my lyceum test blog

At the moment the blogs are like /lyceum/blog1/ /lyceum/blog2/ etc but I’d really like to exclude the /lyceum/ part of the url and just have /blog1/ etc.

This should be a breeze, but in my experience, you just never know.

It must be my day for plugins!

I was looking for a way of tracking my outbound links from wordpress and I may have just found it: the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin has a huge list of features, plenty of users and is in active development.

Another one for testing on my wp test blog before intalling on Lyceum.

I’ve been reading up on this tonight.

I already have Jerome’s Keywords (JK) installed and was thinking about using the tags it generates rather than categories. I would need a list of all/popular tags somewhere besides in each post so that the user can navigate though. That is called a ‘tag cloud’, some of them resize the text size depending on the popularity (a ‘heat map’) and that’s what I’m looking for. JK doesn’t have this though
Another plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior will do the heat map business, but doesn’t seem to provide tags for the user to navigate on each post. It does use meta-tags to optimise the html for search engines though.

So which to use? Luckily there seems to be some middle ground here, in the form of Tags in the Head. From the authors site:

Tags in the Head features include simple ease of use and installation, detailed instructions, the ability to harvest tags for use as keywords from both Ultimate Tag Warrior and Jerome’s Keywords, internal error and logic checking, ability to customize the meta descriptions for your homepage, archives, 404 pages, and every post, and everything validates XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

So that all sounds great, not sure just how that will work in practice though, so it’s over to my test wordpress blog for that. No doubt mods will be required for Lyceum compatibility too…

You’ll see a new feature on the website today, or if you haven’t spotted it yet look for the stars by the bottom of this article.
The new plugin is called Post-Star-Rating and is written by O Doutor. The plugim website (at http://blog.abusemagazine.com/index.php/category/post-star-rating/) is in Spanish, however if you download the plugin the readme file etc is in English.

The plugin allows visitors to rate your posts content by clicking on the stars, obviously more stars is better. The vote request is than handled by your blog server with an AJAX script (yippie my site has AJAX!) and the new rating is immediately updated on the screen so there’s no need to refresh.

The wordpress plugin also has functions for displaying metrics such as the ten posts with the highest rating etc, but I didn’t try these out yet.

The ratings are stored in two new tables in your mysql database, one for users (to prevent multiple clicks from the same user) and one for posts. The total votes and average vote score are stored for each post. Hopefully this plug in will be cross-blog compatible and therefore won’t require many edits for multi-blog compatiblities with Lyceum.

Some edits were required to get this working with Lyceum, as I’ve detailed on the Lyceum wiki.

if pingomatic or technorati are running a bit slow when posting why not try using www.pingoat.com instead?

Plus they have a good selection of tools available

After looking into my problems with pingbacks and trackbacks it seems that these issues might be due to a faulty permalink struture. Clicking on a permalink (eg single post, archive or category) would simply show the blog homepage. Same for feeds and pingpacks urls.
I’ve now reverted to the default ‘ugly’ permalink structure and most things seem to work.

I’m sure the fix will be a proper set of rewrite rules but time will tell.

I tried the plugin that I posed about yesterday. The export side of things seems to work really well, but i’m not sure as yet because the import didn’t go smoothly: every post has it’s category re-created even if the category existed.

So I had lost of categories all with the same name with one post in each!

Well I’ve tried pinging and trackbacks and neither of these seem to work, and to boot comments also seem to be broken as well as viewing a single post on a page.
:-)

I expect these are problems with my setup rather than anything else but time will tell.

A quick bit of research reveals this post by Aaron Brazell. He’s written a plugin to export your existing wordpress blog as WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) and another ‘plugin’ (actually it’s not) to import it.

This is just what I need for this new lycum blog to gra all my posts.

Thanks to a handy page on the lyceum wiki i’ve fixed trackbacks and pingbacks, I didn’t even know these things didn’t work.

Well i say fixed… this is a test post to prove the point.

ping!

pinging ping!

Ok instead of the default theme i’m now running with plaintxtBlog 2.3. the style is very clean and minimal so i might keep it for my ‘general stuff’ blog.

The theme did throw a wobbler at first grumbling about Cannot redeclare plaintxtblog_basefontsize(). It turns out that it’s due to the lyceum version number being a string “0.32″, the theme test this as a number for “> 2″ and of course that doesn’t work. I expect that other themes will have the same issue so I changed line 5 of /src/lib/wp-includes/version.php to: $wp_version = 2.32; (since I’m using lyceum 0.32).

That’s my first ever bug fix!
I informed the author but I don’t expect the theme to change.

I’m testing out lyceum, a multi-blog spin of wordpress . At the moment I have two blogs, my main blog is getting a bit busy and generally concentrates on a couple of specific topic so i decided to split it up. Hence lyceum.

This is my first post, the install went ok, unfortunately not as easy as the famous 5-minute wordpress install but oh well. my problems were all down to my configuration settings so nothing against lyceum there then

SpamKarma2 is installed and at the ready, that install was a 2-click job, next up is themes!