The Caveena Solutions Blog
I’m not sure if this is a brand-spanking new feature or if I just missed it but using JetPack you can now update WordPress Plugins across all your websites through your WordPress.com My Sites Dashboard. What’s even more interesting is that you can set plugins to auto-update.
Right now this feature is limited only to Plugins — no updating Themes or the base WordPress installation.WordPress already auto-update (unless disabled) so I doubt this will ever be offered. I wonder if we’ll eventually see the option of updating Themes through WordPress.com.
There are already a few services out there that’ll help you manage all your WordPress websites. Here are a few that I know of in alphabetical order:
More information can be found on the Site Management support page. And be sure to turn on the JSON API.
I can’t change anything when I try to manage my sites on WordPress.com.
You need to enable site management on your Jetpack-connected site from the dashboard by either opting in as mentioned above, or by enabling it under the JSON API settings in Jetpack → Settings → JSON API → Configure and checking the box for the “Allow remote management of themes, plugins, and WordPress via the JSON API” option and saving your changes.
On the 27th December I opened up Bloglines to see what new updates awaited me. That’s when I saw this:
Notice how the grey bar displays the message “Doc are you telling me you built a time machine?” Hopefully recognize that line from the first Back to the Future movie. Bloglines displayed this because the website in question had scheduled a post for publishing on the 29th December. You can even see the post date on the screenshot itself. Somehow scheduled post made it’s way to the RSS feed eventhough at the time it was not visible on the website. Indeed, trying to navigate to the post yielded a 404 error.
When you sit in front of a computer typing on a keyboard you gotta let off a little steam. Sometimes we hide comments in code or have our website respond to the Konami Code. And sometimes we reference pop culture.
Caveena Solutions would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! Here’s hoping you enjoy spending time with your friends & family.
We were planning on giving our website a Christmas theme (much like we did for Hari Raya and Chinese New Year) but we unfortunately got extremely busy. As we march towards the end of the year it seems that clients everywhere want their websites done by the start of 2015. That and the general busy-ness that is associated with this time of year got the better of us.
And no, it had nothing to do with the recent spate of decorational controversies in Brunei.
With the final few days of 2014 in sight, we hope that the last 365 days have been kind to you and your loved ones. Let’s all try a little bit harder in 2015.
This comes courtesy of Reddit which linked to an old Mozilla’s Bug-Tracker thread. 39 comments in total, not a very long read.
TL;DR Vendor-prefixed CSS Properties will eventually be removed. To future-proof your code, make sure to include the W3C standard property at the end of the declaration.
-webkit-transition: all 600ms ease; -moz-transition: all 600ms ease; -ms-transition: all 600ms ease; -o-transition: all 600ms ease; transition: all 600ms ease;
I have to take my hat off to those who replied to the thread. They did it with such patience, courtesy and professionalism. Kudos to them.
OK, it seems we need to review Form User Interface 101: when providing users a choice of items, ensure the list is exhaustive.
Case in point: I was filling in the registration form for Brunei’s upcoming Century Run when I came to the field labelled Higher Education Institution. The choices were presented as a select menu. See if you can spot what’s wrong:
The list only contains Brunei institutions of higher learning with no catch-all option for foreign universities. And since this was a required field I had to select something. So congratulations Universiti Brunei Darussalam, for the purposes of The Century Run I am unofficially an alumni! You lucky guys, you 🙂
In late 2014 I participated in the BSB International Marathon organized by the Brunei Athletics Association. How did I do? I’m glad you asked 🙂 I placed 33rd out of the 127 runners in my category and covered 5km in 32 minutes 28 seconds, a personal best.
Despite the issues that plagued the marathon, I think a hearty “Congratulations” is in order to the Brunei Athletics Association. I’m sure they will take the lessons learned to heart and do even better next time. That said, there are a few website matters we can scrutinize and draw reminders from.
BackupBuddy by iThemes is a wonderfully simple solution for WordPress backup and migration. That is, when it works. On a hunch I decided to check my website backups and discovered that while database backups were fine BackupBuddy was failing to create full website backups. Even worse, emails that were supposed to notify me of the errors were not being delivered.
Yeah, that’s not good.
Now before you jump the gun and completely write-off iThemes, the TL;DR of this post is that there was nothing wrong with BackupBuddy; Acunetix WP Security had added an unreadable file to prevent directory listing. After adjusting some settings I got everything to work again.
At the risk of giving away my age I’d like to share an anecdote. Over 10 years ago when I was playing around with magic & illusions, an experienced magician said to me that he didn’t consider himself a magician but rather a story-teller; each routine in his repertoire of illusions had a different story to tell the audience.
Microsoft recently previewed a new member to the Office family: Sway. The official website has a preview video but if you’d like a more hands-on demonstration here’s one by the Office Garage Series.
Here’s how the Microsoft Office Blog describes Sway:
[Sway] is a new way for you to create a beautiful, interactive, web-based expression of your ideas, from your phone or browser. It is easy to share your creation and it looks great on any screen … Sway helps you focus on the human part: your ideas and how they relate to each other. Sway takes care of the design work—a Sway is ready to share with the world as soon as it is born.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that lately I’ve also been looking into the Aesop Story Engine, a WordPress plugin which positions itself as a way for website authors to write stories instead of code.
I see this as the next stage of website development. We went from hand-coding HTML to making use of WYSIWYG editors and Content Management Systems. But these were all aimed at the technical aspects of building a website. Using your content to tell a story or create a narrative has often been left by the wayside or given to branding experts and the marketing department. I for one am glad that tools are being developed to help streamline the way we pull information from different sources and present our created stories through different channels.
Content has always been king. It’s time we dressed it up and paraded it on the catwalk.
I saw this billboard on the campus of University Brunei Darussalam and had to do a double-take. I initially thought it was an advertisement for showing the movie Persepolis but instead it was a timely reminder to continue seeking knowledge.
I have neither seen the movie Persepolis nor read the comic on which the movie was based yet it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this design. That really says a lot about the extensive reach of the movie’s art style.
So I was doing routine maintenance on the Caveena Website today when a conflict between two WordPress plugins mucked up our Portfolio page. Being a service-based organization, yeah that’s a pretty big deal.
And this is why I always test website updates on a development server.
So what happened? The issue was between BestWebSoft’s Portfolio Plugin (which, as you probably guessed, we are using for our Portfolio page) and Jetpack. The v3.1 release of Jetpack comes with a new custom post type: Portfolios. I didn’t dig into any of the code but my guess is they used the same name for the Portfolio custom post type. When both were active the http://caveenasolutions.com/portfolio permalink would not work and none of our portfolio project pages would display.
The fix was simple enough:
- Disable the Custom Post Type module in Jetpack’s settings.
- Re-build the permalink structure.
If you happen to be using the Portfolio plugin along with the Custom Post Type module in Jetpack, I unfortunately have no answer for you.
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