After some delays, the interviews with both Sebastian Plano and FareWell Poetry are both underway. Not sure how long they will take as we are bouncing back and forth a question at a time to allow the conversation to change direction. Could be a few days or a few weeks. I'll add a brief review of Sebastian's debut to the interview with him. The FP interview is yielding very thorough answers so far - might be a two-part blog piece on length grounds in the end. If you have a burning question you've always wanted to put to a new young composer or to a Parisian post-rock band, I'm open to suggestions (though no promises, it would have to fit the flow). I have an ongoing conversation in my mind as to which recordings get to the top of the list for trying out the full setup.
I fixed a missing image file that was getting 404 errors. It belongs to the jQuery calendar that Edit Flow is using. The blog sends me email for 404 errors. The only mail I want to get from the blog is notification that a new article went live.
If your are aren't seeing any posts in the post calendar in the dashboard, click on the Today button. There's a bug in Edit Flow that will be fixed in the next release.
I've installed Broken Link Checker and fixed all the posts that had broken links. It is set to check links in all of the post statuses except Private and Pitch. Authors wiil get email if they have a post with a broken link.
I also installed Smart 404. It will try to figure out what post best matches the broken URL and redirect to it. It was doing a pretty good job on the broken internal links in our posts before I fixed them. I mainly want this for inbound links that aren't working (there aren't any at the moment)
@Craig, re Kez's query, you can use my Dickson piece later this week after Kez's Valentine piece to keep the Valentine piece from looking old after the day. Better get Kez's up today though.
Craig, sorry to hear you've been unwell - no fun at all. Hope the digestive system is cooperating again. Perhaps you should write a mixtape for people recovering from flu.
Would it be worthwhile to add this at the end of the Valentine mixtape article today?
"(For more great songs for Valentine's Day, you can like Noisetrade's page on Facebook and download their free gift sampler "25 Love Songs" from various artists including David Mead, Matthew Perryman Jones, Rosie Thomas, Marc Broussard, Josh Rouse & more.)"
Even if the Noisetrade sampler isn't added to the MiG mixtape piece, how about adding Noisetrade. com to MiG's blogroll? "Live at Eddie's Attick" by The Civil Wars is currently offered there, as is Sandra McCracken's "Love / Gravity." It's a very good site to check out new artists and support the ones you like.
Installed better search for MiG (Relevanssi). Relevanssi ranks the results by relevance. It can also provide "Did you mean" suggestions. I can modify the search results page to include them. It's not an urgent task, because Relevanssi needs to accumulate some successful searches before it can provide useful suggestions.
The site and database have always had scheduled backups. I'm now testing a system that automatically sends the backup offsite.
Posts now have social media bookmarking links at the bottom. They will appear on the main page and on the individual post pages. At the moment posts on archive pages don't have the social media stuff. If folks think they should I can add it. This is using the Semiologic Bookmark Me plugin with more tweaks by me to the Night Transition theme.
Added Facebook Like button. I also threw in the Send button. There's a Facebook link in the popup box, but that one just shares to your stream.
One minor irritation. On the post's pages, Like is picking up the post image, but on the main page it's grabbing the RSS icon. I shall have to research this issue.
Executive Summary
Research findings are less than satisfactory. Facebook looks at the page for the image. It's possible to specify multiple images for a page that the user can choose from. We can pull these from the posts. It appears to be possible to fix the shared image after the fact, with significant delay.
Partial solutions:
1. Create a default image for the site. We need this anyway for someone to Like the site. I haven't added a Like button for the site itself yet. We also should have a Favicon but that's a different todo list.
2 Take the Facebook Like buttons off the posts on the pages that show multiple posts.
3. Collect the featured image for every post on the page and add them all to the page metadata. Then the user could choose the correct image, although that seems to put unwarranted faith in random passersby.
4. It appears to be possible to use the Facebook API to fix the image after it is shared. This requires making a Facebook App for the site, which isn't as hard as one might suppose because the app doesn't do much itself, but it gets you an API key. Since the posts are being shared with their permalink, we can use the API to get the right image. The main reason this isn't a fix is the time delay to fix the image. By the time the image gets fixed it's scrolled down into oblivion.
None of these fully fixes the image problem. Option 3 removes the problem but the baby goes out with the bathwater. Everything would be simple if I could just pass image="{url}" with the parameters to the Like button.
@Dr. Mutex, thanks for all the tech work!
Whenever I go into the dashboard I see this message:
"BackUpWordPress has detected a problem. The last backup email failed to send. It's likely that the file is to large."
I thought MiG was looking a little forlorn, so I spent half an hour throwing together a piece that parlays this thread into a blog post. I've marked it for review. Apart from regular edits, I would in particular like to know if folk think the "Mixtape Recipes" category fits here, or whether it needs reframing with another category for music/film reviews. I am happy to go either way; the first sentence would need changing in the second case, and I'd be looking for title suggestions.
I've submitted a Classical Highlights post for review.
I was knocked out by illness for a few days, otherwise I'd have completed my troubadours post. I hope to get that done early next week. It's my intention to create an 8tracks mix for each of the history posts so you can sample all the albums.
Thanks guys. I also went through a long bout with illness, so hopefully I'm ready to get back on the horse too.
