wordpress

Lessons From The Website Downtime

April 27, 2019 Happenings

I had a harrowing time during my website downtime which took me by complete surprise. I was trying to understand the issue which was causing the problem and following up with the tech support team was nothing short of a nightmare. Here’s what I learned from my experience.

I wrote about my experience during the server downtime. It seems like a lot of time has passed and I have aged faster. But thank god, it’s just been three days, although the server issues don’t seem likely to be ending anytime soon. Hours after I wrote a long post on yesterday, the website went down again. Honestly, I had reached the end of my daily quota of patience and I wasn’t sure what support was the technical staff at Bluehost offering me. Last night, a scan was initiated and a malware infection was discovered on the server. A load of malicious .php files were scrupulously dumped in different folders on my site and I was tasked with deleting the garbage. To make the matters worse, the agents had duplicated the root folder so there were duplicates of the infected files that I had to remove. Bravo!

The site went down in less than 4 hours of cleaning the server of the malware infection, then rescanning it for any infected files — I’m still not told how the files got infected though I would see myself just staring at a white browser screen with every refresh. So instead of getting on the live chat and cutting corners, I spent the next hour on the phone speaking with the technical support. He found some plugins that were interfering with the functioning of the site. I had heard that statement so many times in the past 24 hours, but he deactivated the entire list of plugins, that resulted in my site going down again and the white screen reappeared. Then he brought the site up through writing some code in the .htaccess file but I could only see the textual content, not the beautiful theme that I had painstakingly worked on for the past many years. He advised me to activate one plugin at a time and check the website to see if it comes online, to find out the irksome plugin. That exercise took me another hour, in between all the other stuff that I had to complete before the day ended. With the instigating piece of code out of the way the site went up but only the textual version.

I went on the live chat again with the tech-support. This time my site was up and I wanted the theme back, and trust me, I was completely spent by now. I don’t know why but the agents had reinstalled WordPress, just too many times. I later found copies of older versions of zipped WordPress installation files in the File Manager suggesting, the tech support team had tried every trick in the manual to bring the site up. It was closer to midnight, yesterday when the website came up finally after a gruelling ordeal which lasted 3 days! Importantly, the website was online overnight, this hasn’t happened in more than 3 days and that was good news.

There are some positive lessons I learned from this morbid experience which I wanted to document.

Continue reading…

Reviving The Blogroll Exchange

December 23, 2018 General
Revival of Blogroll

Surely the idea of a blogroll has missed some of you today. The early age of the Internet after the dot-com bubble burst ushered users into the participatory ‘Web 2.0’ era. This was also the time when internet users began collaborating and sharing content and ideas through wikis, social networking, blogs, and so on. In particularly with the blogs there is a small but significant feature called the ‘blogroll’ which is a collection of useful links, not exclusive to blogging per se, but the act of ‘blogrolling‘ would mean collecting, displaying and reciprocating with links on the respective blogs. As many would have imagined this traditional source of sharing ideas and uniting thoughts has taken a beating in all the meaningless social media narrative going around, although, with some help from outside, I am looking to revive it on my website here.

The Idea of Blogrolling

A blogroll makes it easier for like-minded blogs to thrive in a diverse Internet ecosystem. The newspaper media has changed the culture of blogging by transforming the platform into a content management system but there are other individuals who utilize their blogs in delivering content that’s relevant to the specified markets. I, being one of those individuals, look at blogging as a means of connecting a majority of design enthusiasts in developing a close relationship with the principles of human-centred design, and the cultures which are being invariably influenced by the advent of technology. For me, personally, I think blogrolling would help me to connect with other individuals who believe in fundamentally reciprocating my thoughts and acknowledging each other’s commitment to their respective streams of thought and audiences. In a nutshell, it’d help to create a community, exchange thoughts and ideas, and build a rapport with the hidden world.

What’s a Blogroll?

A blogroll is a list of links provided on a blog to other websites, especially to other blogs or sites with regularly updated content. It helps blog authors to establish and build a blogger community although in Web 1.0 terminology, a blogroll would be equivalent to a list of hyperlinks on a personal Web page.

Reviving The Blogroll

Needless to say, but I was once a part of a thriving community of designers and it was the most enriching experience of my life. That reality was permanently altered by social media, although social networking alone has significantly connected people more than ever before it has also become synonymous with sharing content en masse at the cost of sacrificing privacy. It might have also affected our ability to produce meaningful content and the frequency with which we produce such content. Blogrolling aims in not just connecting bloggers but also to motivate them in continuing to publish fresh and content on a range of intellectual topics. Hopefully, in the near future, the blogroll feature would make an emphatic comeback and it’d exist on this website too. And someday we might judge our websites on the basis of who’s listed on our respective blogrolls.

Gutenberg & The Era of Modern Editing

August 6, 2018 Happenings Technology
Gutenberg - WordPress

WordPress launched a sleek visual editor and named it after the German publisher Johannes Gutenberg who introduced the printing press in Europe in the 15th century, I thought that naming by WordPress is quite an oxymoron! This would only be my second post in Gutenberg, and ever since I have embraced WordPress blogging as a regular activity I’ve considered it as an art form of composing thoughts that are interspersed with emotions and delivered through phrases. Others might simply label this creative outfall as ‘content’. That it requires the blogger to reconcile with the technology & design first is only a part of a challenging journey in publishing a blog post. But it cannot, rather, technology should not make it any more complicated in putting at risk a writer’s heartfelt endeavour. What about the non-techies then? Bottomline, blogging platforms should aim to minimize any barriers, minimize fuss, and allow writers in publishing their views creatively & constructively.

