Tech and life

Another small milestone here at Tech and Life – the 100th post! Time to thank everyone who’s been following the blog so far – I’m enjoying doing it in my spare time and am really encouraged by the subscriptions to the feed since I began about 18 months ago.

I’m trying to improve the blog when I can and have just signed up to FeedBurner, primarily to add the option for readers to subscribe by email for those who prefer that. I’m a little slow at getting round to it and my apologies. Anyway, please sign up for emails in the side bar if you prefer to receive updates that way. I post at most 3 times a week so I won’t be flooding your inbox! Be sure to add our email address to your ’safe list’ in your email client to make sure newsletters reach your inbox and aren’t diverted to your bulk or spam folders. Let me know if you have any problems with the subscription or any improvements I can make.

I’ve also added Google Translate to the sidebar. Although it’s not perfect, you may prefer to have this option to translate the blog into your own language. I’ve blogged about automated blog translation before. I had some problems getting it to translate to other languages and discovered that the Firefox extension Flashblock causes a conflict with Google Translate. Disabling the extension solved the problem. So if you’re using Google Translate and getting the error message: Error: The server could not complete your request. Try again later, try disabling the Flashblock extension in Firefox.

I’ve also recently added the Wapple Architect plugin so this blog can be viewed on mobile phones.

Finally, I hope to have more guest posts in the coming months – look forward to the first coming up soon. Oh and if you have any suggestions for the blog or for blog topics, drop a comment below.

Image credit: Mzelle Biscotte

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or for email updates at the top right of this page.

With the ever-expanding smartphone market these days, it’s important that your blog is mobile ready, meaning for example, that it can be rendered nice and clearly without having to scroll around too much on your phone. If you have a WordPress blog, there are a number of plugins which will remove the sidebars for example and convert the blog to a nice clean format for viewing on a cellphone. But which WordPress plugin to choose? Here’s a quick run through of how I narrowed the field down.

I went through my Diigo bookmarks and found I had bookmarked blogs discussing quite a few plugins: WordPress Mobile Pack, WPTouch, MobilePress, Wordpress Mobile Edition, and Wapple Architect Mobile to name just a few. But what I really wanted to get hold of was a comparison to see what people thought was the best mobile plugin.

Comparisons of WordPress mobile plugins

I found it hard to track down any blog which had reviewed and compared mobile plugins. In fact, if anyone’s interested and has access to a range of cellphones, there’s an opportunity for a really useful blog post here. WPFeed compared a number of plugins and chose Wordpress Mobile Plugin (but when you click the link now you’re directed to WordPress Mobile Pack), and the only other site I came across was Alpha2beta which I had Google translate from Chinese. They also compared a few and chose WordPress Mobile Pack.

I know that WPTouch is being quite well received, particularly for iPhone and Android platforms. Technically Personal uses the WPTouch plugin. In a reply to me in the comments there, Raju said he had tried quite a few plugins and found problems with them all. Wapple was a disaster he said.

Narrowing the choice down

On Mahalo Answers, I asked ‘What’s the best Wordpress plugin to make my blog mobile friendly?’ I received three answers recommending WPTouch, Wapple Architect and WordPress Mobile Pack. I was getting the feeling now that it was between these three. I liked the Wapple recommendation:

Finally, I tried a search on Twitter for wordpress AND mobile. Jumped into an interesting lead:

@dannybrown Did you test other WP mobile plugins before you settled on Wapple Architect? I’m finding it hard to pick one for my blog

@techandlife I did. Tried WordPress Mobile, WP Touch (good for iPhone, not so great others). Wapple best one I found

@techandlife And Rich Gubby of Wapple is just awesome http://bit.ly/7z2qwx

I checked back on my own bookmarks and Wapple Architect sounded really promising even though it doesn’t work for some. So I thought I’d try it first.

Installing Wapple Architect

Wasn’t just a case of downloading and installing the Wapple plugin. Had to register to receive the Developer Key, click a link in an email to complete registration, then received a Developer Key which was required to set up the plugin. Didn’t take too long though. During set up, you can upload an image to use for your mobile header and which would be automatically resized. Didn’t work for me on this occasion but I’ll try that again later. Incidentally, 2 days after registering, I received an email from Rich Gubby the Lead Developer at Wapple offering to help with the mobile styling – that’s a nice touch.

Testing Wapple Architect

I found a testing tool online to check mobile-readiness at mobiReady. My blog checked out okay.

At mobiReady, you can also check how your blog renders on a Nokia N70, Samsung Z105, Sony Ericsson k750i, Motorola v3i and Sharp GX-10.

