Some Thoughts On WordPress 2.6 (and Plugins Galore) – Part Two
Some Thoughts On WordPress 2.6 (and Plugins Galore) – Part One
Site Updates!! WordPress 2.6

… I wanted to describe a few more plugins I’ve installed on this site and/or afewgoodlenses.

On Saturday, I installed Lightbox 2 from Rupert Morris on both of my sites. Lightbox 2 is one of several similar plugins that add real snap to the appearance of images on a site, and I especially like it on afewgoodlenses. When you click any single image from an article, the background fades to black (or gray, dark gray, or white, your choice) and your visitor can page through the full-sized versions of your images. I liked all the lightbox plugins a lot; this one turned out to be my favorite just because I liked the way the display looked and the color-changing options. I did notice one thing about the lighbox plugins (all of them that I tried) that I don’t understand: the images displayed in the sidebars by scripts like the Flickr badge or MyBlogLog recent viewers are not overlayed by the lightbox images. I’m sure that’s something about Javascript that I don’t understand, but I’m curious about it if anyone can explain it.

I also installed Postalicious by Pablo Gómez Basanta. This post was created by Postalicious, which mimics the delicious daily blog posting function, with much, much greater flexibility than what delicious provides. You can configure a comprehensive set of options for automatically posting delicious links to your blog, by setting such things as a minimum number of bookmarks, the timings between posts, a scheduled time for posting, and an hourly search for new bookmarks. You also have control over the appearance and content of the generated post, with the additional options of specifying a layout for the titles or bookmarks, as well as date and time formats. And, if that wasn’t enough, here are my two favorite features: you can instruct Postalicious to create all new posts as drafts for you to edit later; and you can collect recent bookmarks into a post on demand by simply pressing a button. Smashing! I turned off the delicious daily blog posting function as soon as I saw what Postalicious had to offer.

I am looking into a sporadic problem I’m having with afewgoodlenses, where the WordPress wp_options table is getting corrupted. It happened twice on the weekend (and when it happened, my heart almost stopped when I accessed my site and was prompted to install WordPress), but hasn’t happened since. In both cases, I lost my Internet connection while writing a post using Windows Live Writer, so that may be the root cause. In any case, the experience prompted me to install the WordPress Clean Options plugin — but, honestly, I need to spend a little more time learning about the things it told me about wp_options.

In one of the previous posts, I mentioned that I hadn’t explored the new media library capabilities of WordPress, because I’m using Windows Live Writer to post images and articles. I directed you to a short training video, Managing the WordPress Media Library, but also now wanted to point you to this fine article from Rodney Smith of Hippo Web Solutions:

Managing images with the WordPress media manager

Thanks, Rod! Thanks for stopping by and for taking time to write that article.

Finally, please take a few minutes to read this excellent piece on WordPress and the WordPress community by Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection:

Be Kind, Educate

Mark’s article means a lot to me because, as I spend all this time gradually building — and building up — my two sites, I sometimes get a little discouraged about the amount of actual admin or maintenance work it takes to keep things moving. And, of course — like everyone — I get frustrated when something doesn’t work and it’s a struggle to figure out what’s gone wrong and get it working again. To be fair, the problem is almost never WordPress or a WordPress plugin; more likely, it’s one of the many sites and services that are connected to the blogs that are hiccupping in one way or another.

As I have probably said somewhere here before, I’m not a PHP or MySQL programmer, though I have a smattering of HTML and some web design skill. What I do have, however, is a technical background in various platforms that goes back decades, a willingness to experiment, and a fairly high degree of tolerance for stuff that goes in the ditch. And, I think, I do a decent job of explaining how I do things, or how I fix things, or, sometimes, how I just get over things when the doing and the fixing doesn’t work. So, even though I never intended for either of my sites to have a technical orientation, I realized after reading what Mark had to say that part of being a member of this community means sharing those technical and personal experiences  that make the community what it is. Bravo, Mark, and this post is my answer to the questions you posed at the close of your article.