WordPress, Podcasting, and Changes
I’ve been using WordPress and Podpress to set up podcasting sites for almost 4 years now. I loved Podpress… it made it so easy for people without advanced tech skills to still be able to create a podcast of their own (or at least post it to their site and feed).
I stuck with it even during 2008 when there were no updates and the support forums would vanish without warning, partially out of loyalty to a good plugin (and Dan’s a really nice guy), and partially out of regret for the addition of the Podango functionality.
The challenge is not finding another podcasting plugin to replace podpress — there are several out there that work just fine. The challenge is converting existing posts from using Podpress to using whatever the new plugin might be.
The other drawback is most if not all of the podpress users in my little enclave like the builtin podpress statistics… the instant gratification of seeing that your new episode has been downloaded 500 times within the first half hour of posting it can be addictive, and getting someone started on using a different stats tool can lead to frustration on both ends.
So this is the start of an experiment. I’m going to be testing out Powerpress from RawVoice (mostly because it will work in tandem with Podpress), and see if I can’t figure out a way to easily convert shows that have between 100-300 previous episodes out there.
I’m not in that big a rush, though. The main reason for my wanting to investigate other podcastin plugin options vanished mysteriously about a month ago. My error logs were bloated with podpress statcounts errors (the infamous duplicate entry for key 1 error), literally for a couple of years… until sometime within the past 4-6 weeks.
The errors just went stopped happening. I’m not sure if they upgraded MySQL or PHP on the server where my sites are, or exactly what happened… I do know that the recent Podpress 8.8.1 maintenance release wasn’t what fixed things, because I’ve only installed it on one site, as a test.
But, I continue to explore.
Manually Restoring a Crunchy Database
It’s usually prudent to back up one’s databases fully before transferring a domain from one hosting provider to another. So what do you do when not even that goes according to plan?
I made the mistake of trusting that a full transfer worked, just because the sites and the data on the new location seemed fine. It wasn’t until a few days later, when trying to create new posts, that I uncovered a MySQL glitch.
I’m still not sure what exactly caused the glitch, but on three (possibly four) of the transferred sites, the auto-increment keys were munged, at the very least. At least, that’s the one thing that makes sense from the behavior.
What’s even more interesting is that I ended up taking a different approach to restoring each of the sites.
First site: empty all tables, and restore data from the seemingly incompatible backup. This cleared up the problem, but all of the options from the previous setup were gone, along with a bunch of stats. Not an optimal end solution.
Second site: in order to avoid loss of options and stats, I did a WordPress export of the current site to extract the data needed, then deleted the tables for terms, taxonomy and posts. I recreated those tables using the SQL statements from the Wordpress code from the same version as what was currently running. Once those tables were recreated, I ran the import of the WordPress XML file, and all seemed fine. Turns out the comments were still crunchy.
Third and fourth site: repeate of process for site two, including the comments table from the start.
There are times when all those years spent troubleshooting as a sysadmin pay off.
Lesson learned: never trust what Plesk tells you about your database backup. Go commando if you can (command line interface and mysldump are your safe bets).
Next, to play with DirectAdmin and see if it can give me the same control panel flexibility as Plesk without the same headaches.
The Joy of Customization: mimbo3
I was intrigued when I found mimbo2 last year… it seemed to be the perfect layout for a blog idea that a handful of us had been keeping on the back burner for a couple years: Deep Geeking.
The term comes from a description of what we do when we fall into intense analysis and discussion of a topic; in this case, the source topic was Babylon 5 and what we do on the podcast. I loved the name, and one of the show’s fans registered the domain for our later use. It was 2 years before I actually got around to setting up a website for it.
I liked the way mimbo2 did article images, and my experience with the way arthemia2 handled images made customizing how I wanted those images to appear fairly easy as well.
I wasn’t 100% happy with my final look, but it served a purpose.
Then along came mimbo3, and the nagging questions I had in my mind about some of the functionality had been addressed… but the part I liked the most had been excised completely: article image management.
I may be in the minority, but I like Custom Fields for specific image usage. I like having one image for a thumbnail and having a different image for an internal article image, if there is one. It’s more interesting, to me personally.
So my challenge was to do some extreme hacking on a child theme for mimbo3 to regain that Custom Field image usage that I adore, while keeping the rest of the layout the same.
While mimbo3 and its use of child themes seemed like more work at first, needing to only make changes to a child theme changed my mind about using child themes… I had been ambivalent about them before, but now I see the upside to them. I don’t know if I’m completely sold on them yet, since I’m not the kind of person who’ll update a base theme frequently enough to need a better solution to keeping my customizations, but I can better appreciate the advantages of them now that I’ve had time to work with them.
The WordPress Hack I Dream Of
I have liked almost every improvement made in WordPress since version 2.1, with two huge, glaring exceptions.
