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Note to Self: Evergreen Post Tweeter and WordPress Timer

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Just a reminder to myself that the Evergreen Post Tweeter plugin conflicted with the WordPress timer service, at least for my blog. As a symptom of this, scheduled posts wouldn’t post on the publish date and time, and there would be a backlog of actions queued up.

I was only aware of this since the UpdraftPlus backup plugin wouldn’t run its automated backups. UpdraftPlus itself would complain about incomplete actions. On a hunch, I disabled Evergreen Post Tweeter since it times the posting of old posts on Twitter. Sure enough, after disabling Evergreen Post Tweeter, WordPress started behaving normally. Scheduled posts published on cue, and I have yet to see incomplete actions reported by UpdraftPlus.

Comparing Related Posts Feature

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The recent JetPack version 2.9 includes a new Related Posts feature comparably seen on many, many sites. Just for comparison sakes, I have three different related posts engines running right now on Pulpconnection:

  1. JetPack
  2. Outbrain
  3. Similar Posts

I don’t intend to keep all three running, but I want to see the differences in suggested posts.

JetPack’s offering is pretty basic right now. You cannot customize its heading of “Related.” You can show the heading or not show it. Changing the number of related posts it displays requires a bit of effort. And you can display an image with each related post or not. That’s it.

Outbrain is a third party service used by several commercial sites. With Outbrain, you have a few more customization options including displaying text or images, the number of recommended posts, and the source of recommended posts.

Lastly, Similar Posts is a WordPress plugin that, you guessed it, shows similar posts. While purely textual, Similar Posts offers the most options including tuning how matches are made. However, this plugin hasn’t seen active development for some time. It still works with modern versions of WP, and I think offers the best results of similar posts.

Here’s a quick look at all three in action for a random post, Almost Peet’s Coffee Kailua. There’s hardly any text for this post, one image, the tags of coffee, hawaii, kailua, peets, windward, and two categories of life and addiction.

Examples of related posts
Examples of related posts

Similar Posts and JetPack have very similar recommendations with Similar Posts showing a more relevant “Coffee in Kailua” over “Crepes in Kailua.” I’m not sure where Outbrain is going with recommendations relating to Club 939 and less parking at Ala Moana.

Here is another example from the popular post, 21 Slang Words You Should Know Before Visiting Hawaii (Part 1).

Related posts example 2
Related posts example 2

Again, Similar Posts and JetPack overlap their similarities and rightfully link to Part 2 of the slang list. Outbrain goes on another tangent, suggesting pre-ordering Frozen, a virtual browser, a Buttnut, and another Club 939 post. What’s with Outbrain and Club 939?! Outbrain does say that it provides smarter engagement catering to the audience, so who knows? Maybe pulpy readers are more enthralled with Club 939 and Buttnut donuts.

Anyways, I’ll eventually pick one (or two) of these similar posts providers for the discovery of additional pulpy content. Which one I’m not sure about, but it is funny to see the comparisons.

wooslider-html2

Troubleshooting Wooslider

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Some time back, I was looking for a responsive slider WordPress plugin for Pulpconnection. The thought is to highlight certain posts in a big visual display on the home page. Since the awesome Thesis theme includes the Feature Box, it seemed like this would be simple. I eventually found WooThemes’ WooSlider amongst many other sliders out there.

Only recently, I’ve finally gotten around to incorporating WooSlider with my site but have run into problems. I can’t get it to work right. Well, it might be working, but I can’t see the results. I created this test slider page that’s supposed to display two sliders. Instead I see the outline of the sliders and not the pertinent images. Using Firebug to look at the code, I can see the HTML for the sliders.

Wooslider HTML

Oddly enough, the dimensions for the slider images are strange.

Wooslider image dimension weirdness

The actual image size is 640×480 pixels, so I don’t understand the 0x0 pixels. But this could very well be the root of the problem since the slider is showing images 0x0 pixels in size. I came across this Stack Overflow article that seems related, but um, I don’t understand how to implement the “call to initialise flexslider.”

I have this problem with versions 1.0.4 and 1.0.6. Any tips?

Tinkering, Always Tinkering

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You know I’m always tinkering around, adding and removing things from my blog. Here are the latest changes.

JetPack to JetPack Lite to JetPack

The earlier version of JetPack was bloated and so so, so I changed to the leaner but unofficial JetPack Lite. Then in the past day, a new, more feature rich version of JetPack was released. I switched back to test the new features.

Subscribe by Email

Speaking of new features in JetPack, there’s a subscribe by email function. In the past, I’ve let FeedBurner handle that, but let’s see how JetPack fares. In the right sidebar, kinda down you’ll see the Subscribe via Email section. Provide your email address to get started. If this works, I can remove a FeedBurner plugin to specifically handle email subscriptions.

Improved Search

I never realized the built-in WordPress search function was so basic. It worked good enough or so I thought. Then I read about Relevanssi (I guess that’s supposed to sound like “relevancy”). It boosts the WP search functionality with features you assumed were already there.

The Relevanssi search index is still building so you won’t see any of the features just yet.