It’s time to hail WordPress for achieving this goal and for introducing Gutenberg’ which I was amazed to ‘test-drive’ in their latest update. It’s also available as a plugin although Gutenberg would be a standard feature with the future release of WordPress 5.0. Least to say, when I thought about how the Classic editor could be further enhanced WordPress has just provided a modern & sleek replacement. Firstly, I’ve taken a fancy to the metaphor of ‘blocks’ as a WYSIWYG feature, these are movable containers carrying media such as images, audio, gallery, paragraphs, etc., (ah! similar to Gutenberg’s ‘movable type’ printing press) and each block which can be individually customized. In contrast, the Classic editor treated the entire post as a single structure and all media had to be inserted & refined from the toolbar. The other attribute which stood out for me was the often used ‘link’ feature which has now become more focused and it’s easier to choose whether or not a link should open in a new window. I’m pretty certain in the coming days these collective features would provide a new visual language to the blog posts here. I’m certainly open to experimenting in the coming days.

That being said, although there are some glitches and I’m still learning the ropes, I am particularly eager to see how the other taskbar functions through third-party plugins would be integrated within Gutenberg (or not!!). With that, I’d like to say that WordPress has become a robust, most widely-used blogging platform which is why it should now aim to integrate popular blogging features into its core program, such as SEO or web analytics which are currently being delivered through third-party plugins. This would not only provide efficiency to the non-techie bloggers, it’d drastically minimize security concerns, make the platform faster, and enable WordPress to become a clear alternative to the competition.

Goodbye, Dear Mint!

November 9, 2017 Technology

Last week, with a heavy heart, I removed the Mint Bird Feeder plugin from my site which effectively disconnected my site from providing ‘Mint’ the analytics for one final time. I was left with no choice and here’s why I did what I did.

I remember clearly, I was mesmerized by Mint when it was launched in the last decade. I’m talking about a pre-social media era where blogging was the absolute norm in reaching out to the world. But what seemed important to me was the analytics part. This was the time when Google had not yet launched their Analytics product which gave me raw numbers on page views, geographical visits, etc. I had other analytics software at my disposal which helped me feel the pulse of my audience and to gauge the popularity of my writing. So when Mint was developed and launched by Shaun Inman I bought the product without thinking over it twice.

Last week things started going downhill. I wasn’t able to log into my website Dashboard and I began to worry, that’s when I got in touch with Bluehost and asked them to take a look. It was found that the ‘Mint Bird Feeder’ plug-in was the root cause of the issue and they deactivated it pronto. I was aware that the product development of Mint has ceased with Shaun moving on to other ventures and I did not want to compromise the security of my site and so I removed it completely. Furthermore, the developer of the said plugin hadn’t updated it in over 2 years.

Quite frankly, I had a wonderful time with Mint and some third-party plugins (branded as ‘Peppermint’) as long as they lasted. Given the obvious vagaries of the programming world, I took up the challenge of installing Mint and succeeded, until Google Analytics came along and disrupted the fragmented web analytics product industry forever, in the process, creating an entirely new segment of ‘digital marketing’ and ‘SEO’! But I’ll always be thankful to Shaun for giving me an amazing product experience with Mint and Peppermill. Goodbye, and good luck!

Time For a Fresh WordPress Theme?

January 31, 2016 Design General

I have mulled to change the current WordPress theme, and it’s not an easy task. In 2014, I chose this design for its RWD capabilities and simply loved it. Almost 2 years later, and after many design analysis, I have realised the flaws which are crucial, not just for the visitors but for me as a designer. Here’s what I have found with my review and why I need changes in the theme desperately.

Search
The all-important search functionality lies buried under a cryptic ‘folder’ icon and glancing at my analytics, not many users have ‘cracked the code’. It’s a worrisome situation if users have to first find the search function, before looking for information.

Font Customization
Despite the Easy Google Fonts plugin, I find it hard to change the font for the H1 tag unless if I edit the stylesheet within the WordPress system (which is very meh!). The one way I can bring subtle changes to the theme and effect a better user-experience is by toying with the typography. I quite frankly want to move away from the current typeface used for H1. I even started a thread on WordPress Support forums for help which is lying ‘dead’.

Featured Image
I think a large featured image is an absolute overkill for a write-up. Unfortunately, for my limited coding skills, I would rather change the theme. Besides, I really don’t need large images to convey meanings.

Blockquotes
Simply large and bloated, and I would appreciate a more subtle approach.

Challenges with New Theme
I’m looking for a new minimalist theme and this is taking time. A changed theme means a new experience for the user, a fresh learning curve. I also have no idea what happens to the design of the posts (i.e. the large featured images) when the new theme takes over. Hopefully, we will know soon.

Lastly, Designing from Scratch
My first priority is to design an original theme. Considering the challenges and limitations, I’m keeping all fingers crossed for now.