Category: WordPress

In addition to doing my taxes today, I also spent some time messing around with this blog. The theme I’m using, Stargazer, supports post formats. I’ve messed around with them a little, marking some posts as video, audio, quotes, and images. I thought the feature was kind of nifty, though it didn’t seem to have that much utility.

Over time, though, I’ve started to see some downsides to post formats. There seemed to be some issues with the way they were treated in certain plugins. (Specifically, it looked like they were being ignored, and the plugin would only see standard format posts.) So I thought it might be a good idea to just reset all the posts to “standard,” and avoid using them in the future.

I couldn’t initially find a way to get a list of posts by format. I did some searching and found the Post Format Filter plugin. It hasn’t been updated in a long time, but it still works, so I used that to search out and reset all my posts to standard. That was kind of boring work, but it allowed me to stumble across some fun old posts.

Every once in a while, I spend some time messing around with WordPress, evaluating plugins, looking into minor issues, and stuff like that. I’ve got a few little items that might be worth blogging about, so I decided to combine them into a “miscellany” post.

I recently got a puzzling email from Google, telling me that my WordPress install was out of date. My WordPress install, in fact, was completely up–to-date, and it seemed weird for Google to be sending out an email like that anyway, never mind an incorrect one. I thought it might be a phishing attempt or something, but all the links on it seemed genuine, plus it seemed really unlikely that GMail would deliver a fake Google email to my inbox rather than my spam folder. Well, this article at WPTavern clears everything up. So that’s a relief.

I’ve been keeping WordPress and all my plugins up to date, generally speaking. I also noticed at WPTavern that WP Super Cache was just updated to patch some vulnerabilities and fix some bugs. I’ve been using WP Super Cache for a long time, and have never had any trouble with it. Of course, this site has never been hit with enough traffic to really need a cache, but I guess it’s nice to have one, just in case.

I have a test WordPress site, with all the same plugins as my “production” site, and I generally update that one first, then update the real site if everything is OK. I’ve thought about getting rid of the test site recently, since it didn’t seem to be serving much of a purpose. But I recently had an incident where updating a plugin broke the site, so I’m glad I still have that test site. And I’ve been experimenting with some new plugins recently too, so the test site is a good place to do that.

In particular, I’ve been experimenting with syntax highlighting plugins. I think I like WP-Syntax. I haven’t installed it on the production site yet, but I probably will. I’ve also been experimenting with Jetpack’s Markdown support. I really want to embrace Markdown, but I can never quite talk myself into it.

And I’m still on the fence about backup. I’m currently using the free version of UpdraftPlus, with a little script of my own that I run periodically to copy backup files from my host to my local PC. But I’ve been thinking about switching to the paid personal Jetpack plan, for $39/year, that includes daily site backups.

I have nothing much to say here, just that I noticed that yesterday’s post was #2000. So this is #2001. I started blogging in the year 2001, and (for some reason) never stopped. So here we are. Post #1000 happened in September 2007. At that point, I was still using Blogger. I switched to WordPress in 2014, and I’ve been happy with that decision, though I never had any big problem with Blogger.

I’m not in the mood for a lot of self-reflection this morning; I just wanted to make note of the milestone. I do have a lot of things I want to blog about though, so I’m going to get on with that.

I was happy to see today that the author of the On This Day plugin has updated it to fix the bug I noticed earlier this month. It’s definitely one of my favorite plugins; it’s always surfacing cool random old stuff that I posted 10 years ago. I just wanted to post this as a follow-up and thank you to him!

And just a few minutes after my last post, I’ve figured it out: The Goodreads widget wasn’t working, because I had Privacy Badger enabled in my browser. Well, that answers a lot of questions.

And now that I can see what the Jetpack Goodreads widget does, I see that it is likely just a wrapper around the HTML/JS widget that I could have added directly in a code block. I’m going to leave it on the page for now, but I might drop it later.

Sigh. Well, back to that whole iced coffee idea. And lunch. Yeah, lunch sounds good.

After updating to WordPress 4.6.1 recently, I also updated all my plugins, and decided to spend some time messing around with the site a bit.

First, I found that updating the On This Day plugin broke something; it started showing a PHP error. After looking at the code a bit, I figured out that just changing something in the widget config would fix the problem. If I was more ambitious, I would actually go ahead and see if I could fix the error in the PHP code, and maybe even see if I could get the original author to merge it in. But I don’t have the energy for that right now. We’re in the middle of a late summer heat wave, and I’m not up for PHP debugging right now. Maybe next week.

After messing with that a bit, I noticed that Jetpack had added a Goodreads widget recently. I like the idea of showing what I’m currently reading in the sidebar, so I added and configured it, but couldn’t get it to display anything. This is possibly because I have my Goodreads profile set to private. (Or at least partially private.)

I’d previously messed around with adding a Goodreads widget, using a general-purpose RSS widget, but (for some reason) had never added it to my live site. Looking back at that, I see that there’s a key associated with the RSS feed URL, so that’s probably the issue with the Jetpack widget; it doesn’t have the key (or anyplace to enter it in the widget config). And looking at the RSS widget that I’d experimented with previously, I see that I’d have to expose the key on my site to use that one. So I guess I should leave my “currently reading” list off this site, since I’m not sure what else somebody could do with that key.

Goodreads also has a customizable HTML/JavaScript widget that I could use, and which probably works with private profiles (without exposing the key), but I’m not sure I want to add that right now, since I don’t want to go down the road of starting to add miscellaneous JavaScript widgets all over my home page. (Been there; done that.) So if you want to know what I’m reading, you’ll have to add me as a friend on Goodreads, I guess.

After some spelunking into the Goodreads account settings, I’m a bit confused about all this though. I’m not entirely sure which stuff in Goodreads is public and which is private, and I’m pretty sure the “currently reading” list isn’t private. So I really think this is a rabbit hole I shouldn’t have gone down at all.

The weather app on my phone says it’s 86 degrees out, and feels like 96, so I should really stop messing around on the computer and go get an iced coffee or something.

I got a notice recently saying that the SSL certificate for this site would be renewing soon. That reminded me that it was about a year ago that I bought the cert and set things up so my login and admin were under SSL. That’s been working fine, and I decided today to switch the whole site to SSL. There’s nothing on this site that’s really important enough to require SSL, but I wanted to do it as an experiment, if for no other reason.

I did this simply by switching the site URL in WordPress from http to https. This doesn’t force everything to SSL, but it does make all the internal site links go through SSL. If I want to force SSL, I think I can do that with .htaccess / mod_rewrite, or with a WordPress plugin. But it’s fine for now.

I’m using a cert purchased from my host, 1&1. Their prices aren’t bad, but I probably should have switched to a free cert from Let’s Encrypt. Maybe next year.