Author: Richard

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How to Test a WordPress Theme

If you new to WordPress and blogging then your possibly having fun playing with different themes, customising you blog to get the look and feel you want.

Playing with your live site and affecting your visitors is probably not the best idea.  You need to be able test without impacting on your visitors.

A quick google round the internet soon found the answer, a plug-in that enables the admin user to test a different theme, then what the other users are seeing.

http://www.dnxpert.com/2010/05/26/how-to-test-a-new-wordpress-theme-without-affecting-live-site

Check it out you might find it useful.

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a Trip to North Yorkshire

Friday found us instead of commuting to work, heading to North Yorkshire, one of our favourite holiday destinations, to have the weekend enjoying some landscape photography.

Lunch time was spent in a lovely pub called ‘The Hare & Hounds’ at Staxton.

Caroline had her customary steak and ale pie while I had the Whitby Scampi.

We arrived late afternoon, in Robin Hoods Bay a rather delightful old seaside fishing village.

We were pleased to note that the snowploughs had been before us. Only a few days earlier the village had been completely cut off for a week.

After a few beers and a meal in the hotel, we retired for the night as I had my large format photography course starting next morning.

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A Lazy Sunday Morning

A very lazy Sunday morning was in store for us today.  We had no intention of going out, so first job was to ground some fresh Italian style roasted coffee beans.  I always keep a few whole beans in the freezer, in a plastic airtight container.

We are very lucky here, as Lincoln is blessed, not only with the usual array of Starbucks and Costa Coffee houses, but some very good top rated independent coffee shops, and two top coffee bean retailers, one of which roasts the beans themselves twice a week.

With the beans ground and the expresso on its way, I turned my attention to a very indulgent porridge.  Organic  rolled oats from Lincoln market and milk; with fresh cream and unrefined brown sugar to top it all off.  Yum Yum.

So the morning had us settling down in front of the TV to enjoy Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, one of Caroline’s favourite musicals.

And if you have some beans left you can even practice your photography on them or if your feeling daring, go out into the garden and make Snow Angels.

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Snowy Bike Commute

With winter well and truly arrived, this morning saw us pulling on our winter thermals & fleeces to go under our biking outfits.

I took pity on Caroline, and allowed her to wear my BMW heated waistcoat. The full winter gloves and boots also came out for today.

One we had negotiated the first half mile of ice and snow covered back roads to the village centre, it was an easy ride in on clear roads.

That first stretch was the hard part. Not the weather but other road users. One car driver pulled out on us in a situation they could clearly see was not conductive to using the brakes. I was not travelling very fast, less then 10 mph so was able to roll to a halt without risking the brakes on the ice. Less then a minute later they decided to just stop in the middle of the road with no warning, I gently overtook them. The worse the weather the worse some people drive!

Unlike yesterday today was relatively warm, the temperature reached -0.5C. We felt warm and it was an enjoyable commute into work.

Photo taken and blog posted from my iPhone.

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Pilates or Yoga

Thursday night is Pilates night for us.

I have to admit, I do prefer Yoga but unfortunately our gym did not offer that any more.

With running I find that even stretching well after each run, the legs do get very stiff. Doing Pilates or Yoga for an hour a week really helps you to keep supple.

But the gym telephoned us and cancelled, saying that Pilates would no longer be offered, after asking what it would be replaced with they said nothing, but they would be offering Yoga on Wednesday night.  Yes!  Result!

So tonight a quick tea and off to the gym for our first Yoga session in about three years.

Oh boy, do I ache now.  Never let anyone tell you Yoga is the easy option.  Three years of occasional Pilates has not really kept us as supple as I would have liked.  While the odd course taken with our old Yoga teacher has been fun its not been enough.  Looks like its going to be fun but hard work for the next few Wednesdays until we get back into it.

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Winter Commute and Photo Inspiration

Yesterday morning was the first cold commute of the year. A steady 0°C (32°F) occasionally hitting -0.5° C.  With the wind chill factured in thats about -11°C (12°F), I will definitely be getting out the thermals soon, but until then a pair of silk under-gloves and the heated grips were enough to keep me warm, together with my BMW Rallye 2 Suite.  This will be my second winter in this suite and while expensive I feel its been well worthwhile

While cold it was a beatiful morning, a clear blue sky, golden sunlight and the farmers fields covered in a white frost.  All very beautiful.

This gave me a few ideas for some photo’s.  Mornings like these are always good for inspiration, even a trip to the local park or just go into your garden, can have images worth capturing, a dew and frost encrusted spidersweb, those bright red berries on a bush.  You don’t need an expensive macro lens for this stuff.  Just dig out that old 50mm prime you never use and give it go.

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Moving Posts & Going Live

More Blog configuration: Tonight once home I manually moved my posts from my first blog to the new dev blog.  Just cut and paste.  Next time I need to move to a different blog, the full WordPress software allows easy export and inport.

I then backed up dev to my laptop and deleted Live.

If your after a good FTP client for OS X, I use Transmit.  Makes jobs like this very easy.

Then I FTP,ed the contents of dev to Live. Once that was done I logged into WordPress altered the paths to refer to the blog new location.

Everything seemed to work, so now the final part to delete dev.

Wow, its all still works!

Update:

Well nearly works; the picture I had in a post was lost, I suppose I need to read up on how to officially move a site!

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WordPress ios (iPhone) app

How to manage your WordPress blog remotely.

Well I always have my iPhone with me so that seemed the best way.  I had a search on the iTunes application store and soon found a WordPress ios application.  It was free so I downloaded, installed and gave it a whirl.

Well I spent a while not getting anywhere, like many other users.

What they don’t tell you, or at least I never saw it; you have to enable remote access in your blog first.

It’s easy to do, just log in, select settings, then writing, and at the bottom enable the access. Easy when you know how.

Sent from iPhone during lunch.

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mysql

Well, that was easier then I thought.  Between the wordpress help pages and the ease that my web hosting company made of creating the database, within a matter of minutes I had a simple highly customisable blog up and running.

Now to start moving posts from the old site to this.