eXtra For Every Publisher

So, I have been building a new site for my new employer, and I am learning lots as well as coming across various issues that have slowed my progress down.

In the first post, Insights into Building a Site from Scratch, I mentioned that I was having some issues with WordPress, and so in the second post, Round Two, I talked about that, but today, I want to talk about hosting issues.

See, the host that my boss is using is Mosso, a great company with some pretty amazing hosting plans. While I am a big fan of WiredTree, we are using Mosso.

The site was running really well at the start, but over the last two days, it has become very slow. A support request was put in, and apparently things were fixed, but still, things are running slower than they were when we first started working on this site, thus slowing down my progress on the site even further.

Sure, the site is still up, and it is still running, but loading any page, or even the WordPress administration panel takes two or three times longer than it did at the start of me working on it, and much slower than this blog.

So we will continue to work with them in hopes of resolving this issue, but it does remind me how important it is to find a great host to work with, especially when you have high hopes for a project. Hosting is the one thing that should never slow down the initial building of a site.

I mean, it is one thing if your hosting goes down because you are getting too much traffic, but this site I am working on isn’t even public yet, so that is definitely not the issue.

It can definitely be hard to get things solved when you are talking about performance, rather than just the plain “up and down” of a site’s status. Hopefully, hosting issues will be resolved soon, so I can get beyond all of these delays and really start pushing out content.

This has given me time to think about everything I will need to do that I will either have to program myself, or tweak WordPress to do as I have lots of dynamic data on pages that I need to mess with.

Thus far, I have created over one hundred and fifty pages, most of them blank, but I am slowly pushing out text to each one. I will keep you all posted on how it progresses.

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Today, I sent back the laptop that PicApp bought me, back to them. While I really didn’t like the Dell laptop, I had organized my work flow on it pretty effectively, and I had become used to running a Windows XP environment once again. All my files were in place, all of my bookmarks were set-up, and it remembered my passwords for everything. Clearing it off, I realized how many things I depend on to get my work done, and how disorganized my organizational system is.

Today, I am back on my MacBook Pro, and things feel a little off. It is really hard to switch from one machine to another. I have to remember which applications I used to get things done, and it doesn’t have all my passwords remembered. I have so much to do to get it perfect once again, and I am sure that over the next few days, I will be a little less productive than I would have been on the Dell, but after settling in, I am sure my work flow will get back to normal.

How long does it take you to get your normal work flow set up on a new machine? Can you easily switch from a Windows computer to a Mac or to a Linux machine? Let me know in the comments below.

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The first thing I do every day is check my emails. After that I login to my newsreader to check up on my favourite blogs (and blogs which commonly break news). The emails I receive and the blogs I check daily are the inspiration for quite a lot of my posts however I also use Twitter, check forums from time to time and use StumbleUpon occasionally too.

Going, Going Gone

I am not active in the StubleUpon community at all but I do love stumbling from time to time as it’s a great place to find great articles, particularly on smaller sites which I’m unlikely to find during my usual browsing routine. However, recently I have found that results seem to get less and less accurate the more you stumble.

For example, the other day I was stumbling using the keyword Blogging, a popular keyword and one which should bring up a lot of results. I came across a few good articles but after about 10 stumbles or so I noticed that results were getting more and more unrelated to blogging. I started coming across some joke sites, some political news and some funny image sites. The results also started to get older. All in all results were more and more unrelevant with each stumble.

If I was searching for a strange keyword or perhaps 2 or 3 keywords then I could understand why results would get worse as there would be less pages tagged with my search term. However, Blogging is an incredibly popular term and one which I’m sure many pages get tagged with so I’m confused why results are getting poorer after 10+ stumbles.

I’ve read a lot of posts on the internet about the StumbleUpon algorithm, most of which are speculation and involve a rating applied to the initial stumbler and the number of thumbs up and thumbs down. However, I haven’t see anyone else talk about the inaccuracy of results after a lot of stumbles.

Has anyone else noticed this? I’m curious to know if other stumblers have seen this too

Written by Kevin Muldoon of Blogging Tips - Follow Kevin on Twitter.

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So, I have been building a new site for my new employer, and I am learning lots as well as coming across various issues that have slowed my progress down.

In the first post, Insights into Building a Site from Scratch, I mentioned that I was having some issues with WordPress, and I wanted to talk more about them here.

The issues aren’t all with the software itself, but instead the limitations I am coming across that hinders my ability to quickly push out pages, organize them, as well as listing pages dynamically.

So the first issue I had come across is that if I go add a new page, select a page parent, and click publish before the auto-save has a chance to do its thing, then it would sometimes give me an error letting me know that the page I was working on couldn’t be modified. It was very frustrating, and the only fix that I could see was to wait another fifteen or so seconds for it to auto-save, thus delaying me from adding the next page, but saving me the time it takes to go back to manage pages, and re-select which page should be its parent.

In this project, I have to add hundreds of pages, and so adding them one at a time is very frustrating. I would love to be able to add blank pages in the same way that you can add tags or categories by creating a comma delimited list of titles.

This would help me flesh out the eventual page structure in a much faster way.

Thankfully, a plugin called PageMash makes ordering those pages relatively easy with a drag and drop interface, though again, to be picky, I wish I could select a whole section of pages and move them around easily.

Other than that, I have been having issues remembering how to dynamically show sub-pages in the content area of a page. I am sure there is a WordPress template tag or something, but I can’t remember it off the top of my head. And since I will continue to add pages, I don’t want to hard code lists of sub pages.

There are so many things I am learning through developing this site, but I have to admit that the data entry part is boring, and next time I will be subcontracting it out to someone else, so I can continue to focus on the interesting aspects of developing this site.

Look out for another set of insights as I continue on.

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For those of you that don’t know my history with blogging, you might not know that Michael Heilemann was the person that got me interested in WordPress thanks to his blog, Binary Bonsai.

It showed me what WordPress could do in a design sense, and how useful the software could be, and as a result, I have always followed his site, and kept tabs on the projects he has worked on.

Today, his feed let the world know that he is moving his site from WordPress to Habari, a new blogging platform that he has helped design and develop.

Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…

Hello Habari.

I have tried out Habari, back when it first came out, and while I was impressed, it wasn’t mature enough for me to really take a keen interest in it, but with its recent 0.5 release, many people are jumping back on board to see if Habari has the new “it thing” that many bloggers are looking for.

Currently, his blog looks relatively basic, which has been the presentational direction he has been heading in for a while, but I hope he adds his own stylistic touch to the site over the coming days, and also blesses the world with his transition guide, helping those interested in taking the leap know how he managed to move his extensive archive over to Habari, and get his blogging work flow back on track.

Will others now take the leap and join Michael in trying out Habari on their own main blogs? It is too early to tell, but this is definitely an interesting development in my world.

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