If you have some time, check this video out. Liz knows a thing or two about networking.
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From the category archives:
WordPress
Screen shot of the present Haagsche Suites site
Screen shot of the new Haagsche Suites site in development
I’ve only one New Year’s resolution: to bring my main project for 2010, the redesigning of the Haagsche Suites website, to a level where it can work stand alone, as soon as possible.
After last year’s unfortunate computer crashes, server migrations and now the unfortunate hacking of two of my sites - all costing me too much of my precious time I’m underway again. I’m using the Thesis theme for WordPress which has a couple of wonderful features to change the lay out in a simply way.
Could some in the know please help me with comments either here,
- or there: about the general idea of turning the whole upside down: changing from a dedicated static site maybe with a separate blog into a dynamic site with an integrated blog. Am I stupid?
- or there: do you know of better alternatives for automatic machine generated translation?
- or there: the pros and cons of having dedicated “language” urls, or should I install WordPress MU?
Thank you for your cooperation.
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As you can see the background is back. It’s a photo of our precious garden at Haagsche Suites.
The logo is back with another photo of the same garden.
The Avatar is back, a bit bigger in size. The main reason is it fits the design of the blog better, but I was also thinking about enabling my readers to recognize me. Whenever you meet fellow bloggers or tweeps, or even maybe guests, many people complain that they cannot recognize people form their avatars. I wouldn’t like that to happen when you meet me :-)
Missing posts are back. Still some comments are somewhere in the cellar. If I don’t find them please re place your comment.
Some links have to be added here yet.
At the same time I installed Thesis theme’s version 1.6 (b2 to be exact). I fine tuned some bits and pieces. It has now color included in its core. I used it to sbring back the page navigation an slightly enhanced the visibility thereof. I lost pagination as it seems to interfere with the Thesis theme now.
I believe the ability to quickly navigate is much more important than the loading speed of the site. Therefor I brought back the full visibility of the archives and categories in the site bar. I cannot get rid of some widgets I like, because they enable me to keep contact on several platforms with my readers. These widgets also make the site a little bit slow.
In the meantime I noticed that my Google PR (Page Rank) went down from 5 to 4, but on the other hand I got back some site links that now have their own Google PR.
Curious how the SEO will work out in the future. The migration caused many errors, but the XML-sitemap generator works fine now as the server works on PHP an MySQL versions 5 which WordPress advises.
Off to sleep a bit and then ahead with the blog again.
Added:
I said no migraine, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. I can’t get a working SEO Page plugin or the WP PageNavi plugin. They did function under the prior Thesis 1.5 version but apparently not under the present version combined with the present WP version.
Last edited by Happy Hotelier on November 22, 2009 at 6:17 pm
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WordPress Spelling by Lorelle
I had fun during the Dutch WordCamp. I learned from Lorelle that you should write WordPress with two capitals and not with 6 like I do in the header of this post. I’m teasing her again.
WordPress Future
At WordCamp Lorelle predicted a great future for WordPress. I teased her with my prediction that the future of WordPress will be gloomy, as it is much too technical and people wouldn’t want to go under the hood like I do sometimes. And I know Lorelle, you told us that you blogged long before WordPress even existed and had a hard job with manually copying and pasting thousands of your old html based blog posts into one of the first WordPress versions. My prediction remains that people will rather use the likes as Tumblr or Post It, because they do not have such stamina as you have and sometimes I have – to a certain degree off course.
I believe my adventures with the migration of Happy Hotelier and Chairblog prove me right. It is too time consuming! In addition I believe that you longer yo blog, the more chance you have corrupting your blog through serveral updates. I had far less problems migrating the Chair Blog which I started much later than Happy Hotelier.
It is easy to predict WordPress will have a great future if you are a star blogger like Lorelle who stayed blogging at the WordPress.com platform. It is freely available and very easy as the updating is being done almost automatically. The only problem is that you’ll never be sure when they will close down the service. Recently one of my fave free applications has announced that they will close as of January 1, 2010 their services unless somebody steps in… I’ll be back on that later.
I really have put a couple of hours (too many!) in trying to find out what is happening exactly when moving from one server to another server.
Okay you faithfully back up, but do you know how to restore?
Back up Back up and Backup is the credo for all. But did you ever try to restore your WordPress installation?
There are a couple of issues nobody tells you when working with MySQL. There are several ways to make a backup of a MySQL database. If you want to find out you have to really dig into MySQL. Nobody tells you what the best way is. Nobody tells you you can get a restore so cluttered with wrong pointing links that you might as well throw it away. Nobody tells you there are limits of size involved. If your content is over a certain size you have to pull tricks to restore the stuff in parts. I didn’t manage to grab the moves involved and abandonned the experimenting. I would tell you if I knew the best way. In addition nobody tells you you can lose stuff underway. Nobody tells you you have to adhere to several different procedures with respect to posts, to pages and to attachments as photos or videos you publish on your blog.
