Ooh, ahh…Wordpress 2.5 has a new gallery feature! Too bad that doesn’t really help us folks who could care less about it and just want an easy way to upload one image. IT TAKES TOO MANY STEPS! Maybe it’s just my setup, but this is how it works for me in both Safari and Firefox…
Click Add an Image button
Upload Image
Fill out Title, Caption, Description
Click on “None” button for Link URL; realize the button doesn’t work. Delete the URL from the Link URL input box to manually make it “None”. Then remember that it won’t get saved anyways!
Press “Save All Changes”…or don’t. It does nothing for you.
Go to the Gallery tab.
Click “Show” on your picture.
Change the Link URL field AGAIN (thank goodness the “None” button works now!)
Change Size to “Full size” (I went into Photoshop already to make this image the size I want…please don’t try to change it for me kthanks)
Click “Insert into Post”. Finally.
Are you kidding me? TEN steps to upload an image and add it to your post? Why don’t you just give me all the posting options in the upload tab once I’ve uploaded the picture?
So, I’m not good enough to totally rework this disaster of a feature but I can at least change some of the default values so it’s a little less of a pain. For me, I almost always want the image to link to “none” and the image to be full size. So I changed these defaults in wp-admin/includes/media.php:
Change the defaults from ‘medium’ to ‘full’ (for good measure)
line 51: function get_image_send_to_editor($id, $alt, $title, $align, $url='', $rel = false, $size='full') {
line 512: $size = 'full';
Change the Link URL default value from the file URL to none
line 552: <input type='text' name='attachments[$post->ID][url]' value='' /><br />
I really wish I didn’t have to go to the Gallery tab at all. Maybe the option to add the image to your post (without going to the Gallery tab) is supposed to work, but it doesn’t. So at least these fixes cut down a couple of those steps for me. Wordpress, please fix this soon!
UPDATE: It looks like if I do upload 2+ images at once, the full options (including the “Insert into Post” button) show up right after uploading without having to go into the gallery tab. I also see the “Crunching…” along with the progress bar, which I don’t usually see with a single upload. Too bad I usually just want to upload one image.
Also, my Firefox 3 (beta 5) shuts down whenever I try to use the upload media tool.
One of the biggest things keeping me from trying out Firefox 3 Beta was the lack of support by my addons…but I bit the bullet and did it anyways. I heard about this LifeHacker article today and this Nightly Tester Tools addon that lets you make (most of) your extensions compatible with Firefox 3. Basically it adds a “Make all compatible” button to your addons window:
Look at all those sad exclamation points! :( Just click on “Make all compatible” and say OK to this message:
Then restart Firefox and it’ll bring you back to the Addons window where you can see your updated extensions:
Oh snap! Look at all those happy extensions! So of course, do this at your own risk, it could mess up Firefox, etc. etc. I’ve found it to be well worth it though! A word to the wise though: you should probably wait to make your old Themes compatible…trust me, it’s not pretty.
So, what extensions do I use, you ask? Let me list a few of my favorites…
Adblock Plus – if you haven’t heard of this before, ouch.
BugMeNot – puts a BugMeNot option in the menu when you right-click on a username/password field which populates them with any available u/p combinations
del.icio.us – puts a button in the browser menu so you can quickly add a page to del.icio.us
One of my biggest Firefox pet peeves over the years has been how it handles dragging a boomark to the Bookmarks Toolbar on a Mac (apparently this doesn’t happen on Windows). Here’s a screenshot of how it’s been up through FF2.0:
This tooltip that shows up when you drag the favicon down to the toolbar could be helpful I guess…the first time. But the problem is that tooltip blocks all the space under it on the toolbar, so you can’t actually add the bookmark to any folders you have underneath it. Unless you’re super quick and get to it before the tooltip comes up. There are ways around it (put the bookmark somewhere else and move it afterwards), but it’s still really annoying. I looked into how to fix it a while ago and found this work-around, but it removes ALL tooltips in your browser.
