Update 2: Looks like wp-security-scan is also having some conflict issues /killing the admin on a few sites I’ve done upgrades on. I’m deactivating that where necessary.
Check out the video below highlighting the changes in this newest (and long awaited) version.
Send me a note if you’d like me to build you a site using this awesome content management system / blogging platform or if you have questions concerning your current WordPress site. Those of you with sites already based on WordPress and hosted with GroovySoup will be updated as we sort through the changes and make sure everything works as it should. Remember: all installs are different due to the plugins you use and the custom code used in your site themes. These differences can cause parts of the site to stop functioning correctly until they are sorted out. That’s why we’re taking our time rolling this one out :)
Update: We did find a bug with our site and All in One SEO forcing us to deactivate that plugin. It’s not necessarily the plugin’s fault but turning it off solved our issue which was the live site not displaying correctly or at all.
Okay, so that might be the geekiest blog post title ever but I don’t know how else to say it. The situation is this: You have a client and they need to upload an album for download. Whether it’s a paid download or free doesn’t really matter at this point. You’re going to need this process to be as foolproof as possible so you should include both the M3U playlist to cover non-iTunes users and the PLS file format to cover iTunes and Windows Media Player users. This way your end user will be able to click these files and a playlist or album will be created in their software program or the playlist you determine will start to play immediately in their audio program.
You’re going to need to gather some info about your MP3s in order to build these files. Here’s what you need:
Artist name
Title of each track
Length of each track (in seconds – multiply the number of minutes by 60 and add the seconds to it. So 4:22 would be 262 seconds)
Full file name for each track (ex. Overview.mp3)
Okay so let’s build our files, M3U first. According to Wikipedia, the file starts out like so:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:41,Artist Name - Track Title
filename.mp3
So for the additional tracks in this file you just cut and paste the example above (except that opening line (#EXTM3U that tells your software what kind of file it is), the #EXTINF: will stay for all files, the 41 is the track time, artist name, hyphen, track title, line break, filename are all kind of self explanatory. It needs to be in this format including the hyphen and line break. Then skip a line and paste your next one in.
For the PLS file things are pretty similar. Here’s what it looks like for a two track playlist:
So things look pretty similar here. Filename, title, length in seconds. Then you tell how many entries were in the list and it has to be Version=2 for some reason. Again, Wikipedia has the scoop on this but this will get you started. Copy and paste tracks like you did before and duplicate the line breaks like I have here.
Here’s the key to both of these files as far as keeping it simple for your user: Zip all of your files together and include the M3U and PLS file in that zipped directory. Why? I know Wikipedia doesn’t tell you to but the thing is, when your user downloads the files, you don’t really know where they are going to be saved. By zipping the files up, you make sure all the files will be in the same place as your playlist files. So, when the user clicks one of the playlists, the player will look for the files RELATIVE to where your playlists are, and since they’re in the same directory they’ll work correctly :)
Page Speed – Google has been talking about making speed a factor in search rankings. What does that mean for all of us? Well if there’s too much stuff on that front page of yours, you may take a knock by the Google search bots. When I say stuff I’m not really referring to text or copy. The big things that slow down your page’s load time are large scripts, large images and lots of little scripts all being called at the same time. There can only be so many simultaneous things loading on your page at once so if we limit or optimize those things your page loads faster.
Y Slow
Page Speed is a nifty little Firefox or IE extension that you install and can show you where your page is running into trouble or taking too long to load. This is similar to Y Slow for those of you already working on speed optimization for your site.
Google Ajax Libraries – This is a little trick I started using on sites a few months ago after seeing Steve Souder talk about speeding up sites at SXSW Interactive and after seeing it outlined in this post. Considering the fact that you can only load so many things from one server at a time, an easy way to get around this to load things from different servers. Sounds like an obvious idea and something that can easily be fixed by linking to other people’s files. Well, it’s not that easy – or it is that easy but it’s mostly a no-no. People generally don’t want you lining to content on their site. Google’s different though. They DO want you to link to their Ajax files because it helps speed up the internet.
Why on Earth would Google do this? The faster the internet is, the more pages you and I will visit. The more pages we visit, the more ads we might see. The more ads we see, the more money Google makes. Really this is true of most of the ideas provided by Google here. Speed is necessary for Google to get more eyeballs on their stuff and it’s worth it to them to give away the tools necessary to facilitate more speed.
New Asynchronous Analytics Code – If you’re already using Google Analytics on your website you know what this and all the data it provides. Besides being free, Analytics ties directly into your Google AdWords account if you are doing online marketing or ad buys with Google. If you don’t already know what it is, here’s the video overview. If you need this added to your site, just let us know.
If you already have Analytics, this new script speeds things up by making less requests to Google’s servers. Less requests means faster load times for your site. You do need to move this script higher than the previous one was placed, inside the </head> tag. Again, if you need help setting up this faster version, just send us an email and we’ll hook you up :)
Google DNS – Okay, this is a tricky one to explain. Everyone on the internet uses a DNS service whether we realize it or not. Your ISP at home typically provides this and some of the sketchier ones (Comcast, RCN for sure) redirect your searches to their version of a search page when you type an incorrect URL in the address bar. OpenDNS has provided a service for quite some time that gave users an alternate DNS to go through but they have been using a completely different search facility for those same incorrect URLS. Google has entered this field not so much to hijack incorrect URLs but to speed up the connections we’re trying to make. Do incorrect URLs go to Google’s search? Yep, but that’s what many of us use as a default anyway and your search preferences can be changed through your browser rather than through a third party site. See the link above to set this up. They even have a toll free number to walk you through the changes.
It’s all about speed this week for Google and I hope to see more efforts coming soon from them in other areas or possibly a CDN service that will allow us to host images or site files on Google servers to speed up our pages even more. I’m sure Google has some exciting things coming down the pipe for us.
Using WordPress as the foundation, we incorporated Twitter, a blog and an easy-to-update CMS into Jeff’s new campaign website. WordPress is ideal for this sort of project due to its simplicity and the wide variety of customizable plugins available to add additional functionality quickly and inexpensively.
I’ve tried a lot of different slideshows to get something super easy to use that didn’t require a ton of backend work to make it fit the site I was working on. This might be the easiest. Simple Javascript file, simple css files and easy to edit the pictures and appearance/size. Here’s where I installed it today: http://www.tennep.com/solar.php
Okay, so that might be the geekiest blog post title ever but I don’t know how else to say it. The situation is this: You have a client and they need to upload an album for download. Whether it’s a paid download or free doesn’t really matter at this point. You’re going to need this process to be as foolproof as possible so you should include both the 
Google DNS
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