WordCamp Miami is just a few days away and we’re really excited here at Design Theory. I’m taking the whole family down, which includes my kids so that they can experience their first conference and kick start their own web and internet journey of creativity and creation.
Below is a list of tech things we’re packing to make the trip and stay as productive and comfortable as possible:
Macbook chargers and extension cables. Power is always a big thing at conferences. It’s just as important as having a reliable wifi signal.
Smart phone and tablet chargers and portable chargers. This little $10 and $20 portable chargers can usually recharge your device 2 or more times from a dead charge.
Macbook Pro laptop. Because I’m going to get ideas on things I’m going to want to implement right when I hear it. So having my laptop will be essential.
Tablet/iPad. Having this as a second input device is rather helpful and lightweight. Easy to carry around and setup on a small desk surface.
A comfortable backpack, rolling case, or messenger bag. Carrying all of your gadgets and hardware can get heavy or cumbersome.
Business cards. This should go without saying, but it’s a good way to quickly give out your contact information while in passing or like a secret note in class during sessions.
GoPro. This is a really small and easy to use video camera that I can also take stills on. On one charge it can last me up to 3+ hours and I can control it from my phone.
Nikon DSLR. This one is a bit heavier because I have a few lenses that I like to use for various situations. But capturing some great speaker profile pictures, or scenes of packed out rooms where lighting is really low, my Nikon comes in really handy.
Extension cord and/or power strip. If you’re going to be staying in a certain track for a few sessions in a row, it helps to secure a seat where you can plug in your power strip and multiple devices to charge all at once.
A notebook and pencils. In case you run out of charge on all of your devices, having a good old pencil and paper for note writing is really handy.
So those are the things I’m bring with me. What are some things you plan to pack with you? Add to the conversation below or on Twitter with me and the hashtag #WCMIA
Early last month (November), I did a talk at WordCamp Orlando. It was my first time speaking at a WordCamp and it was so humbling and cool to be able to do so. I spoke on the difference in Custom vs Premium WordPress themes. Because this was a topic I deal with on a regular basis and get asked many questions about, I felt it was a good topic to make into a presentation and discuss.
The feedback I received was great and constructive. Check out the video below to see mine, and also check out the WordCamp Orlando YouTube page to watch the other presenter’s video presentations. You can also view my presentation slides here.
Ever come across a website that you really like? Sure we all do from time to time. Since over 27% of websites on the web are using WordPress, and with the tons and tons of available plugins out there, you’re going to come across some functionality that you would like to add t your own website.
I came across a nice little browser add-on called SpyBar.
The browser add-on as you can see shows you a list of the plugins and theme being used as well as a hotlink for you to Google the items and get more information about them.
The cost of this add-on is $12.95. And with this you’ll have a new tool for your web creating arsenal. Be sure to let us know in the comments below how you intent on using this or ways that this can help.
Have you ever come across this error message after updating a few things in your WordPress Dashboard?
Well don’t panic, there is an easy way to clear this, and get your website back online.
First you need to launch your FTP application. Some use FileZilla or maybe even Dreamweaver. Either works fine, or you can use your hosting providers File Manager to access your server files. Once logged in and you can view your files on the remote server, you’ll need to navigate to the root directory of your website.
Once there scroll up and look for the .maintenance file. It won’t have an extension.
I highlighted the file in red. You’ll just need to click that and choose a delete option to remove it from your server. Once removed navigate back to your website and refresh your page. You should be able to get back to your WordPress Dashboard like normal.
Over the past few months we’ve been experiencing some issues with our current hosting company. Before I start throwing them under the bus, let me first say that we’ve used them for almost 10 years and didn’t start having issues until this year. What were those problems you ask? Let me explain.
Server Processes
Something I will admit that I really didn’t know much about. I’m not a server guy, and no one in our agency is either so this server technology really wasn’t a topic for our meetings. Well with some hosting companies they actually have a limit to how many processes can be running on a server at any given time. Our partner company 1and1 didn’t inform us of this until a solid month of random site performance issues. Our HTML sites were fine, but our WordPress sites where the ones creating these processes that at times would halt their server. In most cases it could have been from adding plugins, new pages, new posts, updating theme settings, etc. It really was random and no thanks to the language barrier of 1and1’s off-shore customer support that (by procedure) blames you first unless you request that they look at their system for errors.