I don’t have a smartphone but I fired up the browser on my LG Cookie and had a look at my blog:

Finally, at the top of the sidebar on the desktop version of this blog, I’ve also tried to indicate that it’s now mobile ready.

I’d love to hear how this blog renders on your mobile. Any annoyances you’ve noticed or any improvements you think I can make? If you do comment, let us know what mobile you’re using.

Most visited posts

Here’s a list of the most visited posts on this site throughout 2009. Site analytics are from Woopra. I’ve only included those posts with over 500 hits. As you can see I had a phenomenal response to my slow Firefox post. If you’re new to this site you should find some interesting older posts listed below. If these aren’t of interest, have a look around – there are about 90 posts to choose from at the moment.

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 11736 visits

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 2880 visits

Finding lost bookmarks in your info archive – 2037 visits

Send free SMS reminders to your mobile phone -1128 visits

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 776 visits

Uploading files to your website with Notepad++ – 649 visits

What is the best time to tweet? – 599 visits

Useful links: A to Z of search – 543 visits

Most retweeted posts

What is the best time to tweet? – 29 tweets

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 19 tweets

My top 15 useful bookmarklets – 13 tweets

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 9 tweets

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 5 tweets

Quick tip: Disable or remap the Caps Lock key in Windows and Linux – 5 tweets

Can I take this opportunity to thank everyone who has visited this blog throughout the year – hope you found your visit was worthwhile and thanks too to all who’ve taken the time to comment on the posts. Please subscribe to the RSS feed if you can – I blog in my spare time and it’s blog comments and rising subscriber numbers which are a great encouragement to keep blogging. Link back to any of the posts if you can and retweet any if you like them. And if there’s anything you’d like me to cover, or like to see more of, drop a comment below.

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2010!

As a native English speaker I’m really very fortunate. In the western world, English is the dominant language used for publishing even though globally only about 720 million out of about 6.8 billion people speak English, about 11% of the world population according to WolframAlpha. Every blog I’ve subscribed to publishes in English even though in many cases the bloggers are not native speakers but do a great job nonetheless.

But what about those many millions globally for whom English is not their native language, indeed many of whom can’t speak English at all. Are we reaching them with our blogs or could we do more? Yes I know there are online translation sites such as Jollo which can be used to translate text but should we all be providing an automated translation service on our blogs to help? After all, the net is global and so is our readership.

There are WordPress plugins like the Global Translator WordPress Plugin, widgets like the new Google Translation Widget, Microsoft Translator and others but are they really effective? Surely automated translation will never be as good as a human translation so are they worth it? I’ve always shied away from using one because I just can’t judge how good they are – I only speak English and minor conversational French.

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration goes into some of the difficulties behind language translation plugins in terms of storing translation results in the blog database and more recently looks at Google Translate.

So I’d really like to know from my readers just what you think of automated translation plugins on blogs. Have you used them to translate blogs into your native language? Do you find any useful and if so which? Is the tech field with its specialized vocabulary just too much for these plugins? Do you prefer to do your own translation into your language? Please add your thoughts below and from the responses I’ll judge whether it’s worth adding this service on this site.

A few days ago, I noticed that some links in my blog posts were not clickable, or at least were only part-clickable. These were all near the right margin of the content column next to the sidebar on the right. Here’s an illustration of what was happening:

As I moved the cursor from left to right over the link Life Rocks 2.0, it would change from clickable (as indicated by the hand symbol in the top panel above) to unclickable (as indicated by the arrow in the lower panel above). Because it was near the right margin of the content column and next to the sidebar, I guessed the problem was something to do with the sidebar margin. Unfortunately, I have very little knowledge of css and php and most of what I’ve learned so far in tweaking a free WordPress theme has been through good old trial and error – keep messing around until you get the desired result. I figured that there must be an overlap of the sidebar left margin onto the content column and this was affecting links near the right margin of the content column. Perhaps someone will put me right here.

Unlike previous tweaking, I got a result pretty much straight off. This is what I did. I opened the theme’s style.css file and tried changing the width of the content-wrapper and sidebar-wrapper until things worked.

