Greg – Page 27 – JumbleCat

WordPress Admin 3.8 Color Scheme

December 16, 2013December 10, 2013 Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]WordPress 3.8 has a major change in the admin interface and the color scheme is part of it. But what if you like the more traditional WordPress colors?

I’m sure there will be some plugins that offer more color scheme’s in the near future, but what until them?

My solution was pretty easy:

Install and activeate the “Add Admin CSS” plugin
Go to Appearance->Admin CSS
In the Admin CSS box, enter the following:

#wpadminbar { background-color: #474747; }

#adminmenuback, #adminmenuwrap, #adminmenu { background-color: #474747; }

This will lighten up the menu background and be more like the traditional WordPress 3.7 color scheme.

WordPress 3.7/3.8

December 16, 2013December 10, 2013 Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]WordPress 3.7 was released a while ago and 3.8 is just about here, both provide significant, if differently focused, updates to how WordPress runs.

WordPress 3.7

3.7’s big new feature was automatic updates. I’ve been using the Automatic Updates plugin for quite a while and it’s nice to see it integrated in to the core. However there are a few things I have to scratch my head on:

Why no user interface to control updates. The plugin had one, it seems an odd exclusion, especially since it just forced a dozen plugins to appear to take care of the issue.
With the plugin, when an update was available it was pretty much immediately installed, the new core code seems to wait quite a long time before it installs it.

It would have been nice to have some advanced features for automatic updates built-in to core instead of relying on plugins.

WordPress 3.8

3.8 has some big changes to the admin UI and in general they look pretty good. I’m not a big fan of the included color scheme’s they have selected and again they seem to have left out any kind of editor to allow for custom theme’s, but it is a step forward.

This seems to be a common theme with the core, it tends to leave out some of the things that would make WordPress more user-friendly, preferring to leave that to plugins.

That may or may not be a good strategy, but when your primarily known as a publishing platform, it kind of seems to me to be important to keep your users in mind when adding new features.

Bell’s Roaming Packages

December 9, 2013December 10, 2013 Greg Leave a comment

[sc:mobile-category ]Cell phone usage when roaming has always been a bone of contention with me. Bell and the other service providers reap huge profits for doing nothing and users had no recourse.

Things began to change a while ago as some smaller players started to discount their roaming packages and the CRTC started to look at the huge bills some Canadians were receiving.

On December 1st, new regulations came in to effect that limited service providers to charging a maximum $100 in roaming fees without alerting the user. A good idea and Bell updated their roaming packages at the same time.

This is the background going in to my trip to the US on November 30. I called Bell on November 24th to purchase the travel package that was available at the time, which was as follows (this is from memory, as it is no longer displayed on Bell’s site):

100 minutes of voice
100 text messages
50 meg of data

Which was fine for me at was priced at $25. A reasonable amount if still not great.

I started roaming on the 30th and everything was fine.

Until December 1st of course 😉

At 9:26 PST I received a notification from Bell that I had used $25 of roaming data.

I thought this odd and called in to Bell to see what was up. I was told by the support rep that nothing was wrong, he could see my roaming plan, I hadn’t exceeded my limit and that it was likely a false message as they had just introduced a new system.

Things continued fine until 12:16am PST on December 5 when I received my second alert from Bell saying I had used $100 in roaming data and that data was now disabled.

A second call in re-confirmed that I had the travel plan, I hadn’t exceeded my limit and they didn’t know why I had received the message or why my data was disabled. He recommended I reboot my phone and see if that resolved the issue. Of course I was using my phone to call in so I had to hang up.

The reboot didn’t resolve the issue so once more I called Bell.

The support person once again confirmed everything look fine on their end and after I confirmed I had rebooted the phone he put me on hold to talk to someone else.

After a few minutes he came back and knew what the problem was. My roaming plan had been terminated on December 1st when the new plans came in to effect. He had to add two new features on to my service to compensate:

Voice and Text service (100 minutes and 1000 text messages) for $30
Data (100 meg) for $20

So now you have to pay twice as much to get a basic roaming package from Bell, though you do get more for it. Bell has said they will credit me the difference, but even so that’s not really the point.

So a few things:

Why on earth would they sell be a 30 day travel package that clearly only could be used for 7 days?
Why didn’t they notify me of the change when I purchased the package?
Why didn’t they notify me of the change when they changed it?
Why didn’t they grandfather in existing users?
Why didn’t their support people know about the change and how it would affect users?
Whey did I have to call in 3 times to get it fixed?
If the new roaming limits are designed to reduce costs, why is the basic package now twice as expensive?

Overall it’s just another example of why I really should have dumped Bell when my contract came up last year.

Expansys.ca Order

December 2, 2013November 13, 2013 Greg

[sc:mobile-category ] Having purchased my Nokia 925 from overseas has had one downside to it… getting accessories is a real pain in the butt.