Memory Usage
Here at Design Theory, we manage many websites. Since end of last year just about all of our new sites coming online have been in WordPress. WordPress runs on MySQL, and thus a new database is needed for each site. Each of those databases have an amount of memory usage depending on how much content the site has. So having upwards of 70+ databases and you’ve got a perfect storm just waiting to flood the server your sites are on. The amount of memory the hosting company allotted for your websites is limited. Each company may offer a different amount but it isn’t much when you’re on the economy hosting companies like 1and1, GoDaddy, Blue Host, and others. I suggest you either give them a call or do an extensive search through the fine print to find out what yours is.
Price
I can’t stress enough how you get what you pay for. For those of you that pay for your own hosting for your one main site, for now you may be safe. But isn’t the idea of a business website that it will continue to grow? Aren’t we doing things to boost traffic to our sites to promote our products and services? Well if you’re doing it right you should notice an increasing number of visits each week and month. At some point you’ll need to make the decision to move away from the economy hosting options to either higher cost VPS (Virtual Private Servers) or to a hosting company that specializes in WordPress – Like Media Temple. (shameless plug)
Performance
If you’ve had your WordPress up for a good few months, you may start to notice things running a bit slower than it did when you first set things up. You’ve added a ton of great content, images, pages, posts, plugins, etc. Nothing wrong with that if you’re creating value for your visitors. Until it takes them more than a few extra seconds to pull up your site and pages. The decrease in performance could be due to your site or other sites on the same server (unbeknownst to you). A better hosting plan or company will have optimized servers that don’t:
Throttle your bandwidth
Force a site shut down (Error 403)
Service Temporarily Unavailable error
WordPress Security & Automatic Updates
There are are some hosting companies that actually offer automatic updates to WordPress while also taking preventative measures to keep their infrastructure secure from malware and attacks. If you think about it, it actually benefits those hosting companies a bit more than you as their customer; mainly because they can assure version control and scheduled updates for off-peak times. Some even vet the updates prior to making them live to all of their hosted WordPress sites.
What’s To Come
For a lot of those sites staying on economy $10/mo hosting run the risk of these types of errors above in the very near future. For the amount of websites currently online, 20% of them are WordPress sites according to w3techs. Looking at the chart below, you can see that in a year there’s been substantial growth. Imagine what percentage of site will be on WP by the end of next year and beyond if it keeps growing like this.
I actually had a client just recently had their website taken down for what the hosting company (Blue Host) said that she had used up too much of their server. Are hosting companies preparing for the increased stress on their servers? You have to wonder right? To most you’re just an account number that is being billed regardless of the level of service. There probably are hundreds of site owners that can may not even notice if their website goes down for a few hours or days. But for those of you that have frequent traffic to your site for your great content and resources, and those of you that are working to be the authority figure on your industry, you really can’t afford to have your website go down for something that could be easily avoided sans frivolous predetermined hosting restrictions.
As always your thoughts and point of views are appreciated. Lets continue the conversation below in the comments.
When WordPress 3.6 came out a few weeks ago, there were a lot of plugins that also made their own coding upgrades. While most were good and seamless one in-particular didn’t fair so well with older versions. Here at Design Theory, we had a few client websites using some older (pre NexGen v2.+) that were working just fine until we updated WordPress to 3.6 and then we either received error messages or the galleries weren’t showing up at all.
Error Messages:
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 58458112) (tried to allocate 16 bytes) in …/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/pope/lib/class.extensibleobject.php on line 1291
or
‘Error 404 – page not found’
While the galleries were intact when you log into the Dashboard and view or manage the galleries, the photos and settings all still there, they just weren’t displaying at all or displayed errors on the site. We created the video below to show you how to easily restore your plugin version back to 1.9.13 and get back your gallery views.
Instructions
Visit the NexGen plugin site here, then download either your previous version (prior to your upgrade) or select the 1.9.13.
Download and unzip the folder on your computer.
Select all the files from the unzipped folder and copy them
Navigate to your WordPress site files on your computer (Documents/YourWebsite/WP-Content/Plugins/Nexgen-Gallery)
Paste the files into this folder/directory. Yes you must overwrite the existing files
Upload that folder (Documents/YourWebsite/WP-Content/Plugins/Nexgen-Gallery) back to your host/server via FTP.
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