the call.
» Wordpress Blog Security Measures
May 6th, 2008 Sammy RussoHere area a few tips and tricks to keeping your Wordpress blog or Wordpress CMS safe and secure. There are plenty of other tactics out there to take for increased security but these will get you started and should be considered best practice.
» Have Code Your Way in the Wordpress Editor
February 28th, 2008 Sammy RussoSo I was half way done building out a Wordpress CMS website in which I was using div class tags and inline styles inside the editor. What I soon realized is that Wordpress was removing all of code and breaking my pages. So I searched the Wordpress forums and sure enough I wasn’t alone.
» Schedule Wordpress Posts to Publish in the Future
February 9th, 2008 Sammy RussoA client emailed me the other day and asked.. “how do a schedule posts to publish in the future”? Hm, I thought… this is new.. never been asked this question before. So I went looking.. I knew Wordpress could do it.. I just never had a need for it so I was unaware.
» Upgrading Wordpress Using Dreamweaver
January 6th, 2008 Sammy RussoDreamweaver is my primary web development tool… I use it for writing code and for FTP. There are a lot of folks out there who swear up and down that Dreamweaver FTP is aweful. Personally I love it and I’ve never, ever had an issue.
Here it goes Read more…
» Moving Your Blog from Blogger to Wordpress
December 18th, 2007 Sammy RussoThe Blog Herold just published a great tutorial on moving your blog from Blogger over to Wordpress. The tutorial is very straight forward and easy to follow.
Why move over to Wordpress? This may be a biased opinion but Wordpress is far superior to Blogger for a number of reasons. It’s open source with a massive community, you can add almost any functionality you want with just a few clicks and skinning or theming a Wordpress blog is much easier as well.
I started blogging with Blogger. At first I thought it was an outstanding platform until a friend turned me onto Wordpress. As soon as I saw a fraction of what it could do I moved my blog over to Wordpress and I’ve never looked back.
