Sidewaysgravity Blog

Well after much frustration along with some late nights, wordpress for the iphone works! Up until now I have been running a previous version of wordpress, 6.2 or something and the iPod / iPhone wordpress app. Unfortunately after upgrading the app to 1.2 it started to crash. At fist it would not open, then after I deleted it and reinstalled it, it would not connect. After typing in my blog information and saving it, it went back to the home screen with my added blog and a loading / thinking / spinning wheel next to it. It would do that for as long as I cared to wait and I could not access my blog.

That brought me to my previous post of upgrading my wordpress installation. Although the iPhone.wordpress.com website says my version was supported, they apparently have some more bugs to work out. But upgrading to 7.2.1 seemed to do the trick. After upgrading I opened up the wordpress app, it still had the thinking / loading circle so I clicked the blue arrow, saved my settings again and after a brief wait (10 sec) the spinning circle was gone and I was able to do this post!

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After only a few hickups along the way I finished updating the blog to the latest version of wordpress. The main issue I had, and due to not following the upgrade instructions was that after the install the screen would be totally blank, with no error messages. I finally realized that since I had not kept all of my wp-contents files, the theme I was using was not in the new version and so it was causing a blank screen to appear. After I uploaded the theme I use, it worked great. If you want to avoid this problem, you can set the theme to the classic or default theme that come with wordpress, that way when you upload the latest version, it will already have those two themes standard.

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The Hub was recently re-opened on playstation Home as a new area to explore. To get to it there is a small circular grafitti mark that has been placed on a wall in the main central area that connects to all of the rest. When you first enter the hub you will be put on a “quest” or scavenger hunt after a breif introduction, and you will have to go find some pieces of paper.

• The first piece of paper that I found was located behind the three teleporting pads which are directly to your left as you walk down the main entry stairs. There should be a robot like statue back there and the paper is to the left of it.
• The second, if you keep moving away from the main stars toward the corner of the room there should be a plant sitting on the ledge. Move up to it and you should get it.
• The final piece of paper was located near the base of the staircase that is on the far side of the entrance. It is easiest if you are between the staircase going up and the staircase going down to the message board room. There should be a small ledge where you can look at the pillar and find the final piece of paper.

From there the system kept crashing on me so that is where I stopped.

Update (3-25-09)

After collecting the three images I was unable to progress any further due to technical issues so I gave up. I tried again today and noticed on the scrolling information that if you had collected all three pieces of paper and it wouldnt let you go further, than to unregister and try joining again. To unregister you simply need to walk up to a box on the wall near the entrance where you can unregister.

Once I re-entered the Hub and joined again, I was able to complete the first task of collecting the peices of paper and get access to the AFK website. The first puzzle you select the cat and you get the code 17PARIS

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Today I had a simple question of how to find what the current version or build of wordpress I am running is. When I login, it is easy to see if there is a new one available as notices are put all over, but I did not see anywhere that it stated what the current version is. After poking around the only place I have come across is the source code of my blog in the head section. For those who may have their own templates that do not show the version number, you can also find the same information within the souce code from the admin section.

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One question that I get asked a lot is about bounce rates. Most programs that track your website statistics will show your bounce rates. Google analytics, which is what I use will show the entire site average and also the rate for individual pages. I said that it was one question I get asked about, but it is actually two.

First, what is it?

The bounce rate is a ratio of people that visit one page on your site and leave, compared to people who visit one page on your site, and then visit another page on your site. Image you have four pages on your website “A, B, C, D”. A is your home page, while B and D are product pages, and C is a contact page. Each of these pages can be an Entrance page and an Exit page. Entrance and Exit pages are any page “A, B, C, D” that a visitor first visits your website with or leaves your website from. Imagine searching Google for YourCompany.com. You might get a result of page A (your homepage) as a result. This would be the entrance page to your site. Now imagine that you search for YourCompany.com and Product B. Now instead of Google returning page A, it might return page B since it better represents what your searching for. This time page B would be the entrance page. So what does this have to do with your Bounce Rate? When a visitor enters your site on page B, and doesn’t visit any other page, and leaves your site (closes their browser, returns to Google, etc.) then this counts toward your bounce rate. The higher it is, the more people are viewing entering and exiting your website from the same page.

Second, should it be high or low?