Here’s the relevant section of code before:

#content-wrapper
{
width: 60%;
float: left;
}

#content
{
float: left;
padding: 0 0 10px 30px;
}

#sidebar-wrapper
{
width: 35%;
float: right;
}

#sidebar
{
float: right;
padding: 0px 15px 10px 10px;
width: 210px;
margin-right: 15px;
margin-top: 0px;

and I changed this to:

#content-wrapper
{
width: 70%;
float: left;
}

#content
{
float: left;
padding: 0 0 10px 30px;
}

#sidebar-wrapper
{
width: 25%;
float: right;
}

#sidebar
{
float: right;
padding: 0px 15px 10px 10px;
width: 210px;
margin-right: 15px;
margin-top: 0px;

So changing the width of the content-wrapper from 60% to 70% and changing the width of the sidebar-wrapper from 35% to 25% made all the links near the sidebar completely clickable as shown below:

Very satisfying when you get a quick result.

So, I’d suggest you have a quick look at any links on your blog near the right margin with the sidebar and see if they’ve been masked by the sidebar margin. It may be just a simple fix in the style.css file.

Any css experts care to comment on what’s happening here? Is there any other tweak I could have used to sort out this problem?

I had a phenomenal response to my Firefox tips post yesterday thanks to submitting a link on the Technology board at Reddit. Yesterday was my first attempt at promoting this blog on Reddit and I’m amazed at what happened. I submitted a link to my Firefox tips post to Reddit around 2pm BST (British Summer Time) (9am EDT, 6am PDT) and over the next 24 hours, I’ve almost doubled my RSS feed subscribers adding about 350 to reach about 830 subscribers.

The link  stayed well up the first Reddit ‘What’s Hot’ page over the first 9 hours:

In hindsight, I’m actually in the wrong category on Reddit. Should probably have been in the category Software, but I was exposed to 145,000 subscribers on the Technology board.

Looking at my blog stats in Woopra, there was a huge increase to over 4000 visits and 10,000 page views yesterday. I originally published the Firefox post on my blog on Sept 2 and you can see a small effect there from previous RSS subscribers, Delicious and Twitter, but nothing compared to the Reddit effect on Sept 3.

Naturally, as the post was about Firefox, most visitors were Firefox 3 users, with Chrome the second most popular browser.

The plot below shows that Reddit and StumbleUpon were the best referrers by some considerable margin:

interestingly, with Twitter, Digg and FaceBook further behind:

I’ve never gone after bulk adding followers in Twitter but have just gone for organic growth – letting followers find me first, but clearly most of my 600 Twitter followers don’t seem to be interested in Firefox tips. I’ll keep a closer eye on referrers in future – quite easy to do with Woopra on my blog.

So, in summary, Reddit really drives traffic to your blog and it’s well worth registering and submitting a link to your blog posts there. I’ll try and get the correct category there next time, and doubtless I’ll reach a lower subscriber number with future posts – unless I start posting about technology. Still, it’s nice to have added a substantial number of new RSS feed subscribers.  I’ve just got to hold onto them now.

How do you promote your blog? Drop a comment below.

Today marks the 1st anniversary of this blog. It’s been an interesting journey for me so far, and thanks to Woopra, the WordPress plugin for website analytics, I’m getting a good idea which posts are the most popular and what people want to read here. I’ve put up 62 posts so far, so that’s just over one post per week. Hopefully, I can improve on that in the next year but it isn’t easy to blog in your spare time and still allow plenty time for friends and family.

My most popular post so far has been Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One Netbook, followed by Some Linux Resources for Beginners. However, if you haven’t already seen them, I’ve done a couple of posts in my series on Useful Links which you may find interesting:

Useful links: A to Z of Search

Useful links: Free Wifi Hotspots

It’s really heartening to see the RSS subscription numbers steadily rising. I didn’t dream of having almost 450 subscribers at the end of year 1. Of course, I also really enjoy getting emails, comments and suggestions from readers. Please keep them coming either by using the Contact Me form or commenting on any blog post.

And I really hope you’ll stick with me through the second year. If you haven’t already subscribed to the RSS feed, please do. It really does give me great encouragement to know that people are following and supporting the blog. These are interesting times for me – Windows 7 on the horizon, exploring and using Linux, working with netbooks, blogging with WordPress, getting a new touch-screen mobile phone, and more – and that’s just a few topics I can see coming up. I hope you’ll enjoy the journey with Tech and Life through the coming year too.

Picture credit: *iFatma

I hadn’t experienced any problems upgrading WordPress in the past …until yesterday. Tried the automatic upgrade from version 2.8.1 to 2.8.3 and got a memory php error along the lines:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 228968 bytes)

The upgrade then terminated without installing. Tried googling this error and came up with a reasonable suggestion to change the memory limit on line 13 of wp-settings.php to 64M from 32M. After doing this, I retried the automatic upgrade and got an error along the lines:

Fatal error: Class ‘Translations’ not found in /home1/techandl/public_html/wp-includes/l10n.php on line 407

This time the situation was more serious. If I tried to access this website or my WordPress dashboard, I got this error message on a white screen with no way to access my website. I’m sure others trying to access the website got the same greeting. Thankfully, I had run the WordPress Database Backup plugin and saved my posts to my hard drive just before attempting the upgrade so I had my content safe.

