Big thanks to two Twitter friends who took it upon themselves to solve what was to me a major issue on my blog. I explained it in an earlier post but basically comments took up twice as much space as they should. That made for an ugly comment section.
Turns out the problem was two fold. First WordPress’s Twenty Twelve theme simply puts too much space between comments. The second problem was a CSS conflict with Livefyre was double-nesting all the comments, thus doubling the space taken up. Five comments in a row would end up taking ten comments worth of space. So the solution? Much easier than I thought!
Lines 1-5 prevent the double-nesting of comments (or so I’m told via @onebrightlight). LInes 6-12 close up the space after each comment and lines 14-16 remove the extraneous lines WordPress insisted on adding to my blog. The last bit of help came from @BigCloudMedia. He later went on to help me close in the extra space on my sidebar between items. How kind!
So now my comments issue is fixed and my sidebar spacing issue. Thanks Twitter, but especially thanks to Christopher Kennedy and Big Cloud Media.
I’m not sure if this is because I’m using Livefyre to manage my comments or maybe it’s a fault of WordPress’s Twenty Twelve theme but ever since I moved from Twenty Eleven, my comment threads have added space between comments and again in between each thread. This doubles the length of my comments on the blog and makes for messy comment reading experience.
You can see an example of this with the image on the left. The areas in purple are the wasted space. It wastes so much space that I had to shrink the image down so you could get an idea of how much space it is wasting.
I have threading turned off in my WordPress settings.
I’m no CSS expert, this is no secret. I can get a theme and hack it together into something I like but normally with the help of qualified friends like David. I’ve asked on Twitter a few times but no one has responded with a suggested solution. The image to the left is a screenshot of the post for my Nutella Ice Cream Recipe, if you want to see the problem for yourself.
Maybe you guys can help in the comments, on my comments. How meta is that?
No, this is not another blog post about me going to the gym, experimenting with a new 4 Hour Body recipe or anything else you are probably guessing. This is about how I’m trying to make the experience on my site better for both of us.
I spent the better part of my last two evenings optimizing this site. Seems like I spend a ton of time helping clients and friends do this sort of stuff, meanwhile I have been neglecting my own site. This is what happens when you start to do what you love as a means of income; when you’re not getting paid to do it, it’s the last thing you want to do!
While this post is about what I did to my site, many of my choices are relevant to anyone that wants to take blogging seriously. I touch on how I’m speeding up my blog, to making money off of my original content and encouraging others to engage with my posts.
I hope this proves to be helpful for the both those who have just started blogging as well as those veterans who may simply have forgotten, or never knew, these tips to get the most out of your blog. So without further adieu, here’s a totally inside baseball look at what I’ve been up to. Continue reading →
For the last few months I’ve been having issues with pop-up ads showing up on my blog. Originally I thought it was a bug with my new favorite commenting system, @LiveFyre, but that was ruled out. They were even kind enough to look around my blog for the problem and couldn’t find it.
I’ve done just about all that I can think of. I manually went through my WordPress database cleaning out extra tables and entries down to the bare essentials. I got rid of all my plugins and themes, deleted every orphan database entry, wiped my WordPress install and even got my host involved.
They did some searching and twice found an iFrame with malicious code injected in it. They removed the malicious code, twice and the problem stopped, before coming back each time.
I did my own tests, Acunetix, Norton, SiteLock and M86 security scans all came back clean. One of my Twitter friends, @TheDigitalNinja, did his own scans and found nothing. Continue reading →
LiveFyre, promising to turn a blogs comments into a live stream of organic, reader created content from all walks of the Internet life. I have been a huge supporter of the people at JS-Kit and their product Echo, in fact I’ve had it running the back end of my comments for quite a while. But when I got word about LiveFyre’s new system, I had to give it a try.
For the last few months I’ve had a beta invitation waiting for me, sent from LiveFyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer. Unfortunately, work at Pure has kept me so busy that even updating my blog has become difficult. I’m going to do what I can to make these updates happen more regularly…
I finally got a few free minutes to install LiveFyre and ran into some major problems. First, it was incredibly slow, not the plugin itself but the entire site. It took a few seconds for every page to load on the back end. The front end of the blog, what you guys see, was just fine. Second, popup ads! Every time I tried to load the plugin I got a popup advertisement. Not cool. Third, it didn’t work. Simply wouldn’t import my existing comments or install into my theme which is the standard WP 3 2010 theme.
I tweeted my problems and faster than anyone could ever hope, LiveFyre was there with help. I turned control of my blog to the tech guru’s at LiveFyre, after clearing out all the orphan tables and remnants of previous plugins/themes/installs. They feared a bit of malware was hiding on my system. Nevertheless, even after wiping my database of all extraneous entries and my WordPress folder of any extra content, I still had these horrible popup ads.
True to their word, LiveFyre went in, did the install and import for me and wham, everything is perfect. They even did a sweep of my blog to check for any major issues including malware. Luckily, they found none.
I still don’t know what happened that caused all of these problems but I’m happy to say they are all resolved and I’m ready to try out LiveFyre. I’m going to use this post as a test so comment away! Link back to it from your blog, Twitter or wherever else. Let’s test out LiveFyre, put it through its paces.
I still have my Echo Live subscription but… if LiveFyre proves to be the powerful comment engine it promises to be (and it is affordable after their beta period) I’m sold. If not on the advanced features, the absolutely amazing customer service.