Now that you know what your bounce rate is, you might be curious if it should be high or low. There are various responses to this, some say it should be low, and others will tell you it doesnt matter. My view is a mix of the two. It depends on your content, and also what you want your website to be. Lets return to the example pages mentioned above. Lets say that you created page C, your contact page, with the purpose of displaying the address and phone number of your company, and really want people to call instead of just browsing the site. If this is the case, when people search for YourCompany.com and Contact info, they might get a search result that takes them directly to page C. This becomes their entrance page, they see your phone number and call you, and then close the webpage. That means they also exited on page C, so the bounce rate for page C is now higher. In this example, your purpose was to get people to call you, page C provided them the information they needed and they called you. Page C served its purpose, but has a high bounce rate. Your bounce rate in this case is not as important. Lets now imagine that page A, your homepage, is setup to welcome people and direct them to your products, which intern direct visitors to your contact page. If some one “enters” your website on page A and then “exits” your website without visiting any product pages then again your bounce rate will be high. This time it does matter, because the purpose of A was to direct them to look at your product pages B and D. So while your bounce rate on page C could be high, it may not matter, but having a high bounce rate on page A will matter.

Time on Site.

There is one thing that you should check to help you decide if a high bounce rate is something to be concerned with. I recently posted an article giving a solution to a common problem people were having. The bounce rate was almost 100%. Was this good or bad? You can take this two ways: 1. it is bad, people entered the site, didnt find what they needed and left, or 2. people entered the site, got exactly what they needed on the first page they visited, and then left as a satisfied customer. How can you tell the difference? While not a perfect method, the average time on page is a great indicator. If it is number 1, most likely your average time on site will be very low, they opened the page, looked and didnt see what they needed and left (10 seconds). For number 2, the found what they needed, read the full article and left a happy customer ( several minutes). Luckily for me, my situtation was the latter.

Google has a quick synapsis of what bounce rate means, in a little less detail, here. If you are still have questions feel free to drop a comment.

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There have been several complaints about the mediatemple grid server (gs) since its original launch over a few years ago. Since then there have been several changes to the way that they maintain their grid server accounts. Since I recently moved all of my sites over to the grid server, I have been keeping an eye on its performance. So far I have not had any issues.

In a recent article that mediatemple posted, they discussed some of the ups and downs they have had over the years with getting the grid server to where it is today. One thing that stuck out to me in their article was the fact that customers who are located on the original cluster servers 1 and 2 are still running on the original architecture. The grid clusters after one and two are using the newer architecture and have greater improved stability.

Getting to the point, if you would like to check which grid cluster that you are on, you will need to login to the account center. Click the admin button on the overview page, and then click on Server Guide. This page will have a lot of you grid server information and at the bottom you will notice the cluster section and it will contain your grid cluster number. As you can see, I am on Cluster 4. So far so good.

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Last night all of my macs in the house got notice that there was a software update for the Airport Utility so we ran the update on all the computers. It then showed that there was “something wrong” with my base station, the status light had gone yellow, and when I went to see what was wrong, it said their was a new firmware available (Version 7.4.1). So I told it to do the update.

Once the update completed, My laptop could see the base station through the airport utility, it could connect to it and I could use the internet. When I went to configure the base station though, It could not connect to it and it soon stopped showing up in the airport utility. Since it was late I unplugged it all and went to bed, and decided to mess with it the next day.

The following morning I noticed some more unusual behavior, the Airport Utility could no longer see the base station from my laptop, or connect to the internet. To get it to see the base station in the utility I had to physically connect via ethernet, which made the base station appear in the utility and also allowed an internet connection. But it still would not give me access to change any settings.

Ever since I upgraded to the new firmware I get the error message “An error occured while reading the configuration.” And I do have it connected to one of the ethernet ports. Since I could not connect to the base station via the Airport Utility I decided to reset the base station to its default setting.

If you are looking at your base station from the back side, there is a small hole located on the right side, with a little circle with a triangle icon located above it. This will reset your base station to its default settings. Doing this will reset what you named your router plus reset all passwords, and take it back to its original factory settings. A paper clip works great and is the right size. You will need to push the button and hold it down, you should notice the light on the base station change to a blinking yellow, and once the reset is complete it will blink at a constant rate and then you can stop pushing the reset. The yellow light should then go back to a slow blinking yellow. Once you finish resetting your base station you should now be able to access it via the Airport Utility.

Note: even though you reset the base station, it still keeps the latest firmware, but it seemed to fix whatever was wrong after resetting the base station. Also, if you are going to do a reset, it is a good idea to write down your current network name and password, that way when you set up your base station again, you can use the same settings and wont have to change all the setting for the computers that connet to it wirelessly.

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