The *inside word on what’s happening with OnTheWight’s sites
(*Long neglected)
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Our Social accounts
A quick overview of our social channels:- Facebook Twitter Instagram Flickr Group Vine Pintrest
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WordPress Recent Comment plugins: Review
We’ve been using WP-RecentComments plugin for a long time (despite it not have been updated for 2+ years), but since WP has upgrade to 4.2.4, it’s been de-activating itself every five minutes – literately – so Reader’s comment not appear on the home page. This has led to a drop in commenting. I looked around…
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Mobile version enhanced
We’ve been running the new(ish) dedicated mobile version for a while now, so we thought we’d tighten up the design a little. Reading articles on a mobile is different, as is obvious to all the screen size is oftne much reduced, so text appears small, making it hard to read, particualrly if you’re on the…
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Added Magnify glass to expandable images
New CSS will automatically show a magnifying glass in the top left on images that can be viewed larger.
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Now using Github for WordPress template code
Version control of our code brings security of the code and a discipline to changes.
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Facebook badge in ad spot trial
We’re going to test to see if the Facebook Badge with friends faces gives an uplift in Likes.
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WordPress Plugin to display multiple RSS feed in widget
We had a problem with the way the RSS feed from our Isle of Wight events site was showing – with only yesterday events displaying. A quick search online pointed to perhaps a problem with the default WordPress RSS widget. I found Super RSS Reader 2.5 as a replacement. Lots more function, including scrolling list…
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Only recent ‘Other stories …’
Following a reader’s request, we reduced how ‘old’ the articles show in the ‘Other stories …’ section under each article. Previously we went pretty deep – at four year I think. We’ve now reduced this to two months to increase relevance. We should perhaps be thinking of a way to make readers aware of this,…
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Dropping /YYYY/MM/DD from WordPress URL and successfully redirecting
How to get rid of your Day and Name Permalink structure in Wordpress and redirect old URLs successfully.
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How to merge or change a WordPress Category to a Tag
Edit Category – Copy out text of Description / SEO fields in to a text editor (This can/will be lost in the conversion) _Setup redirect rule for old category eg to Forward http://onthewight.com/business/solent-lep/ to http://onthewight.com/about/solent-lep/ Use: Source as ^/business/solent-lep/$ Destination as /about/solent-lep/ _The conversion Enable Taxonomy Converter plugin Select ‘Convert’ and tick ‘Tags’ Pick the…
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New ad formats
We think this new ad format will appeal to reader while not being intrusive.
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Mobile version now working properly
For a long time we’ve had a template that hasn’t worked properly on Mobiles, partially down to the Template, but also, as all-around CSS Hero Joseph found out, was down to our Geo-location plugin. As we’d soft-set our map to be 500px wide, it was demanding that space, even if a map wasn’t being shown.…
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Tiding up Google Webmaster errors
We had over 1,200 ‘Not found’ links being reported by Google Webmasters tool. Have reduced this to 168. A large amount of them was /tag/ links. Created a server redirect to point them to about. We used to use a little URL redirect program, redir.php, so have manually edited out all references to this now.…
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Graphing data made easier with dataWrapper
We’ve been wanting to display our numeric data in a more attractive way for a long time. Over the last couple of months we’ve been trying out DataWrapper and today we got a chance to use it live on a story about the amount of money that the IW council spends on media in a…
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Dropping nRelate plugin
We’ve had to de-active the nRelate plugin on the main site. It’s a shame, because we started using it from their very earliest days (before they became big), but it’s simply stopped working. The ‘related’ posts that it brings up are the same for each article. We’ve tried upgrading the plug-in and using the nRelated…
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Armchair Auditor revamp
wightgeek has done great work in seamlessly moving the Armchair Auditor site to an even faster server. The performance is blistering.
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Rejig of OnTheWight front page
We’d noticed that the Home page of OnTheWight has been taking longer to load. This evening we’ve had a change around, removing the Facebook, Twitter and Flickr Widgets from the home page. We’re dropped two of the sliders – Film & Book reviews – from the bottom of the phone page and reduced the number…
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Events On The Wight: New Publication
There are so many events going on across the Isle of Wight, we’re going to have a site _just_ for events. You won’t be surprised to hear that it’s called Events On The Wight. We’ve got loads of work to do setting it up, so are battening down the hatches and getting on with it.…
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Valentines.OnTheWight Launches
Second magazine ready for the World … well the Isle of Wight at least. Valentines.OnTheWight is, not surprisingly, about the things that you’ll need for making your Valentine happy on the Isle of Wight. Again, a mountain of work to get the information about shops and businesses collected, but all entered and ready to be…
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Christmas.OnTheWight Soft Launched
Wow … we’ve been knocking our socks off to get Christmas.OnTheWight ready for launch. As it’s our first OnTheWight site, it’s been tons of works, but it’s come together well and is finally ready for the world to see. We’re soft launching it, quiet style. Hope you enjoy it.