Since many people before me already grumbled and complained about the autosave and revisions updates that initially caused more problems than they resolved, and since I was able to find a solution to it quickly, it wasn’t so big of an issue with my sites. For anyone not familiar with the problem, let’s just say that revisions and podpress do not play well together, and since podcasts are an integral part of my other work, I needed revisions to die quietly, like so many others also did.
The other glaring exception to my love of WordPress was the addition of the “feature” that automatically creates thumbnails from images uploaded through the WordPress media manager. I haven’t noticed any public grumbling about that feature, so I may be alone on this one.
Several of the sites I maintain have a lot of images accompanying them, and they have or use custom image thumbnails that we create for the category and front page listings. The fun part is that we use different images for the thumbnails than we do for the image in the body of the articles, and I think it makes things looks better.
The thumbnails also appear in two different sizes, depending on if it’s being viewed from the main page or the category page, and that’s done with timthumb on one site, and the use of CSS/HTML on another.
The best part about using both methods for the resizing meant I didn’t have to worry about needing several versions of a single image in different sizes… upload one image, and the scripting in the right section of the theme takes care of the resizing where necessary.
Somewhere along the line in the growth of WordPress, the automatic creation of thumbnails for images was added. It happened after I upgraded a few sites in either January or February 2007, so I’m guessing that had to have been included in the release Wordpress 2.1.
I never used the images created from the new thumbnails feature, so I never paid much attention to it… until version 2.5.1 came out.
First, I noticed when the mysqldump backups of that site grew from 20Mb to 50Mb far faster than it had grown from 10Mb to 20Mb. At first, I thought it was from the rapid increase in comments the site was receiving, from a few hundred to a few thousand a week (along with the crazy increase in spam comment attacks… thank you Akismet!)
But I also noticed that the site was taking up a lot more space on the server, and the only explanation for that was an increase in uploaded media. At first, I thought we’d added a lot more video to the site, but I knew it wasn’t enough to account for such a big jump.
When I realized that the month folders in the uploads directory were now much larger in size than a few months before, I poked around. When I noticed that there were now 3 “versions” of every image that was uploaded for an article, instead of the previous original plus generated thumbnail, I was not amused.
I honestly don’t need WordPress to automatically create two thumbnails for every image I upload. Instead, what I need to do these days is go through my uploads every few months and manually delete those thumbnails. That’s cleaning up a couple hundred files files per folder that I didn’t need created in the first place.
Applications shouldn’t have unintended side effects that cause more work, especially not ones as smart and slick as WordPress has become.
There had been an uproar over how many problems with increase in database size and other problems caused by the autosave and the revisions additions that were introduced in WP 2.6, and thank goodness the community came up with immediate workarounds in the forms of adding directives to wp-config.php, and more recently the Post Control plugin.
What I’d really like to see added to WordPress now is the option to turn that thumbnails “feature” off entirely if I want to. Because on almost all of the sites I build and maintain, I really really want to.
I’m not sure yet how much extra space, if any, the references to the thumbnails take up, and my initial thought that the added thumbnails were directly contributing to the huge DB increase might be off base, but I wouldn’t mind seeing if there’d be a way to delete the references to the thumbnails from the database, too.
It’s not vital, but I’d also settle for a quick and dirty mysql command I could run to clean that up, if they’re in there. The database for that one major site grows about 10-12Mb per month. If getting rid of references to thumbnails I don’t use or need can slow that a bit, I’m willing to figure out a way to get that done.
The Joy of Customization
Over the past year, I think I’ve become addicted to customizing WordPress themes.
I have an idea in my head about how I want some of my sites to look like, but I’ve never seen one theme that had all the components or layout areas that I’d imagined. I’d always want one idea from one theme, and another idea from a second theme, and a tweak of an idea from yet another theme.
Isn’t that’s how Dr. Frankenstein started out… or was that Dr. Moreau…
I’ve never had the inclination to write a theme from scratch… as far as I’m concerned, I’ve still got a lot to learn about CSS. But I can read the code, and I know what to change and how to change it to get the look that I want. The same thing goes for tweaking the PHP framework of the themes.
Over the past six months or so, my favorites for customizing have been arthemia2 by Michael Jubel, and the Revolution Two themes (which are no longer free, alas). I had fun with Mimbo2, with both Branford Magazine and Wynton Magazine, and also with the original Revolution themes that were purchased for the massive number of websites that fall under my other creative hat (more on that later).
I ended up using arthemia2 as a base on three consecutive sites. I found myself taking pieces from Revolution Two themes and plugging them into heavily customized Original Revolution themes. I’ve mixed and matched pieces from different themes to get close to a look that I could see in my mind, and sometimes it worked, and other times I had to scrap it and begin again. And in one case, my graphics design weakness became a challenge to sidestep.
But I’m going to continue to see what pieces from what themes I can mix and match into what new concoctions.
I may turn this into a series of what I customized and why, since there were so many that have fallen under the code tweaking knife.
