smart computer use?

Nice little bug here. I’m sure if you are reading this you may be looking for a solution to the problem you are having with updating your Wordpress categories.

I’ll let you know what worked for me.

I was trying to update a category named “Computer Hardware” with a slug of “computer-hardware” to read “Hardware” with a slug of “hardware”. Easy enough, right? Well, Wordpress just told me “Category Not Updated” and left it at that.

After some good ol’ Google searching, I found that there seem to be numerous reasons why people think they might be getting the error. The reason I couldn’t update my category, in particular, was because I had a tag with the same name and slug as what I was trying to update the category to. Meaning, I had a tag named “Hardware” with a slug of “hardware”.

I deleted that tag and then I was able to change my category name to “Hardware” with a slug of “hardware”. Dumb. But it worked. I would think Wordpress would cook up a solution to this bug soon as there is a lot of buzz out there about this issue.

Hopefully this helps somebody.

Over at ThouShallBlog.com, there is a nice list of 20 reasons why they choose Wordpress. Great reasons. All of them. I agree with every single reason, as a Wordpress user.

It includes some of the obvious awesome reasons such as low maintenance, great SEO capabilities, open source (free) and on and on. But seeing all the reasons lined up in a list of 20 is pretty impressive. It just solidifies how great Wordpress has become over the years.

Head over there and read the list. If you haven’t given Wordpress a look you just might after reading this.

Yeah! I’m just testing this out.

Well, it appears to work. I’ve just installed the WP to Twitter plugin and have posted this blog post automatically to Twitter. Great stuff!

This wasn’t the first one I tried. I also tried the Twitter Updater plugin, but it didn’t want to work and I couldn’t get any posts to go to Twitter. Oh well. Not sure what was wrong with it, but who knows.

Good to go! I can definitely recommend the WP to Twitter plugin, based on my own experience. It looks like it has a lot of options and worked on my first try. It uses the Cli.gs url shortening service as well. You’ll need to get an API key to make it work but it’s free to sign up for an account. It only took me about 2 minutes to make an account at Cli.gs and then get an API key.

I’m not sure how this one slipped by me, as I use Wordpress pretty much every day. A co-worker pointed out to me that there was a Wordpress.tv now online. Yeah!

Online video for the purpose of learning how to use Wordpress to it’s maximum benefit is great. At the office we frequently need to figure out how to better train people how to use Wordpress, and this new video resource at Wordpress.tv fits very nicely for that purpose.

There is video content teaching the the most basic of Wordpress operations, such as creating a new post, all the way to technical stuff such as installing Wordpress on a local WampServer.

I tend to like to read content more than watching videos myself, but I’m slowly warming up to the idea of watching videos on the web for learning purposes. I can’t skim as easily through a video, and need to learn some patience, but watching a video can go into much more visual detail when required, which can help greatly in learning processes.

Another thing I should mention is that I find Wordpress.tv to be a great model for video blogs. It has a simple and clean layout, is easy to navigate, and puts all the focus on the video content and the followup comments. Good stuff.

I think I like this one the most, out of all the Wordpress plugins I have installed and used. This really just does take the pain out of keeping Wordpress blogs updated. The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. Sweet words to my ears.

Really handy if managing many blogs

I think that the importance of using this plugin is magnfied if trying to manage many installations of Wordpress. Many sites will mean many upgrade procedures each time Wordpress releases a new version, which seems to be quite often and annoying to Wordpress users these days, really.

Just being able to make a few clicks to update a blog to the new version takes the pain out of the updating process.

Downloading new files, uploading to web server, running any scripts if necessary, disabling/reabling all plugins… stuff like that gets old fast. This plugin does it all for you. I like it.

Why my favorite?

Because of the fact that it seems that it is the plugin I interact with or come to appreciate the most on a regular basis. Sure, I like Google XML sitemaps for creating maps of my site easily, or even the Wordpress database backup plugin which magically emails me database backups, this one upgrade related plugin is just my prominent fav.