Last year, a combination of a loss of service from my hosting provider and my appalling backups meant that this website was temporarily wiped off the face of the Internet. It’s never recovered – at least not in terms of revenue – and it taught me an important lesson about backups (it’s all too easy to forget the hours of effort that go into a “hobby” site like this one…).

Whilst the blog posts were restored, and I took the opportunity to apply a new theme to the site (it’s probably due another one now…) but some of the images had got AWOL along the way. I’ve been ignoring that (mostly) but decided I really should do something about it when an old post was picked up by a journalist today and I realised it had a missing graphic.

I remembered a WordPress plugin that I used on another site recently, for managing redirects when access to the .htaccess file is not available. The plug-in, written by John Godley, is called Redirection, and one of its modules will report on HTTP 404 errors, like the ones that my missing graphics will create. I know there are other tools that can do this for me (Google’s Webmaster Tools, for example, or trawling through the web logs) but it’s an easy way to see when a 404 has been returned in order to investigate accordingly.  So far this afternoon, I’ve tracked down and replaced around 8 missing graphics and one broken permalink using the logs from Redirection.  I’m now scanning through the rest of John’s plugins to see what else I’m missing and will certainly be donating later…

Long-time readers of my blog will know that I used to manage the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog (which we’ve recently closed, but have left the content in place for posterity) and I’m still getting the comment notifications (mostly spam).  Many of the posts have HTTP 301 redirects to either mine or David Smith‘s blogs (I found a great WordPress plugin for that – Redirection) but, for those that remain, I wanted to turn off comments.  Doing this individually for each post seemed unnecessarily clunky but there is, apparently, no way to do this from the WordPress user interface (with database access it would have been straightforward but I don’t have that level of access).

There is a plug-in that globally disables all comments – named, rather aptly, Disable Comments – except that the blog is part of a multi-site (network) install and I’m not sure what the broader impact would be…

No bother, I found a workaround – simply set all of the posts to close comments after a certain number of days. The theme that someone has applied to the site (since I stopped working with it) doesn’t seem to respect that, and still leaves a comment button visible, but anyone with a well-developed theme should be OK…

Last night, as part of the rebuild of this site, I reinstated the social sharing links for each post. In the old site they had been implemented as bespoke code using each social network’s recommended approach (e.g. Twitter or Facebook‘s official button codes) but presentation becomes problematic, with each button having a slightly different format and needing some CSS trickery to get it right.

I looked into a variety of plugins but they all had issues – either with formatting or functionality – until I stumbled across reference to WordPress.com’s social sharing capabilities.  If only I could have that functionality on a self-hosted (WordPress.org) site…

…As it happens, I can – WordPress.com’s social sharing is based on the ShareDaddy plugin, which is part of a collection called JetPack. ShareDaddy is also available as a freestanding plugin but now I have JetPack installed I’m finding some of the other functionality it gives me useful (and it’s not possible to activate ShareDaddy if you have JetPack installed).

I need to make some changes (like working out how to hack the code and turn off the count next to my Tweet/Like/+1 buttons – it’s embarrassing when the number is small!) but I’m happy enough with the result for now.  One thing I did need to do though was to add some services that are not yet in the JetPack version of the plugin (one of the major advantages of ShareDaddy is how simple it is to do this).

• The first service I added was Google +1, for which Di Turner has produced a plugin to extend ShareDaddy.
• The other important one for me is LinkedIn (it’s in ShareDaddy but not yet in the JetPack version). Ryan Markel has created a post to describe the process for adding custom sharing services (Paul Robert Lloyd’s social media icons are useful for this) and he’s listed the settings for some services. Brad Dalton has listed some more, including LinkedIn (the one I needed).
• Finally, I found a forum post from airodyssey with details of an improved Print option, using the PrintFriendly service.