I have the Wiley PHP5 and MySQL bible ( over 1,000 of pages) next to me for reference. Do you really believe I have the time to read and understand all that stuff?
It is not easy to simulate a restore and get a blog working again. About 2 years ago I tried that once using XAMPP a suite to simulate PHP and MySQL on your own computer. You can use it for testing purposes. But it handles only small installations.
To be honest: It may be becoming less and less important to know how that works as the WP functionality with the XML export and import are getting better each WP version.
Some people who have been following me, know that I have experimented with Linux time after time and time a new version was released, but time after time I have gone back to the not so much appreciated Windows system…because I don’t want to spend the time to grasp everything I need to understand to run a proper Linux system. I have the same feeling when working with WordPress sometimes.
Just a couple of random ranting thoughts.
What induced this ranting?
Yesterday I asked my ISP to make the change from my (their) old server to my new server. The change would take 24 hours because the DNS servers usually are being updated once every 24 hours….
In the meantime I had been experimenting with some necessary redirects on the old server and then on the new server all to prevent this blog from being inaccessible for some time… and then I ended up with a Happy Hotelier installation on the new server that did not work. So I re redirected the URL of Happy Hotelier back to the old server to keep my readers in the loop.
Currently this post is on that installation….
This morning I reinstalled WP and did a second export and a second import on the new server…. I don’t know how but this second installation got the comments right and also the categories…..It was ready just before the DNS servers really flipped the URL from the old server to the new server. The blog remained in the air during the transition which was somewhere around noon November 19, 2009.
So far so good.
Just by accident I have made the second installation with the use of a second database on the same server with another prefix than just wp_ .
During the afternoon I had other things to do and was busy. But my readers had something to read…
Tonight I thought “Hey! I have two different databases on the same WP installation…Why not try to reuse the former installation by simply swapping the wp-config file?”
And that worked and so today you see installation number 1 on the new server….
Tomorrow I will try to merge the best of the two….
I’ll keep you posted.
In any case I believe this is also a good trick to keep in mind if yo want to simulate a crash and be sure your “backups” are really working.
In one WP installation you can run two versions of your Blog as long as you make sure both versions have a different Database prefix… you simply flip your config file in.
Off course you cannot run the two installations simultaneously…but it is helpful. It is an alternative for experimenting with a WP installation in XAMPP, especially if XAMPP limitations will curb you.
My 2 cents for today…
Last edited by GJE on November 21, 2009 at 7:09 pm
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A rare photo of this photographer in action at WordCampNL.
Thank you Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat of PunkMedia.nl, of Flickr | Eventbranche and @Punkmedia !
General
I attended the first ever WordCampNL. It stands for a Dutch WordCamp or a WordCamp in the Netherlands.
At first I had decided not to go, because I was very very busy. I do have to admit I thought a WordCamp would be a gathering of WordPress Newbies and/or Geeks and/or Nerds only. However, this first Dutch WordCampNL proved me wrong in that respect and in many other aspects! The people attending were normal people like you and me, some savvy and some very savvy, but all passionate in reaching out, connecting and sharing.
Unexpectedly three people gently nudged me to come… so I decided to come… eventually and last minute.
I’ll wind down in three posts:
- My Heroes part 1 – The Organization of 2009 WordCampNL
- My Heroes part 2 – The Speakers of 2009 WordCampNL
- My Heroes part 3 – The People of 2009 WordCampNL
Lessons Learned
WordCampNL confronted me and made me realize a couple of important things about myself in relation my attempts in proper blogging here at Happy Hotelier.
I’m not so much a talker by nature and I have to admit I’ll never be a talker. In addition I’m a two fingers typist. I’m more of an observer. I’m a reasonable photographer and I’m more than averagely interested in people. Portray photography is I the type of photography I like most. So I have to stop behaving as if I’m a writer. ll have to admit I’m more an observer who shares his observations. I think that is also important with respect to the styling and the lay out of this blog to acknowledge this more explicit that I did before. Thank you WordCampNL.
I’m not so good in multitasking as I would have liked. I cannot listen to presentations and tweet about it and make photos at the same time. It means that I also won’t be taking my eee book to future events and will not be twittering live from events. I will concentrate on taking high quality photos and adding some observations to the photos I’ll publish after the event.