I haven’t actually switched over to the 925 as my primary phone yet as I want to add the wireless charging to it in case I break something and the phone becomes unusable. However that means I need a wireless charging shell.

The problem is that the 925 hasn’t come to Canada yet so no one has any of the accessories. Of course in this day and age that shouldn’t be much of a problem, after all that’s what the internet if for 🙂

I found a couple of the accessories I wanted on Expansys.ca, placed the order and waited. The first problem is that it isn’t actually a Canadian site, instead shipping from the US. This adds significant cost to the items due to duties and taxes.

Then the site indicated 5-10 days for stock to arrive so no problem… a monthly later, stock is still listed at 5-10 days 🙁

At that point I had a friend heading to the US so they stopped in to a T-Mobile store for me, but alas, no luck so I left the order in place.

In the end it took over 2 months for Expansys to get stock.

I received both the wireless charging shell and the charging stand the other day, however there was a minor issue with the charging stand…

That’s the charger plug, which would be fine if I lived in Europe, but doesn’t work very well in Canada 😉

fortunately Expansys did include an adapter 🙂

I guess it will work, but I did expect the North American version of the charger.

Well there’s no way I’m sending it back and waiting for another 2 or more months!

Now on to the hacking the wireless charging in to the phone… an update will follow with the results.

JumbleCat WordPress Plugins Update

November 25, 2013November 25, 2013 Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is another post in an ongoing series of articles here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first four were:

It’s been a while so I thought it was time to update what I’ve added and removed.

Plugins Added:

Add Admin CSS

Plugin’s Description: Interface for easily defining additional CSS (inline and/or by URL) to be added to all administration pages.

In the previous list of addons I included Ozh’s Admin Menu settings which let’s you convert the left hand admin menu to a drop down menu style. I use the Add Admin CSS addon to add a bit of custom CSS to make the admin menu look flat, so from:

To:

Admin Post Navigation

Plugin’s Description: Adds links to navigate to the next and previous posts when editing a post in the WordPress admin.

This is handy if you want to move between posts without having to go back to the post list. Just one of those little plugins that are useful in certain circumstances and probably should be part of the core WordPress install.

BAW Post Views Count

Plugin’s Description: Count views for post and pages.

This is just a simple little page view counter, quite easy to use and adds a column to the posts list in the admin menu with the view count. It also can exclude views by logged in administrators.

Just Writing

Plugin’s Description: Adds buttons to the Distraction Free Writing Mode for all kinds of extra functions.

Distraction Free Writing Mode is nice, but really limited, this plugin gives it a bit more functionality.

Shutter Reloaded

Plugin’s Description: Darkens the current page and displays an image on top like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc. However this script is a lot smaller and faster.

A nice little plugin to make screen shots and other images pop up over the current page instead of a new window or replacing the existing one.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Plugin’s Description: See which plugins are slowing down your site. Create a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time.

This is a great performance tools, but I keep it disabled normally and just check the site every once in a while to make sure nothing is going wrong.

Pie Register

Plugin’s Description: Enhance your Registration form, Custom logo, Password field, Invitation codes, Paypal, Captcha validation, Email verification and more.

I don’t use even a fraction of the functionality of this plugin, but I do use it to put up a user notification during login that dormant accounts will be deleted after 60 days.

Schedule Posts Calendar

Plugin’s Description: Adds a javascript calendar to the schedule posts options.

Something that has always seemed missing from the WordPress admin interface for creating new posts was a way to schedule them with a popup calendar. This plugin lets you do that and also adds a quick link to the posts list so you can reschedule a post without opening it.

Shortcoder

Plugin’s Description: Shortcoder is a plugin which allows to create a custom shortcode and store HTML, Javascript and other snippets in it.

A while ago I decided to jazz up my posts with an image indicating the category they were in, but I didn’t want to hardcode the media so I use this plugin to insert the image in to the post. That way if I change a category image all I have to do is update the shortcode and all related posts will automatically be updated as well. There might be a better way to do this, but it seems to work well so I’m happy with it.

WordPress Statistics

Plugin’s Description: Website statistics tracking.

I’ve been using BAW Post Views Count for quite a while and it does provide a good view of what posts are being read, but that’s all it does. WordPress Statistics takes it a step farther and give a detailed view of all the hits on your site.

Plugins Removed:

Admin Customization

Plugin’s Description: Allows you to customize basic aspects of your WordPress backend This plugin simply adds several options that probably should be in the base WordPress control panel but aren’t.

I removed this plugin quite awhile ago and I can’t honestly remember if WordPress simply added the features I was look for or it fell out of support and stopped working. Either way it’s gone from JumbleCat now.

GTranslate

Plugin’s Description: Get translations with a single click between 58 languages (more than 98% of internet users) on your website!

This was a nice plugin, but Google broke it and I haven’t found a replacement yet.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Plugin’s Description: The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

I used this for a while but it had quite a few bugs and didn’t really provide a very good user interface. For my uses Schedule Posts Calendar replaced this.