I set Nereffid's to go up today to break of the string of GP articles, and have GP's scheduled for Monday. I do think the Mixtape Recipes category works here. It's obviously a different kind of "mixtape", but I think it qualifies nonetheless.
@Germanprof - Yes the backup is too large to mail, but the plugin's not smart enough to send me a mail to come download it or to break it into mailable chunks. I'm working on a better solution. In the meantime I'll see about getting rid of the dire message in the dashboard.
For my WP installation I use BackWPup which gives a wide array of places to drop it (S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, and good ol' FTP). Been using for the better part of the year and it has been mostly "fire and forget".
I'm thinking of using Mercurial or Git to manage the site's files. A cron job on the server would periodically push changes to a master, possibly on the same server. My local box would have a cron job to pull changes from the master (if the master isn't on the same server/hosting company this doesn't need to be very often). The basic setup (less cron) would be along the lines of this tutorial and this tutorial.
Comments
Craig
I fixed a missing image file that was getting 404 errors. It belongs to the jQuery calendar that Edit Flow is using. The blog sends me email for 404 errors. The only mail I want to get from the blog is notification that a new article went live.
If your are aren't seeing any posts in the post calendar in the dashboard, click on the Today button. There's a bug in Edit Flow that will be fixed in the next release.
I've installed Broken Link Checker and fixed all the posts that had broken links. It is set to check links in all of the post statuses except Private and Pitch. Authors wiil get email if they have a post with a broken link.
I also installed Smart 404. It will try to figure out what post best matches the broken URL and redirect to it. It was doing a pretty good job on the broken internal links in our posts before I fixed them. I mainly want this for inbound links that aren't working (there aren't any at the moment)
Craig
A starter...or two
"(For more great songs for Valentine's Day, you can like Noisetrade's page on Facebook and download their free gift sampler "25 Love Songs" from various artists including David Mead, Matthew Perryman Jones, Rosie Thomas, Marc Broussard, Josh Rouse & more.)"
Link to the free sampler is here:
http://www.facebook.com/noisetrade?sk=app_160291820682178
Even if the Noisetrade sampler isn't added to the MiG mixtape piece, how about adding Noisetrade. com to MiG's blogroll? "Live at Eddie's Attick" by The Civil Wars is currently offered there, as is Sandra McCracken's "Love / Gravity." It's a very good site to check out new artists and support the ones you like.
Also, if Craig and others agree, Noisetrade.com would be a good addition to the MiG's Blogroll sidebar.
kez - I don't really know anything about noisetrade.com. If others are in favor, I can certainly add it.
Craig
americansongwriter.com
Interview with founder
Noisetrade vs Bandcamp
Installed better search for MiG (Relevanssi). Relevanssi ranks the results by relevance. It can also provide "Did you mean" suggestions. I can modify the search results page to include them. It's not an urgent task, because Relevanssi needs to accumulate some successful searches before it can provide useful suggestions.
The site and database have always had scheduled backups. I'm now testing a system that automatically sends the backup offsite.
Posts now have social media bookmarking links at the bottom. They will appear on the main page and on the individual post pages. At the moment posts on archive pages don't have the social media stuff. If folks think they should I can add it. This is using the Semiologic Bookmark Me plugin with more tweaks by me to the Night Transition theme.
Craig
Do we need a facebook Like button?
Added Facebook Like button. I also threw in the Send button. There's a Facebook link in the popup box, but that one just shares to your stream.
One minor irritation. On the post's pages, Like is picking up the post image, but on the main page it's grabbing the RSS icon. I shall have to research this issue.
Executive Summary
Research findings are less than satisfactory. Facebook looks at the page for the image. It's possible to specify multiple images for a page that the user can choose from. We can pull these from the posts. It appears to be possible to fix the shared image after the fact, with significant delay.
Partial solutions:
1. Create a default image for the site. We need this anyway for someone to Like the site. I haven't added a Like button for the site itself yet. We also should have a Favicon but that's a different todo list.
2 Take the Facebook Like buttons off the posts on the pages that show multiple posts.
3. Collect the featured image for every post on the page and add them all to the page metadata. Then the user could choose the correct image, although that seems to put unwarranted faith in random passersby.
4. It appears to be possible to use the Facebook API to fix the image after it is shared. This requires making a Facebook App for the site, which isn't as hard as one might suppose because the app doesn't do much itself, but it gets you an API key. Since the posts are being shared with their permalink, we can use the API to get the right image. The main reason this isn't a fix is the time delay to fix the image. By the time the image gets fixed it's scrolled down into oblivion.
None of these fully fixes the image problem. Option 3 removes the problem but the baby goes out with the bathwater. Everything would be simple if I could just pass image="{url}" with the parameters to the Like button.
Whenever I go into the dashboard I see this message:
"BackUpWordPress has detected a problem. The last backup email failed to send. It's likely that the file is to large."
I was knocked out by illness for a few days, otherwise I'd have completed my troubadours post. I hope to get that done early next week. It's my intention to create an 8tracks mix for each of the history posts so you can sample all the albums.
I set Nereffid's to go up today to break of the string of GP articles, and have GP's scheduled for Monday. I do think the Mixtape Recipes category works here. It's obviously a different kind of "mixtape", but I think it qualifies nonetheless.
Craig