Free monthly premium wordpress themes

I found this via a Twitter post and was thrilled that they had some beautiful premium wordpress themes which you can download for free. Follow the other links and you find AudioJungle free download of audios that you can use for podcasts or videos.

Problems uploading images in WP 2.7

I have been trying to upload images to a site which is on Wordpress 2.7 using the Arthemia theme. The problem I was having using the media uploader was that after I uploaded the image, it went to the gallery. I could see that the file had uploaded to the uploads folder. The only problem was that when I went to insert it into the post,the screen went blank and nothing happened.

This was obviously a common problem and there are numerous posts about this on the net and support forum. One of the issues might be incompatible plugins which interfere with the adding images process. These have been identified as:

NextGen Gallery
Bad behaviour
WP-Amazon
CommentLuv

There are probably more but these are teh most common ones so far.

Unfortunately, even after disabling all the plugins, it did not help . I could still not upload any images.

The next thing to try was to make the htaccess changes as suggested by this post.

I also tried the suggestions on here Nothing worked.

In the end, I decided that it was something to do with the theme and the version of wordpress. I was using 2.7. Am now upgrading to 2.8 and switching to a theme where it is tried and tested with lots of support. Sometimes you just can’t fight the code, make your own life easier and go with the simplest option.

How to increase the items in Edit Post Page in WP2.7

I was struggling to bulk edit my posts to add tags and reassign categories with each search only showing a maximum of 15 items. It was taking me ages to scroll through multiple pages to update my posts. There had to be a simple solution to change this setting in Wordpress 2.7. It took a lot of searching to find the hack to fix this, but here it is:

1. Open the file manager in your Hosting control panel.
2. Find the this file wp-admin/includes/post.php
3. You need to find this code

wp(”post_type=post&what_to_show=posts$post_status_q&posts_per_page=15&order=$order&orderby=$orderby”);

Its about the 805th line in wordpress 2.7, line number might be different in different versions, so better find (CTRL+F) the line of code above in wp-admin/includes/post.php

Replace 15 in posts_per_page=15 by some higher number you like, I made it 50.

4. Save the file and exit. Voila, much less work to bulk edit now.

Using Amazon S3 for hosting media files

What is Amazon S3?

AmazonS3 is an innovative, developer-oriented Simple Storage Service with extremely low prices.

This is how it has been described: “Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.”

You are billed monthly based on the bandwidth used – $0.15 per GB stored, $0.10 per GB transferred monthly. This is a great alternative if you are paying hefty monthly Hosting fees to store video files which are not used very much monthly.

What can you store on S3:

* Audio files
* Media files
* Podcast files
* photos
* Backup you hard drive

Why should you use S3:

* Amazon S3 is cheap.
* It’s scalable – use as much or as little storage and bandwidth as you want.
* Easy to use with the Firefox addon interface – see below.
* Everyone can use S3 – while it was built for developers, it is now widely used by anyone who needs a secure and simple Hosting solution.
* Your data is safe as S3 is an Amazon service. Amazon is also a brand name that people recognise so it can add kudo’s to your content.
* S3 is more reliable than a homebuilt server or cheap web Hosting account.

How to use Amazon S3

1. You need to go and set up an account at Amazon Web Services.
2. Then you need to download this free Firefox Addon, which looks like an FTP screen, which helps you manage your file transfers. This is better than other paid tools out there that do the same job.

Essential Wordpress Plugin to protect your media files.

If you do use Amazon S3 to host information that you sell either as an online course or for a membership site, you need to think about protecting this IP. One way that I have found to do this so far is to use this clever Wordpress plugin: S3FlowShield. This plugin encrypts the files and paths of files stored on AmazonS3.

If you want to learn more about using AmazonS3 and how to protect your media files from being downloaded illegally, here is a free webinar on S3FlowShield.

The good and bad of Wordpress 2.7

I have been working on a new site on WP 2.7 and there are some gripes. The way the have laid out the new page takes a while to get used to. The side bar navigation is a bit better but there is a lot of scrolling and does take time to find what you need.

I do like the new quick edit function under Manage Posts. This does make it easier to edit categories and tags.

New sticky post feature is a welcome addition as the old WP-Sticky plugin never worked for me and the manual tweak of changing post dates and times was way to fiddly to be worth it.

One big gripe is the lost of the edit post slug function which used to be under the Post Title. This has since disappeared, from my version at least. I can’t find it anywhere which is truly annoying.

The Polldaddy addition is a nice touch which simplifies adding polls to your blog but takes a bit of tweaking and set up.

I did find a great post identifying some of the new features here in more detail.

Am still exploring and am still trying to get over the loss of usage of some of my favorite plugins, making blogging a great deal more hassle. If you have any great finds or tips on WP2.7, please share.

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