A quick overview of our social channels:
Our Social accounts
Leave a Reply
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 the WordPress ‘Show recent comments’ plugin world and amazingly there wasn’t much around. There’s a brief review of what’s available below.
WP Tab Widget was my first choice as it used AJAX to load the comment (keeping page load times as short as possible), but I found that it gave a “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error”, which I’d never see in WordPress before. I’ve put a report in about it to see if it can be resolved.
As a stand-in I installed the ‘Decent Comments‘ plugin which has worked very efficiently, loading pages quickly each time. Only thing is that it’s styling isn’t great. This might be alterable with attention.
Quick review of available show recent comments plugins
WP Tab Widget
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-tab-widget/screenshots/
Looks perfect
AJAX loading of comments
Crashes on Activations
Decent Comments
Last Updated: 3 months ago
Don’t think it’s AJAX
Better WordPress Recent Comments
Not updated for Two years
Popular Widget
Perhaps not AJAX
Not updated for 10 month
Display looks old fashioned
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 move (walking, bus, Island Line (for sure!)).
To address this, we’ve increased the font size of headline (on the front page), as well as in the actual articles.
People have now got used to using their thumb to scroll up pages on Mobiles, so the fact a large font produces a longer page shouldn’t be an issue.
We’ve dropped the excerpt text beyond the top story as well on the Home page. Two reasons – the headline font size has taken up a lot of space, and we want to read the story, not just the excerpt.
We’ve made a few other text size tweaks witha goal of genearlly making the site easier to interacti with while on the mobile – or lazing on the sofa at home.
Added Magnify glass to expandable images
We’ve been adding ‘Click on the image to see a large version’ above photos that were being displayed through our impressive FooBox image handler.
We thought, “There’s got to be a better way.”
Inspired by sites like Jalopnik, we’ve worked with Brad from FooxPlugins (who has been so helpful it’s been a dream) we’ve now just made code live on OnTheWight that fades in a magnifying glass in the top left corner of an image when the reader’s cursor is placed over it.
Pleased with the results.
WhatsApp share button joins our dedicated Mobile site
On Christmas Eve we (very) quietly released our dedicated Mobile version of OnTheWight.
For many years we’ve had an Responsive Website – ie it automatically resizes depending on the width of the screen looking at it. It worked well, but after a chat with Joseph Moore, we felt there was more to do.
Joseph’s approach was ‘Strip it all back and just deliver what’s needed for that device at that time’. His fantastic efforts on it have given us a mobile experience that loads near instantly. It’s highly impressive.
WhatsApp share button
Last night – as our first use of the new Github approach to coding – we made live our latest tweak to the mobile version – A WhatsApp share button to join the others that are ever-present at the bottom of the screen of a mobile.
We’ve been running separate WhatsApp trial for distributing our News story, but this lets the reader share the story themselves to their friends.
Now using Github for WordPress template code
Thanks to the generosity of Joseph Moore, giving his time to help/make us understand the philosophy and practical steps of using Git, in particular Github, we now have a structure to the development of our WordPress template code.
If those words – Git, Github – don’t mean anything to you, they might well do in the future.
Control over changes
Git is a way to strictly control changes over things. I use the all-encompassing ‘things’ because it not just code (Git’s roots), because graphics and other files can be included. It’s also not just code. Git is also expanding beyond its familiar use in code, to other writing as well, as demonstrated by GitBook.
We’re using it to control the version of code and graphics that make up our WordPress template – and hence the display of our publication to the public. Initially our mobile-specific WP theme.
It brings the discipline to ensure that any changes made to the template are incremental, while bringing added advantages like you don’t litter the code with changes comments. It also brings the advantage of a central backup of the code.
Branching
‘Branching’ is intrinsic with this Version Control (which Git is an instance of), meaning that code can be safely developed by more than one person, in more than one location, without those distributed changes overwriting each other.
Facebook badge in ad spot trial
We have the luxury of many page views, so are trying a little experiment.
We previously used to have the FB Like badge on the page, but removed it after we found it could have quite an impact on the page being delivered quickly. Its performance seems to have increased over time.
Why this badge?
I feel the major advantage of this badge over others is that it shows the faces of your FB friends that like the page, so giving reassurance/encouragement to also connect.
Its placement, where there are usually adverts, could also encourage people to pay more attention to that space, rather then just assuming that it will be an advert there.
On a very low rotation we’re placing the Facebook Badge (generated here) in our top MPU slot.
We’ll monitor for any increase in FB Like/signup rates.
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 of items and the ability to have multiple tabs, giving us the ability to show event on Today or Tomorrow.
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, to increase re-use. Display the date of the articles?
Dropping /YYYY/MM/DD from WordPress URL and successfully redirecting
I wanted to drop the Year / Month / Date part of the URL from the Cafe Scientifique site, so what would previously have been
http://cafescientifique.onthewight.com/2014/06/11/barry-arnold-story-chocolate-science-serendipity/
becomes
Barry Arnold: The story of Chocolate: Science and Serendipity
We just didn’t need to know in the URL what the date of the posting was.
Not wanting to lose any URLs that might have been referenced elsewhere, a Redirect Rule was needed.
RegExp code for Redirect Rule
John P. Gamboa and James Gardner at WPE were heroes forming the RegExp needed to do they job. We ended up with
Source: ^/(\d*)/(\d*)/(\d*)/(.*)/?$
Destination: /$4
Domain Wildcards: cafescientifique.onthewight.com
As James pointed out, it was the fourth string that we needed to be used.
Permalink Setting has to be changes from ‘Day and Name’ to ‘Post name’ as well (of course!).
It working
So now
http://cafescientifique.onthewight.com/2014/06/11/barry-arnold-story-chocolate-science-serendipity/
resolves to
http://cafescientifique.onthewight.com/barry-arnold-story-chocolate-science-serendipity/
and none of the other subdomains are affected. Perfect.