The third thing is that it was a great opportunity to connect more with fellow Dutchman. Not that I didn’t connect already, but now even more so.
My Heros – Part 1 – The Organization of 2009 WordCampNL
The organization and the venue Seats2Meet in Utrecht were impeccable. What impresses me most is the “after sales services” offered. Unlike other events, the organization is still fully engaged and do their utmost to make the experience complete by providing after the event content. All keynotes in the main room were video recorded and will be published soon. There were approximately 170 persons irl and approximately 300 people following the event via live streams and twitter. I count already 465 photos of at the Flickr group WordCamp Nederland
The heroes of the organizing team:
Lisa Rouissi (@KoffieKitten) of KoffieKitten and Orange Buzz NL. I had met her already at the first ever #TweetUpTheHague that she had organized together with Suzy Ogé. I still have a post about that somewhere up in my sleeve. She was on the organizing team. Constantly yawning we drove together to Utrecht via a deviant way as the road to Utrecht was blocked due to maintenance that early Saturday morning. She was one of the persons who nudged me on Friday. Thank you Koffiekitten!
Then we have Kaj Rietberg (@KajRietberg) of Kaj Rietberg.
Joeke Remkus de Vries (@DeFries) of De Fries.
Erno Hannink (@ErnoHannink) of Erno Hannink NL and in English Erno Hannink Com a fellow Thesis Theme user. Boy has that man a big smile! Here he is in dire admiration for one of the speakers, Lorelle VanFossen, @LorelleonWP of Lorelle on WordPress, who was the second person who nudged me that Friday. Thank you Lorelle!. @Punkmedia here in the background.
And, not to forget Jean Paul Horn (@JeanPaulH) of Textopus and Iphone Club NL who I knew already, but that’s another story. He was part of the team, acted as a great speaker and also as a sponsor of the venue.
A Great Thank You! to all of you for a great event!
Last edited on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 15:10 hr. I hope they put the publish button somewhere else on the dashboard in a futur WordPress release. Accidentally hitting that button happens too frequent.
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Shortly after the first WordCampNL some WordPress die hards found Lorelle prepared to privately give some tips and tricks in Rotterdam in what was believed to be the first WP MeetUp of The Netherlands. It was Cool. Again first the photos.
The first photo shows the Unilever head office in Rotterdam. Behind that was the place of the meeting. While I took the photo It was a bit in remembrance of my late brother in law who was in charge of organizing the delivery of this building on behalf of Unilever and who orchestrated the moving from the old head office to this building by Unilever. That was eons ago. i also remember his sleepless nights when glass panels started to fall from the building…
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I’ve finalized the uploading to Flickr of the photos I took at WordCampNL. I will devote one or two posts to the camp later. For the moment I leave it with posting this slideshow. The reason I link to my own stream and not the entire pool is that it is chronologically organized from the checking in to the final one thanking Erno photo.
All photos are also in the WordCamp Nederland Flickr group.
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Tearing myself away from the hotel. After some gentle nudging I’m charging batteries for camera and netbook. Hope to be able to give some coverage tomorrow when I’ll be at the first ever Wordcamp in the Netherlands.
I’m experimenting a bit with a plugin that gives a Twitterfountain. The only problem will be there will be a lot of Dutch language tweets here:-)
Looking forward to it.
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The new WordPress 2.7 version makes it much easier to find Plugins. I had a project on my back burner for which I need a decent Photo or Gallery Plugin.
I have shown already some interest here for Yachts and Yachting. I have not divulged yet that I used to be an avid dinghy sailor and used to race dinghies as well. Alas ever since I ventured into our Hotel business, my own clinker built 12 foot Dinghy dating back from 1944, is stored safely without much attention lately. I’m even not sure my old stiff legs will be able to endure a regatta anymore.
On the original date of this post I used a plugin, Tylr Slidr enabling mee to show you a couple of photos that I uploaded recently, but took in 2005 in Venice during the Biennial of 2005. There I found two Italian 12 ft Dinghies in the Arsenal. They were berthed opposite each other and were giving each other signs with lamps. It was an Art installation. A sort of act of love. Very poetic and I would never have thought of such use of two old dinghies in a basin that was used for maintenance of submarines.
The Artist, Laura Belem, born in 1974 in Bele Horizonte and working there, was able to make this installation with the help of a stipend from the Ministry of Culture of Brazil.
The 12ft Dinghy is a typical One Design Class. It was designed in 1913 by George Cockshott, an amateur boat designer from Southport, Lancashire, who won a competition organized by the Boat Racing Association (BRA). The BRA wanted a new sailing dinghy that would also serve as a yacht tender, and Cockshott’s design with its single, high-peaked lugsail fitted the bill.
