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WordPress tips

– To change the days order of your calendars, the setting is under Settings -> General, at the very bottom. The default is Monday-Sunday, which not the usual arrangement of Sunday-Saturday. It’s bothered me forever. Found the setting today!

– WP does not (as of 2.7.x) have automatic DST capability. That means you’ve got to change your Time Zone manually. Again, it’s under Settings -> General.

– If Google Analytics works for you, how about sharing that info with me? I’ve never been able to get it to work with any plugin. Weird, huh?

– If you don’t use Akismet plugin for your comment spam, GET IT.

– Broken Link Checker is another handy plugin.

– Events Calendar is the best calendar I’ve found so far. (Not to be confused with Event Calendar, which is a different plugin.)

– If you are new to WP and themes, I highly recommend the one I’m using: Atahualpa (we call it Chupacabra). There is a link to it in the footer. This theme has all the configuration written into the dashboard so you can literally rewrite the CSS on the fly without having to deal with raw code. SWEET!

– The 2.7.x version of WP is much easier to use on the backend. I just used an older version and now I can see how much better 2.7.x really is. Do your upgrade, it’s totally worth it.

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Old White Men in Suits

This is so dumb, I can barely even type it. Sci Fi is now SyFy. The suits at NBC somehow thought this was a way to “distance” themselves from the science fiction genre. Cuz, you know, sci fi means GEEK and that is “holding the brand back”. Personally, I find the implication that we geeks are a detriment very insulting. We’ve got more discretionary income than sheeple, I can tell you that. Harumph.

I’m not making this up. It’s too dumb to be fake. Are these brainiacs in charge at NBC really this dumb and out of touch? How can they not know the power of the geek cred? How can they not know that geeks make the world go ’round? How can they be so incredibly stupid? Answer: Age + Cluelessness.

Just read this statement (from the above link) and try not to laugh:
“When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it,” Mr. Howe said. “It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”

David Howe has no interest or background in sci fi (clearly) and is all about banishing all references to science fiction from the channel. Judging by the movies they crank out, maybe it should be called the Bad Movie channel. Or the Trek rerun channel. But, no, not the word Trek – that might run off all those hordes of sheeple who are “put off” by the term “science fiction”. Right. The more mediocre the better because we all know that sheeple do not like to be challenged in any way.

Sometimes I think that everyone over 50 should be rounded up and forced into technology camps so they can join the rest of us in the 21st century. (I think Howe is not quite 50 – but he should get a waiver and be sent with the geezers.) Just damn.

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Bye Bye Blogrolling!

As I suspected, Tucows has made blogrolling not only slower but now you get lovely ads when you click – but, hey, you can pay to remove them. Yah, no thanks. The site’s been disabled for months and now that it’s back with a redesign (that Tucows didn’t bother to announce). The site is painfully slow – like almost a minute to load pages slow. Why would I want to pay for a slow ass user site and embedded ads when I can simply move the links over to my blogroll within WP? (The blogrolling.com site is slow, not the redirect with ads, to be clear.)

Thanks Tucows for ruining a pretty good service. You’re not the first and won’t be the last to buy a service and gut it. Hey, at least the Blogrolling people made some coin, right?

You’ll notice a bit of moving stuff around in the columns to balance them out as much as I can. C ya, blogrolling!

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Testing FB plugin

Not sure if this is any better than FB pulling the feed. What I need is a FB plugin that will send the FB users back here. Like the LJ plugin. Feh.

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Google Analytics?

LJ users, this is strictly a WP plugin issue, feel free to ignore.

Does anyone know how to fix GA? I’ve got the plugin installed, everything is correct, yes the theme has the correct php call in the footer and all that looks fine. On Google’s end, they are receiving the info but tracking nothing.

This thing has NEVER worked. From day one of installing the plugin and over several themes, it’s never registered a single hit over at Google. It seems lots of people have the issue but there are few answers as to why it works for some but not others. GRRR.

Help? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?