Wordpress

How to connect to Google Cloud Platform web server via FTP?

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With the absence of CPanel, managing your website on Google Cloud Platform is a bit tricky. Nevertheless, you’ll find that an FTP or SFTP connection to your web server will come in handy especially when you have plugins and PHP functions that break your WordPress website.

Here is the tutorial I followed and that worked for my case in connecting Filezilla on my desktop PC to my Google Cloud Platform web/file server:

Once you’re connected, you can find your WordPress installation in: /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs. This location is valid if you installed WordPress via the WordPress Certified by Bitnami and Automattic software from the GCP Marketplace.

Filezilla and Putty Key Generator are safe applications if you downloaded them from valid websites.

Looking Back at 14 Years of Deuts.NET

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I’ve just finished migrating my blog from WordPress.com to Google Cloud Platform. Along this process, I needed to do some housekeeping, and check for broken links. Thus, the Broken Link Checker plugin.

I was particularly interested in intra-site links especially images that might have been broken through the years. But I was greeted as well by broken external links, hundreds of them:

Websites, blogs, and pages that are relevant at that time, but eventually faded into obscurity. Those are the websites that Deuts.NET survived. If you look at the sidebar, you’ll see the long list of archive links. That makes up 14 and a half years of Deuts.NET. Looking forward to 14 more years to come.

The WordPress Bloat — Ten Years Later

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Dumitru Brinzan of ilovewp.com writes:

Currently WordPress powers over 60 million websites, that is an estimated ~33% of the Internet. Some of these websites are large websites with tens of thousands of content pages. But a vast majority of WordPress websites are run by regular people and small businesses, many of them with probably less than 20 pages of content.

Now imagine that these millions of WordPress websites rely on thousands upon thousands of files, hundreds of megabytes worth of scripts and libraries, just to output a few hundred of cached kilobytes of “Hello World” content.

This has been my predicament 10 years ago. If I thought WordPress was bloated back then, more so it is now! My suggestion: have a 1.) WordPress full install script and 2.) WordPress core (or call it WordPress Lite, if you will), taking away functionalities like Gutenberg, Custom Post Types and Formats, and Multi-Site support.

Gutenberg is the WordPress Editor We Don’t Need!

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I was surprised to find out when adding a new entry to one of my self-hosted WordPress blog that the back-end interface has totally changed. And it was not for the better. It was not at all intuitive. I hate it! I learned it was called Gutenberg.

Searching around, I understood why WordPress has to do this, WordPress wants to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, where users simply upload a media, add some text, and go! While mobile, using touch.

If I want to do some quick posts, I’d do that on Facebook and/or Twitter. For lengthy texts and explanations, WordPress is the way to go. And I don’t need those pointless blocks that break in the first place to do that!

So please, WordPress, don’t ruin our experience. Stop using Gutenberg as the default editor in the self-hosted WordPress blogs, and don’t you dare remove the classic editor option here in WordPress.com.

Web Hosting

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So, let me just rant a little.

Aren’t there really a cheap but reliable web hosting anymore? I understand that hosting costs (especially maintenance costs) would have gone up from all these years. But I’m sure these web hosting providers would have benefited from economies of scale. Plus, hardware prices would have dropped dramatically from say 15 years ago.

But web hosting prices are going up nevertheless. Take A Small Orange for example. It used to be my favorite — it used to have a $25 per year starter plan. Now, plans start at $5.92 per month, and the regular plan at $8 per month.

Yes, you get what you pay for. But I’m not keeping a busy website anyway, just trying to maintain a “not so dormant” but a “special to me” website.

Colinear WordPress Theme and the broken ‘Related Posts’ section

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Update (September 11, 2015): I submitted a ticket to WordPress Support about this issue, and it appears they have acted upon it promptly. Kudos to a certain David who responded to my ticket. The related posts section design is now fixed in Firefox.

I’m using the Colinear theme right now, and so far I’m loving it–except for the broken design when using a ‘large and visually striking layout’ in the related posts section.

Here’s the screenshot of the options window complete with the preview of how it is supposed to look like:

related-posts-preview

And this is how it actually looks like: …

Colinear WordPress Theme and the broken ‘Related Posts’ sectionRead More »

‘Featured Images’ is a WordPress feature that badly needs fixing

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We’ve seen WordPress improve over the years. Unfortunately, not all these improvements help better our experience. Indeed, you cannot please everyone.

Take for example the Featured Images feature. A lot of themes display the Featured Image, should you have tagged one in your post, as is right before or after the post title. These are not magazine-style themes and the featured image is presented nowhere near special at all. Why didn’t they just remove it altogether?

Below is a screenshot of my blog post with a Featured Image using Colinear theme: …

‘Featured Images’ is a WordPress feature that badly needs fixingRead More »

Successful Transfer of Blog to WordPress.com

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After so many years (7 and a half years) of self-hosting this blog, I’ve decided to move it WordPress.com.

That way it would be:

  • Cheaper — I have to spend for the domain mapping ($13) and registration only per year;
  • More Secure — I have 2-step authentication in place;
  • Less Downtime — I suppose, it’s WordPress.com for speaking out loud!
  • Free Storage — I don’t think I’ll be able to use all the free 3GB of allowed images by the service — for the life of this blog.
  • It’s here to stay — Again, I suppose. WordPress has been challenged by so many but it will be here to stay.

I have always aimed for the minimalist design. I’m tired of fully customizing my blog. I just want a simple blog that I can write everything that interests me.

…

Successful Transfer of Blog to WordPress.comRead More »

Ghost – just a blogging platform

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ghost_blogging

From the Features page:

A beautifully designed platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing.

Ghost is an Open Source application which allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It’s simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time making your blog work and more time blogging.

This is exactly what I have been referring to when I said WordPress has somehow become bloated. I just wish I can spend less time making my blog work and more time blogging.

I hope the Ghost project pans out — and they offer a way to import a WordPress blog. 😛

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