Anyways, it’s something I’ve begrudgingly learned to live with. Until now! The beta version of Firefox 3 (3.0b5) finally lets you add a bookmark to the middle of your Bookmarks Toolbar! So instead of instructing people how to add a bookmark, it has a new tooltip about the current webpage’s identity information, but you can still add a bookmark under it:
After a second of hovering over the tooltip, the folder the favicon is over will expand so you can drop the favicon into the folder. And after 6 or 7 seconds the tooltip disappears altogether. AND sometimes when you drag it doesn’t even show the tooltip at all. Thank goodness!
So what’s that identity information message? A webpage’s favicon is more separate from the web address as a button (in FF2 it’s in the URL box)…and if you click on the favicon it will open a box telling more about the “identity information”:
If you’re on a secure website (starting with “https”), that’s where it will give the identity information:
The “More Information” takes you to the Security tab of the Page Info box. I guess that’s a nice feature, but I doubt I’ll use it.
So color me excited about this in Firefox 3. Yeah, it’s probably the least exciting new feature about FF3 but this has been too annoying for too long. Any other FF3ers out there? What’s your favorite part about it?
So I have this other website. It’s basically a blog that I add to a couple of times a week. It’s pretty niche and embarrassing to boot so I’m not going to disclose any more details…but in light of it reaching 5,000 page views today (after five or so months) I figured I should talk about things I’ve learned as I’ve tried to build a successful website.
Track your visitors (everyone else does it)
Get a traffic meter on your site from Day 1. For me it was sitemeter because it was simple to use and gave me stats I liked without much fuss. I’ve since added Google Analytics which I think will be great for tracking trends. It also really blows sitemeter out of the water in terms of UI and the depth and flexibility of statistics it can offer. But I still like sitemeter because I can see all the stats about a single visitor. For example, this visitor spent a few minutes on my site so I wanted to find out more:
Okay, the person came from a Facebook link, looked at a lot of pages, and I can see what page he/she entered on and was viewing when exiting…and what that outgoing link was. With Google Analytics you can figure out all the stats about a single visitor but it’s pretty convoluted. Hopefully I can reach a point where I’m getting enough traffic to just monitor the trends (such as top landing page and link clicks via the spiffy site overlay). But at this point — with an average of 30 visits and 62 page views a day — I’m most interested in tracking the patterns of my visitors who browse the longest as well as top referrers.
Optimize for the search engines
Fill out that meta section with as many keywords as possible. Credit your sources, inspiration, etc with links and images; then your site will show up when people search for the source (I’ve found this to be particularly true with images). Link your site on portals like Yahoo! Answers but don’t be annoying about it (here’s a good blog post on why it helps). Maybe all this is just common sense, but luckily I realized one of the biggest tips (image linking) early.
Become part of the community
My site is far from the end-all-be-all in my niche and it relies a lot on content that’s elsewhere. So I realized it’s a good idea to make friends with my content sources and contribute to their communities. The more you get out there with your name and a link to your website the more it will be…out there. But you have to be able to give something back to the communities other than just hawking your website. Plus they’ll be less likely to get mad at you for any, um, content re-purposing you may be doing :)
Try things out…but don’t throw the kitchen sink at your visitors
This is something I’ve had a bit of trouble with. Since by nature I like to tinker with new things and code/customize to my heart’s content, it’s hard not to add this widget or that functionality. I gave Skribit a try because I think it’s a good idea (user-generated content suggestions) but my audience really isn’t that participatory or big enough yet. So what I have now for visitors beyond the actual content is:
ways to browse – archives, categories, tags/a tag cloud
ways to respond – comments, ratings, contact info
ways to share – I switched from a list of social network icons to a ShareThis widget
ShareThis is nice because it handles all the top social sites on its own (or you can choose what to put) and it gives you stats on how many people are sharing to each site. Other than that, I have a countdown which may or may not be too much :)
I think that’s about it for now, but I still have a lot to learn. While I’m still waiting for my “big break” I’m just plugging away at adding good content that will give people a reason to stick around once they find the site.
