CompuSkills Blog

Just to let you know, if you haven’t already seen it on the dashboard, but WordPress has been upgraded to 2.6.5.

This upgrade fixes a security problem so unless you have an overwhelming reason not to, it is advised that you upgrade as soon as possible. From the WP Blog:

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

Also, as a result of the faked 2.6.4 version that was passed around, WP decided to skip this release number (which is why you should be upgrading from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5). WordPress have stated there will never be a verion 2.6.4 release.

Download the Why Dont You Blog WordPress Theme.

The Word Press theme designed for the WhyDontYou Blog is now available for download (free, released under the creative commons licence). It is not a “sponsored” theme, but there are links back here in the footer which we request you leave in place. In addition, there is a section in the footer which explains who created this theme and where it was made for - you may edit this if you wish.

This is currently at version 0.9.8 beta and has a few teething issues, especially in Internet Explorer 6, but is largely stable. It requires the UTW plugin and Dunstan’s Error pages which need to be downloaded separately.

This theme is widgetised and has been tested on WordPress 2.1 and 2.2. Read the rest of this entry »

After quite a wait, Wordpress 2.2 is now available for download and install.

While we think this is a good thing, Compuskills are currently advising customers who have a WP 2.1.3 installation to hold off for a little while before doing the update. If you give it a few days, people will have the chance to check out the new code, hopefully also identifying potential problems and pitfalls.

Unless your system is really “not critical” and you dont mind the risk of potentially considerable downtime, do not update straight away. If you do choose to update (now or at a later date), please ensure you make a full back up of your system - just in case. If you have any problems with this, please contact us and we will assist you.
[tags]Wordpress, Blog Software, Software, Compuskills, WordPress Upgrade[/tags]

Just a reminder for everyone who uses WordPress that there has been a security upgrade (patch) released. Find out more.

If you are Compuskills customer, your word press has been upgraded.

For people using WP to run their blogs:

It appears that the files for 2.1.1 have been hacked into and corrupted, all wordpress 2.1* users are advised to upgrade to 2.1.2 as soon as possible.

You can read more on the dev blog: WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Blog Software, Software, Hacking

FireStats is a system for getting web statistics. You can download it from firestats.cc homepage or you can get it as a WordPress plugin for a blog.

It gives you a fascinating insight into how many hits your pages are getting, which pages are getting accesssed, how they got there, what browsers and operating systems visitors use and the IP addresses and countries of origin of your visitors. This information is useful for so many purposes.

• First, it’s very helpful to know what people are interested in on your website. The pages that people visit may be surprising. This can help you tailor your content to your customers’ needs.
• Referrers can tell you what links are good at driving traffic to your site. You can then choose to develop more links of the types that are worthwhile.
• Referrals from search engines can also be enlightening. You may have been disappointed to find that you came low down on Google for your key words, for instance. Firestats will show you what Google searches have actually brought traffic. You may find you rank surprisingly highly in searches that you would never have anticipated. If you are trying to optimise your pages for search engines, you will find some useful pointers to what text will bring visits and put you at the top of the search pages.
• The information on browsers and operating systems is very helpful when you are tweaking your site design. For example, if you have a site which looks brilliant in Internet Explorer 7, it might be a salutary shock to find that only 5% of your visitors use this. You may have to forego the effects and adapt your site to older browsers. If most visitors use Firefox, this should become your priority in designing pages. You may find that a significant proportion of visitors are using mobile devices or feed readers. This certainly calls for more thorough website design testing than you might do if you imagine your visitors are all sitting at Windows PCs using Internet Explorer.
• The Firestats information on operating systems may help you decide if your content is matching your visitors’ interests. An open-source focussed site can find it has very much more traffic than would be indicated by other web statistics generators, such as Alexa, which concentrate only on IE.
• Location information could be very important for tailoring content or for choosing which languages your site should appear in. Knowing where your customers are could be a crucial marketing tool for an e-commerce site and could help you in planning global distribution strategies. The location information seems infinitely more accurate than the information generated by Alexa for instance, as well as being 6 month more up to date,

The installation process seems relatively painless in WordPress. Once it’s installed, it’s very easy to use. You can show traffic statistics on your homepage, although I have doubts about whether this is a good idea, except for an activist site. You can adjust your settings to exclude your own visits and to ignore bots.

