PigPog

One of the things we wanted with the current redesign was to have a simpler homepage – less busy, without the mass of posts and links. We also wanted to get a decent sized photo up there as soon as people arrive.

I was inspired somewhat by Inspiredology’s post on sites with large photo backgrounds. We haven’t gone that far, but the photo is the biggest element on the page.

I wanted to rotate images randomly, though, so people could see different ones, and a range of images would show up on different visits.

Showing a random image with PHP is something I’ve coded myself before, but I figured it would be easier to Google for one than either write from scratch, or even try to dig out an old one I’d written before. The first one I found takes a different approach that I wouldn’t have thought of, and was easier to implement than what I was going to do – Matt Mullenweg’s Random Image Script. Matt is the guy behind WordPress, so he probably knows what he’s doing

PigPog hasn’t performed well for a long time. Pages have been taking a long time to generate, and a long time to download and display.

I’ve designed a new theme today, keeping it very simple. The result is that pages take around a fifth as many database queries to generate, and are created in a fraction of the time by the server. The difference seems pretty noticeable. The front page doesn’t display any posts any more – it’s just a static introduction.

I’ll probably continue tweaking it a little, but I like the simplicity, and I like the speed.

I’ve fixed a few little things here today. Paging through archives wasn’t working, so I’ve fixed that. I’ve also added dates and authors to these little oinks when they’re in the sidebar. It didn’t make much sense that you’d have to click through to the entry’s permanent page to see who wrote it.

I had a bit of time at home today, while Sam was out at work, so I continued poking our custom theme. I managed to get the tabs working on the right, so there are five ‘pages’ of content always available.

All but the ‘Oinks’ tab are WordPress ‘sidebars’, so they can contain widgets – makes it easy to change them from the WordPress Admin screen.

I’ve also got some ads back in there – fairly simply done, and reasonably subtle. We’ll see how they go, and add or modify if they don’t work reasonably well.

I’ve got the comments displaying again here. That turned out to be the ‘Comment Mover’ plugin – I’ve disabled it for now.

I seem to have got jQuery working, and got some javaScript being called when the tabs in the sidebar are clicked – they don’t do anything yet, but I’m getting there. That’ll do it for today, though. Time for a beer, and another dinner…

I’ve been playing with a custom theme for PigPog, which moves our ‘Oinks’ (little posts with no real thought behind them) into a sidebar (here, all being well!). It seems to be working ok, so I’ve just activated it for the live site. It’s not as pretty as it could be yet, even allowing for my limited web design skills, but I’ll keep tweaking it. As usual, do pass on any thoughts – it could help the tweaking process.

All seems to have gone smoothly again. I used WPAU to do the upgrade automatically, which worked fine. The new admin interface looks nice, and I’m posting this through the new ‘QuickPress’ feature – a posting form on the Dashboard page. Cute.

I’ve experimented with a few different gallery plugins for WordPress, so we could host our photos over here, rather than just keeping them all on Flickr.  None of them quite did what I wanted, but I’ve just found NextGEN Gallery, and I’m quite impressed so far. It’s not the simplest to get set up, but there are lots of options, and it gives you a nice simple way of adding photos from your galleries into any post.

I usually upload photos to Flickr, then insert them into posts here to tell the ‘story’ of the day, event, etc., and I still wanted to be able to do that – most other galleries made that difficult. Most others also meant uploading photos one at a time. That’s not too bad if I’ve been out and taken three or four shots, but a bit of a pain if I have ten or so. For events like the Race for Life or the Slimming World Regional Finals, it would have been unusable. I’ve uploaded the Slimming World event photos to NextGEN, and adding 191 photos was quite easy. The upload stalled twice, but each time, just clicking the ‘upload’ button again continued from where it got stuck.

I’ll probably be tweaking and playing for a while yet, but feel free to have a look around the gallery – probably nothing you haven’t seen before if you visit much, just in a different format.

Oh, and it’s also running the random slideshow at the top-right corner of every page.

I just upgraded our installation of WordPress here to the latest version, using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. All seemed to go pretty smoothly.

…and we’re running WordPress.

It’s been an unpleasant time.  We’ve had to get the RAM upgraded in our server, but we don’t really know what else has gone on.  In the process of the troubleshooting, we migrated the site from Drupal to WordPress, and I think we’ll be sticking with WordPress now.  Drupal was great, but the site is really just a blog now, and that’s what WordPress does best.

I used to love it when things went wrong. It was an excuse to sit poking a computer for hours on end. Now, I want to leave the computer behind at least some of the time, and go outside. Being tied to the computer, and working late trying to fix a broken database isn’t as much fun as it used to be. I hope things keep working, and don’t need too much maintenance for a while now.