My penchant for using long titles in my blog posts, and my now active involvement in all things Facebook and Twitter, drove me to install this nifty but challenging plugin called YOURLS. I took for granted that this was going to be one of those normal WordPress plugins you get to install through the dashboard.

But it’s not.

My number 1 mistake was thinking that all I had to do was install the WordPress plugin version of it and it will run immediately. Nope, it doesn’t work that way. You actually have to download the package and FTP everything into your web folders. Next, you need to do some manual configuration for both the database and config file, then run it the first time via the admin panel, and ONLY THEN should you install and set up its complemental WordPress plugin within your WordPress dashboard. And I’m explaining these in way too simplistic terms.

My number 2 mistake was to not understand enough the statement in the FAQ that says “You cannot install YOURLS and, say, WordPress, in the same directory” because YOURLS needs its own .htaccess file.  I ignored that and tried anyway. Didn’t work, of course.

I tried to rectify it by reinstalling everything into its own subdirectory (e.g. http://webgrrrl.net/z/), as advised in the FAQ.

Guess what? IT DIDN’T WORK, EITHER!

But then, I had a light-bulb moment — why not set YOURLS up under a subdomain instead?! And that, ladies and gentlemen, did the trick. I hazard a guess that since my WordPress was installed in my root folder, my blog’s mod_rewrite settings were waging war against YOURLS’s, which in turn causes the shortened URL not to work. In any case, I’m fully satisfied with using the domain z.webgrrrl.net for my personal URL shortening service.

I’m currently using YOURLS / z.webgrrrl.net for this blog as well as Blogging Fu. My favourite option in YOURLS is its bookmarklet ability. Whenever I’m on a web page that I want to tweet and get its URL shortened, I just click the bookmarklet on my browser, and it will automatically bring me to z.webgrrrl’s console for me to generate the short URL. Nice.

Hey, by the way, did you get it? z.webgrrrl? As in Ze WebGrrrl? Hahah, hahahah!

I found out about this a couple of days ago through the Top 10 WorPress Plugin Authors post, but only decided to talk about it now, coz this is a scheduled post, muahahahahah!!

I should have felt happier that I ranked in the 200s for the Top Commentators widget, but really, the credit should go to Personal Finance Advisor for developing the original plugin in the first place. The TCW, as I fondly call it, still has bugs to squash, so it’s not perfect. The new update will be published sometime this month, together with the start of the WordPress GEDCOM plugin I plan to develop.

You should really take a look at the Top 1000 list, as they contain some wonderful plugins such as Article Templates, Amazon Reloaded for WordPress, eShop, WordPress Download Monitor, and many more. If you’re creative, a lot of them can be used for your niche sites, either to improve usability or improve SEO!

How’s that for a first post in 2009?

Despite my need to keep this blog lean and mean, I couldn’t help but add more of those wonderful WP plugins into my site. Here are the new additions to my blog plugin family:

1. Ad Rotator — I don’t really sell ads in my site, but it doesn’t hurt to recommend certain products to my blog visitors once in a while, especially those cheap domain deals. I’m not going to say that this plugin is really great, but it’s just enough for what my blog needs. Adman wasn’t for me because it is limited to one type of ad, and relies on that ad’s capability to randomly display different advertisers. AdSense Deluxe plugin wasn’t my choice either because it’s a little too fancy for me. So I ended up with the simple Ad Rotator which randomly selects and displays an ad from a list I have in the text file.
2. Leprakhauns Word Count – This plugin helps you to count the words while you’re typing in your post. Very convenient for my, er, money-making activities let’s just say.
3. Robots Meta — I needed this very useful plugin to hide certain posts from the G-bot by using nofollow and noindex, which would hopefully help me maintain my PageR. If you earn money from posting, you know what I mean.
4. WP Super Cache — I use this to lower the load off my web hosting server. WebGrrrl.net now loads one third faster than normal because of this, or at least that’s what my stats say.
5. Flexi Pages Widget — This widget is used to hide a certain Page from displaying automatically under my 411.

One plugin that went RIP is Dean’s Permalinks Migration, since WordPress version 2.3 and above now has the ability to redirect between those ugly and pretty permalinks within WP.

Those are what’s new in the WordPress Plugins I Use list. Check out my full list if you’re interested.

Hallelujah! I thought I couldn’t complete ironing out the kinks that WP 2.3 blasted on my blog by today, but I finally did it. The new database schemes definitely wreaked havoc on the site, particularly due to my heavy reliance on plugins. Yeah, I know I should have tried the upgrades out in my sandbox before putting the upgrade in production. Blame it on my overconfidence.

I spent most of my time trying to hack the Category Visibility Plugin-RH Rev (CatVis Rev) to no avail. My struggle has mainly to do with modifying the SQL so that the parent-child category support is reflected using the new category tables; now that a category’s parent ID is separated into a different table (term_taxonomy), I needed to do a tricky JOIN statement with the table terms in order for the plugin to function the way it should. I finally surrendered, browsed the 2.3 compatible plugins and got myself the Advanced Category Excluder which, although not as extensive as CatVis Rev, will do just fine for my blog as I only need category filtering on my front page and feeds.

Thank God the Top Commentators Widget is spared from the DB taxonomy change, or else that’s another headache to handle.

If you’re planning on upgrading to 2.3, here are a few handy tips:

1. Download the WordPress Upgrade Preflight Check and run it to identify which existing plugins you have will work or won’t work with 2.3.
2. If you’re unlucky and do have non-compatible plugins, go to the 2.3 Plugin Compatibility list to find out if you can get an alternate plugin that will work as well as your existing one.
3. Do the same with your theme, if you’re not using the default WordPress version or if you didn’t create the theme yourself.
4. Do a back up of both your theme and database before the upgrade; you’ll never know if you need to roll back to the older version if WordPress 2.3 doesn’t work for you. I don’t know of an automated way of downgrading should you need to. The manual way would be (at least that’s how I do it, and takes me around 15 minutes tops):
   1. Deleting all WP files, except wp-config.php file and the wp-content folder.
   2. Uploading your older versions of WP and theme, making sure not to overwrite wp-config.php.
   3. Logging into MySQL, drop all of the newer tables, and restore the backup database.

   If you use CPanel’s Fantastico, even better — just delete the install, including the database, and then re-install the whole thing again and restore your database using MySQL. That should take you about 7 minutes, based on my experience.