Bonuel Photography » wordpress

A more useful 404 for wordpress

Miguel — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:46:57 +0000

I stumbled upon a great article by Dean Frickey, entitled A More Useful 404, which discusses the need for blogs (and other pages) to have a more elaborated 404 page. I couldn’t agree more with the fact that most website out there offer very slim possibilities to their users to find what they were looking for on your site. I immediately thought that it would be a great little plugin to add to the ever increasing collection of wordpress plugins out there (about 3758 as I write this). To my surprise, and delight, someone had already written a plugin for it, creatively called Useful 404 (Also found on wordpress’s download site). I was happy to find that this plugin works great on wordpress 2.7, which is fabulous by the way.

Unfortunately, I may have to tweak the plugin a little bit since it is missing what is, in my opinion, the most important feature of a customized 404 page, which is to offer the user a list of possible candidates that actually exist on your site. This feature is apparently already available in another 404 plugin called Smart 404 (Also on wordpress’s download site), but this one doesn’t seem to function on WordPress 2.7 yet. Anyways, I highly recommend the plugin Useful 404 for now. Simple to install and does the job very nicely for now. Any other 404 plugins out there?

Upgrading WordPress from 2.3.3 to 2.6

Miguel — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:31:01 +0000

I reluctantly upgraded my WordPress installation yesterday night. I say reluctantly because, for some reason, even after having upgraded from 2.2 to 2.3.3 a while back, i thought that this was going to be a long and painful process. I once again was able to upgrade my whole installation, including backup of all my files, in less than 30 minutes. I followed the great Three Step Upgrade from the wordpress folks! I will not wait as long as I just did before upgrading next time. The design of the 2.6 version is awesome and was definitively worth the 30 minutes spent on the upgrade. I can’t wait for great new things that the next version promises. Good work wordpress!

What are you waiting for? Go get the latest version and get blogging!

WordPress upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3.3

Miguel — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:53:58 +0000

I’ve been very reluctant to upgrade WordPress because of the dreadful “backup” that needed to be done in advance. My problem was not that I didn’t know how to backup my databases, but more that I am just simply too lazy to undertake the task. Well, also the fact that they mention it just scares me and makes me think that I may have to re-install lots and lots of things.

If you a little like me and you’re scared to try to upgrade your wordpress engine… well, fear no more! I did it in about 30 minutes, following wordpress’s superb three step process, and this including the upgrade of a handful of plugins (about 10 of them). Yes, among other things, WordPress 2.3.3 will tell you when a plugin is out-of-date and which, to my surprise, helped me realize that most of my plugins were due for a tune up.

The nicest thing about this upgrade is that my site is now using a much more secure, powerful, and faster blogging engine. It also fixes some glitches with my new template K2 which were really annoying me. The problem was that when I was browsing categories, I would get the following error:

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1]
SELECT wp_posts.post_date_gmt FROM

That was because the fine folks behind the latest K2 template were using the new mySQL database structure that WordPress introduced in their version 2.3.

I am usually reluctant to install a new version because of all the little bugs that tend to come out. I specifically waited a little while before installing, but now that I know that it takes about 30 minutes to upgrade, I don’t think I’ll wait as long next time. I highly recommend moving to 2.3.3!!

Spring Clean up Day

Miguel — Sun, 20 May 2007 04:35:48 +0000

I’ve spent the whole day cleaning up both my computers. I’ve been wanting to free-up space on my powerbook for the longest time. Mac is brilliant if you have enough space to support its needs. So I manage to free-up 7 Gigs, by mainly backing up old pictures and erasing some old programs I wasn’t using anymore… Anyways, this post is not really about macs and clean-ups, but about a new finding for wordpress addicts. I wanted to write about this cool new importer/exporter for people using WordPress 2.0. I haven’t updated for a while (why would I, when I have everything that I need on this version?). Turns out that I needed this cool little gadget that comes pre-installed on the new version: XML Exporter/Importer for wordpress. Pretty neat.

Yes, the site is undergoing some changes and will soon (very soon) be moved to my very own domain (www.bonuel.ca). Right now, I have our wedding site there, and very soon I will have my blog at www.bonuel.ca/blog. Anyways, that’s the future. If you haven’t visited our flickr account lately, I suggest you do so. There were many updates there and you’ll discover that we were just in Jamaica for our fabulous friends’ wedding! What a blast! Now off to do more computer-geek things. Cheers

Askimet is amazing

Miguel — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 07:38:13 +0000

I’ve been bombarded by spam comments on my website lately. About 150 a day I’d say. I got tired and decided to do something about it. I knew that there was a tool out there that did the work for me. It took me a minute to find it using my favourite search engine and installed it. The spam comment problem was so bad that while I installed it, I got about four or five spam comments in my mailbox… Well, today Askimet stopped 160 spam comments… I can’t believe it. This is so amazing, I’m loving it.

I’ll write more very soon. I am working on a personal project for the wedding and it’s been taking a LOT of my time. Anyways. Right now, I need to crash.

Creating a Tip Jar on WordPress with Paypal

Miguel — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:14:12 +0000

I’ve been curious to know how to setup the equivalent of a Tip Jar on my website. Just for the fun of it. I finally got to it, and I thought I should share the wealth by writing this simple tutorial on how to create a Tip Jar using your existing PayPal account.

Go to http://www.paypal.com and login to your account (Sign up for one if you don’t have one)
Click on ‘Merchant Tools’
Find the link to ‘Donations’ at the right side by scrolling down a little (or do a search for Donations).
Fill out the necessary information and click on ‘Create Button Now’
You then copy it to your website, and hope for some more traffic!
Don’t forget to leave a tip by clicking on my ‘Make a Donation’ button to see if my setup works and help improve my site (Ha ha!).

My Website (Version 2.2)

Miguel — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 09:33:09 +0000

Here is the new design of the website. I am still working on it and so I hope most of the stuff is working correctly. I am going to change a lot of the stuff around and so don’t get too comfortable. I need major feedbacks from everybody because I am not sure about the new menu thing. J’l'ai changer pour toi John!!! Est-ce que c’est pour le mieux ? Anyways, I hope you guys like it.

To leave comments, just click on the small ‘comment’ link at the bottom of THIS post.
Pour laisser un commentaire, clicker sur le petit icone ‘comment’ en bas de CE message.

I am also thinking of introducing a bilingual option to the site, but HEY I am writing a masters thesis at the same time… Hehehe In the meantime, practice your english!!! Oh and the photoblog is still coming up. How do you like the new beardcam comments ? I’m off to watch some CYE a little bit more. Everybody should get into that show, it is hilarious!!

A New Design for my Webpage

Miguel — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 00:27:53 +0000

There it is. The new design for the webpage.

I still have to work out some details like the fonts are not perfect and some of the headers are not the way I would like them to be, but overall it’s great. I went for a smaller size for Header and Eddie, and people who still have a smaller screen. I really like this new design and am trying to not use tables at all so that the download speed is faster and it complies to the new standard in web design.

It sucks though because I just erased all of my previous posts by reinstalling pmachine… I guess now I have a clean — Brand new! — blog. We’ll see how it goes. I will try and change a lot of the preferences this time because I had complaints on the way the forms looked for comments and all that. I’ll try to keep it clean.

So for now, most of the section on this page has been erased and built from scratch so I don’t have as much as I used to have, but I will add some more tomorrow during the day. So if I had a link that you liked, then do not worry it will come back! Yes, I am thinking about the link for Leslie’s poem about Bush, the link to Phyloworld and all that. Oh and the pictures are coming VERY soon.