It became an IYRU Dutch Class in 1914 and an International Class in 1920. It was even used for sailing competitions in the Olympic Games of Antwerp of 1920 and of Amsterdam of 1928. In 1920 they sailed on the North Sea with a lot of wind. The gold medal was won by the Dutch brothers Jan Hin and Frans Hin. In the 60ies I had the honor to sail against Jan Frans Hin – well, competing …. actually it was more of looking to his backside:-) The Silver medals were also won by two Dutchman (Van der Biesen and Beukers). In Amsterdam in 1928, on an inland lake near Amsterdam with not much wind, the medal winners were all of Scandinavian origin: 1)The Swede Sven Thorel, 2) Norwegian Henrik Robert and 3) The Fin B. Broman.
Recently we saw the International 12 ft Dingy class association being incorporated.
There are still several fleets:
- In The Netherlands there is a fleet of over 200 active enthusiasts,
- North Germany has fleets mainly around Lubeck and Hamburg,
- Italy has several fleets and is very active,
- To my knowledge there are also fleets in the UK, Japan, Switzerland and Turkey.
Dutch compete in Italy and in Germany. Japanese and Italians come to The Netherlands for a race sometimes. The class becomes more and more international nowadays, 95 years after it’s creation. Amazing huh?
I found a PDF file with 2007 draft Class rules in English at the site of an Italian Fleet.
This exercise in nostalgia was just to test this plugin and it seems to be what I needed for this post, although the loading of the whole seems a bit slow. What would you think? [Added: And sadly it didn't work out as anticipated]
Added January 5, 2008: The next Slideshow of the same photos is as per the advice of Heather from Heather on her Travels. It loads a lot easier, and is also very easy to copy and paste into your blog, but has not the full screen view mode as the other plugin….Thanks Heather!
Added July 14, 2009
Oops When I reviewed this article there appeared some hiccups and part of the post including the two slide shows simply disappeared completely. Grrr recovering it from previous revisions must be done piece by piece as apparently a later update of Wordpress (or the theme) seems to garble text into executable code…. done…it was the link to the Swiss fleet that did it!. Those Swiss:-)
Added November 9, 2009
Since this post I’ve had to delete the plugin. We now are waiting for the 2.9 version of WordPress, wich has been promised will handle media much better than it does prsently.
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It was Lorelle VanFossen (from her Family name I guess she or her hubby has Dutch ancestry), avid WordPress advocate, who drew my attention to Woopra with her post Whooping Woopra Blog Statistics Program, starting as follows:
I’m rarely totally and completely blown away by anything, and yesterday at Dallas WordCamp, John Pozadzides of One Man’s Blog, who works together on this project with Elie El Khoury [italics added by HH], who blew the whole crowd away with his new blog statistics program, Woopra.
I now fully concur with Lorella’s observation. I am not such a stats lover that I write for my stats. I blog because I find blogging a reasonable orderly way of cataloging my work / life / interests / finds for myself and sharing them with my readers. I use my stats mainly out of curiosity, because it shows me how people land on my site and what they are interested in. It always gives me (too) many ideas what to write about.
What is Woopra?
Woopra is not just another stats program, it is the re invention of the blog stats program.
Still a Private Beta
It was launched recently. Is still in private Beta. It is a small 4 man operation. You can sign in on their site. Then it takes quite some time before they let you in, because the demo at Dallas WordCamp drew so much attention that they can’t handle all requests in a timely way.
My short experience
I signed up shortly after Lorella’s post dated March 30, 2008. My patience was honored and I was let in on April 27.
I am in the process of installing several new workstations and a new server. Especially for Woopra I now have installed a second screen that constantly features Woopra. It is fascinating to see readers check in real life. You can see where they landed from, which search terms they used, where they land and which posts or pages or categories they read. It is almost too addictive and together with Twitter makes me forget Face book entirely.
Woopra has a built in chat functionality. I have tried it out with some of my readers and it works. I presume it scares the hell out of a reader when he gets a pop up screen out of nowhere and there are some concerns about the safety of the chat function. I take it that has to be ironed out yet. Also they have a plug in for WordPress that I haven’t even downloaded yet. You can tag your readers, so you can really start communicating with them if you wish via the Chat box. Twitter or mail.
For me the biggest surprise is that Woopra shows me that from all my posts here the two posts that draw the most readers are almost totally unrelated with my main subjects.
I suggest you check it out!
Update
If you want to see other peoples raves on Twitter, just check out Tweet Scan on Woopra. A link I found through a visitor just a few minutes ago.
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