Tag: Wordpress

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

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

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.

What Happens Now to Tumblr?

It has been like 3 months since Matt Mullenweg announced that Automattic acquired Tumblr. Until now, though, I have not seen any developments in my Tumblr Dashboard, nor any announcement for plans by Automattic on what to actually do with Tumblr. So what now? What current Tumblr functionalities will be dropped, and which WordPress features will be added?

The WordPress Bloat — Ten Years Later

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!

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

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.

Happy 10 Years!

10-years

Today marks the 10th year of existence of Deuts.NET. I registered this domain name on May 17, 2006 — check the whois.

I’m sure we’ve seen better days in blogging, when I used to post a lot more often, and daily traffic was much better. Perhaps, those were the glory days of blogging — before Facebook even came around. Continue reading

Colinear WordPress Theme and the broken ‘Related Posts’ section

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: Continue reading

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

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: Continue reading