A great strength in PHP is that it’s so accessible, that almost anyone can get access to a PHP site and often will download “applications” for their site such as discussion boards, photo galleries and others. While it may easy to download such applications, it often happens that the people trying to get things to work, doesn’t read the requirements section of the install.txt or readme.txt file, and thus never get the application running and doesn’t understand what the problem was and how to fix it. This is a brief guide with some tips on how to improve usability in this area.

While trying to respect the notion that URLs dont change, moving to a completely different engine for a website is bound to cause many URL changes. I’ve been trying to redirect old broken URLs to their new destination, and one of the tools was the 404 Notifier plugin for Wordpress.

The idea is that you configure it to send you a mail every time a 404 error occur. I did that and configured it to mail me at my GMail address (with endless storeage). It seemed like a great idea, but somehow it seem to mail me plenty of false alerts.

Publishing a list of which pluins you use seems to be popular among Wordpress users, so here’s my contribution in case you’re wondering, which plugins are in use around this site.

• Askimet - Anti-comment spam (comes with wordpress)
• Amazon Showcase (hacked) - Displays the “Currently reading” on the frontpage; hacked to display valid XHTML.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - Handles the Feeds from the site (and moves load a way from this server).
• Google SiteMaps - Helps Google index the site.
• Sociable (hacked) - Places “sharing” links on posts & pages (StumpleUpon seemed to be broken).
• Tiger Style Administration - Beef up the backend of wordpress and make it look nicer.
• Underscore Permalinks - I like underscored permalinks over the default dashed permalinks.
• WordVerify - A simple spam-prevention method.
• WP-ContactForm - Used for my contact page.
• WPG2 (and friends) - Trying to make Gallery2 and Wordpress play nice together (not quite successful yet though).

In line:

Just in case you’re wondering, this new design isn’t a homebrew. Moving content and other stuff from the old (movable type powered) site to this new platform was hard enough without me having to challenge myself to come up with a design and learn how to create a wordpress theme from scratch.

The core of the design is from gluedideas’ subtle theme. I’ve made it 200 pixels wider than the orgininal, but that’s about it on the theme side of this. I will probably switch the default header image (and colours) with images of my own at some point.

Gmail from Google is usually great, but it does have some bug-like features.

One of the most annoying is when your inbound mail is tagged with a label and should have been auto-archived, but is caught by their spam filter and placed in the spam folder. Discovering and finding the mail in the spam folder is easy, but when you tell Gmail, that the mail isn’t spam, it doesn’t pop in to the archive (where the filter-rule should have put it). It pops back into the inbox, and you can then archive from there.