If I wasn’t paying attention, how did I find out, you ask? I planned a sale on my jewelry website, only to find out it had been hacked. And so began my two month journey to remove/replace all the hacked code across my websites.

When I finally had a chance to start working on the jewelry website (because as is the plight of an independent contractor, clients come first always), I was able to migrate it from Textpattern to WordPress, but not without some trouble. The latest of which was fixing a discrepancy with post comment counts in WordPress.

I originally tried a few solutions, but myPHPAdmin was yelling at me… it didn’t like how the SQL was formatted for making the updates. Another quick search and I found this post: Reseting Post and Comment Count in WordPress by Ankur Banerjee. He wasn’t sure that it would function on everyone’s servers due to timeout settings, but it worked like a charm for me.

How about you out there porting from Textpattern to WordPress… What issues did you encounter that were not easily handled by the Textpattern importer plugin in WordPress?

We know that Textpattern relies heavily on sections. Traditionally, if you want to setup one section of your site as the blog, the RSS functionality for Textpattern will only add articles for that particular section. So what happens when you want to combine two or more sections into one RSS feed? Previously, you were out of luck…that is, until the aks_header plugin came along.

With this plugin, you can group sections into one feed. Exactly what I needed to do with the A Pretty Rock website, to allow feeding one RSS feed to NetworkedBlogs for its Facebook Fan page. It works great!

Want to learn how to do this yourself? Read this excellent article: Create and customize your own RSS feeds. It explains a method using the plugin aks_header to group and manage RSS feeds like ordinary Textpattern articles. Note that the Textpattern tag, “txp_article_custom”, permits the use of comma separated list of sections, which is how you get your feed to pull from more than one section.

Problem solved!

Here is the second one in the series of projects I’ve had on the backburner. If you’re looking for a Halloween costume, go check it out!

I don’t get very many opportunities to play around with personal projects, so I’m very glad to announce the completion of this website. If you’re looking for a Halloween costume, go check it out!

Just finished a website for my church, Family By Faith Worship Center. It’s a Flash movie that defines what adoption means to them. Go check it out!

reCAPTCHA is a free service that takes CAPTCHA one step further. If you’re not familiar with a CAPTCHA, it’s a program that helps control the amount of spam received through web forms by generating tests that humans, but not computers, can pass. For example, when you visit a blog to comment and you are asked to type out a set of words, numbers, or phrase in order to submit your comment, that is a CAPTCHA.

What makes reCAPTCHA different is that they are using these web forms to help digitize material like books, newspapers and radio shows. By having humans process words that current computers find difficult reading, they are processing internet archives and old editions of the New York Times, for starters. I think this is one of the neatest ideas I’ve heard all week.

Check out this ScienCentral video explaining reCAPTCHA:

They have application plugins for WordPress, Movable Type, and Joomla among several others. Go check them out!

Have any other spam control plug-ins or addons I should consider? Let me know below!

One of the services I’ve recently started providing is what I like to call “Blog Management“. Basically, you send me your original content in whatever format you have it saved – be that a Word document, a PDF file, an Excel spreadsheet, the restaurant napkin, whatever. I then scour through it for editing and split it up into blog posts that I leave scheduled on your blog according to your posting schedule.

With that service, I also keep an eye out on what is going on with your company on the Internet to supplement your content with other information related to you or your business. This works well for many companies, especially small business owners who are wearing more than one hat, if you know what I mean.

Since I provide this service of reading through documents and creating blog posts from my client’s content, you would think that when it comes time to blog on my own web sites, it would be a piece of cake. Let me tell you…that is far from the case.

After hemming and hawing regarding content, I usually end up not writing a thing. (Hence my lack of blog posts, but that’s neither here nor there.)

But have no fear! I ran across this excellent blog post for those of us having trouble coming up with new content. You can check it out here: Creating New Blog Content – A Simple Guide. An excellent way to approach content for your blog or web site for those times you are just stuck on writing your next words.

Or do you have other ways you break your blogging stop log? Share them with me in the comments…I need all the help I can get!

That’s what happened to this Web site. It became one of the many victims of “doing life”…but no more! I’ve taken steps to revitalize this Web site and to keep my clients better informed.

The first step was to convert the backend of this Web site from Textpattern to WordPress. While Textpattern has been an excellent CMS, I realized that I really did want to start blogging on this site. In order to do that, I decided to go with WordPress, a platform that was built for just that…blogging.

While things aren’t exactly as they were with Textpattern, the design of the site has mainly remained the same. You will also noticed that I now have a monthly newsletter (to which I encourage you to sign up) with tips, updates and news pertaining to YazminMedia and to keeping your site profitable and up-to-date.

In the meantime, welcome to the newly updated YazminMedia Web site! Glad to have you here.

Work Completed: Blog setup, Template Customization

Description: This is a portfolio site for a Atlanta-based pen and ink artist, Judson Hall.

The requirements to setup the site were:

• easy to maintain
• clean design
• purchasing options

I managed to do just that with a premade WordPress template. I also setup a PayPal account to allow him to receive payments for his artwork.

Work Completed: Website Design, Content Management System setup

Description: An easily maintained business site for a technical recruiting company based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Work Completed: Website Design, Blog Setup, Donation Integration, WordPress Setup

Description: A personal website established to chronicle the events of my husband and myself leading up to our 52-mile road skate for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training program.

Work Completed: Website Design, Blog Setup, Gallery Setup, Guestbook Functionality

Description: An easy-to-maintain family-friendly website for one beautiful bundle of joy.

Work Completed: PHP website with Mambo CMS Backend and photo gallery

Description: A complete redesign from the ground up of Math2Go, an educational company that uses race cars to teach kids about math and science.

Work Completed: PHP Scripting, MySQL Database creation, Website workflow process setup, Tables to CSS conversion, SSI Templates

Description: A large and complex website consisting of an over 800 digital camera database and 1500+ digital camera reviews.

With over 30,000 pages on their site (and continually growing), The Imaging Resource needed a way to alleviate the process of posting new content.

Together, we modified the backend of the site and created a template based system that drastically reduces the length and download time of review pages. In addition, new database and site functionality scripts are created monthly in a continual effort to improve the site.