‘So what next?’ I thought. Well I tried changing the memory limit back to 32M in wp-settings.php but this didn’t work. I then googled the phrase “Class ‘Translations’ not found in” and found that quite a few others had experienced the same problem when upgrading. Tried several suggestions before concluding that the best route was probably to downgrade WordPress back to version 2.8.1. This was a little daunting because, having not experienced any problems since the initial WordPress install last year, I was a little hazy on how to proceed. There isn’t an easy downgrade route, so I had to treat the whole thing as relearning the WordPress install.

Thankfully, there’s a reasonably good tutorial on the WordPress website. I only had to go to step 8 in the tutorial to downgrade the installation. Briefly:

1. I backed up the complete website to my hard drive in case I messed up and had to retrieve some important deleted files.
2. I downloaded WordPress version 2.8.1 from the Release Archive, then extracted the zip file to my hard drive.
3. I deleted all the files in the root of the /public_html directory online (not the subfolders) except for .htaccess, wp-config.php and sitemap.xml and uploaded the equivalent files from the extracted zip file.
4. I deleted the wp-admin folder online and uploaded the complete wp-admin folder from the extracted zip.

I then tried accessing this website and thankfully everything was now okay – I could see all my posts and the plugins were still activated.

So what have I learned here? Well, I now have a complete backup of my site on my hard drive which should help in downgrading a failed WordPress upgrade in future. But I shouldn’t have to downgrade a failed upgrade. The automatic upgrade should work and if it doesn’t, there should be an easier way to restore a previous version. I do have the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin installed which I used until WordPress included this feature. Perhaps I’ll go back to using that but I don’t know if it works with WordPress version 2.8.

Hope this will be useful to anyone in a similar situation. Have you had any problems with the WordPress automatic upgrade? Let me know in the comments.

I’m not one to be checking my blog stats on a daily basis, just happy to have some loyal readers who are getting something from my posts.

I added the Feed Statistics plugin a couple of months ago and was pleased to find I had 7 loyal readers then. To my utter amazement, I went back to check my feed stats a couple of days ago and it is now hovering around 400! That’s really exceeded all my expectations and a big thanks to all who have taken the time to subscribe to the RSS feed. I’ve just added the subscriber count below the RSS button on the top right of the blog.

For those who don’t know, subscribing to an RSS feed from a blog allows the content to be pushed to an RSS reader like Google Reader. It’s well worth doing and means that rather than having to visit blogs looking for new post, the posts are actually sent to you in your reader saving you loads of time. Just click on the RSS feed icon (like those shown above) and add the feed to your reader.

I’ve been blogging in my spare time for just 10 months now with 49 posts up – not a lot, but I hope there’s something for everyone in the content so far. I generally have 2 or 3 posts in various stages of readiness and I’m pretty happy with the next 2 or 3 in draft. Hope you will be too. Check out the recent posts on the right and click through some of the categories which might interest you or visit the archives. If you like what you see, subscribe to the feed if you haven’t already done so.

Once again, thanks for subscribing and hope you’re enjoying reading my take on tech … and life.

Image credit: Chesi – Photos CC

I’ve use NotePad++ as a Windows NotePad replacement for some time now. It’s great for editing css and php files on my local computer. But did you know you can upload your files to your website directly from NotePad++? Saves having to launch your ftp client to upload them. In NotePad++, there’s a plugin called FTP Synchronize under the Plugins menu which is installed by default during installation of NotePad++. Go to FTP Synchronize and click Show FTP folders. New windows should open to the right and below the main NotePad window. The window to the right looks like this:

Click on the Settings icon, which will bring up the following window:

Click on New at the bottom left to start a new profile. In the box named Profile at the top right, give your profile a memorable name, e.g. the name of your blog and click Rename. Add the details down the right side and click OK. If you’re not sure of these they’ll be in your current ftp client. You can set the Initial directory to the sub-folder where your files are stored online.

Once this is saved, you can click the Connect button as shown in the top graphic. You’ll get a drop-down box with your saved profile and just click on it. Obviously, you could save a number of profiles here to connect to different folders online (e.g. different blogs). Once connected, just click the Upload button shown in the top graphic and the saved edited file currently showing in NotePad++ will be uploaded to your chosen folder.

That’s it.