Altogether this is a fantastic free service. At the very least, you can see how your site is getting on, in real time. You can adjust what you offer and be able to tell very quickly whether your changes are likely to achieve what you want. You don’t need to wait months for a report from an external service. Highly recommended.

Tags: Firestats, web design, website, traffic, Software, Web Design Software, traffic analyser, site redesign, Wordpress, blogging, blog

Two weeks ago we said how we were looking at trialling Expression Web, seeing what sort of sites it produced and how it compared to the likes of Dreamweaver and Bluefish (our current favourites).

Sadly, after two weeks we still cant get into the software well enough to make use of it. This is not a “review” and it is important for us to emphasise that it may well be a good package - but it certainly does not gel with any of our working practices.

In the end, trying to use this package was causing too much difficulty in re-learning things so we have drawn the experiment to a close and returned to what we know best.

It may be a good package for some one new to web design, or people more adept at learning new things, but it certainly is not for us.

Tags: Expression Web, Dreamweaver, Microsoft, Bluefish, Software, Web Design Software, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET

What is Javascript? Firstly, Javascript has little in common with Java, which is a full-scale programming language. Javascript is a scripting language, mainly used to add functionality to web pages, through actions performed on the user’s computer (client-side) Javascript can carry out actions that aren’t possible using standard HTML. These actions include opening pop-up windows, setting cookies and validating user input on forms before they are submitted.

Technorati Tags:Javascript AJAX Web 2.0 Accessibility Client Side Scripts Client Side Scripting

We have been fortunate enough to have been given a copy of MS Expression Web design software for a trial basis. The intention is to create some of our personal sites using this tool and see how it compares against the likes of Dreamweaver, NVU (which has been blogged about by staff in the past) and the truly wonderful Bluefish editor (again, discussed elsewhere).

Before we begin though, there is the need to “declare” a couple issues which point to a definite bias.

First off, our preferred OS is Linux although we do have Windows machines to use (and regularly use them). Also, nearly all the website construction tasks we perform are on Dreamweaver and Bluefish - which we love.

Also, critically, nearly all the sites we develop use PHP as the server side language and Expression Web does not support this. To make the testing “fair” we will endevour to create ASP, ASP.NET and plain HTML sites and we will be as objective as possible with our conclusions.

That said, unless MS does something significant to change the way Expression works it is very unlikely we will adopt it to develop CompuSkills websites (as almost 95% are PHP driven).

Tags: Expression Web, Dreamweaver, Microsoft, NVU, Bluefish, Software, Web Design Software, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET

The Extended Live Archive is an excellent wordpress plugin that lets you automatically create an AJAX powered archive page for your WordPress blogs. We have currently set it up on a blog for you to see it at work here.

It does suffer from one massive problem though. It wont work in anything except IE 7.

This is a shame, the plugin from Sons of Skadi, is excellent. When it does work (for example, in IE7) it works well. The problem is when it doesn’t work there is very little in the way of place holder content to tell the user what they are missing out on. The Support Forum for the plugin is almost useless for this (despite the number of times it tells you to go there for advice) so it seems that this is either a unique problem to the way it has been installed this time, or a bug which will remain for quite a while.

Now, IE is IE so in time the entire world will be using it but currently there is not a high enough percentage of users to make this sort of plugin sensible on anything other than a personal page. Remember more half the people out there, browsing, are not using IE7!

There are, as you can imagine with such a complicated plug in, several pitfalls on the installation but the 24FightingChickens site has some excellent advice to work through these. Shame about the Opera / FireFox / IE < 7 problems though.

Tags: Word Press Plugin Software Blog Usability Cross Platform Cross Browser AJAX Web 2.0 Client Side Scripting FireFox Opera