Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

WordPress

How to turn off post revisions in WordPress 3.3

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Did you just update to WordPress 3.3 only to find that post revisions have returned even though you previously engineered some way to turn them off?

Don’t worry, I can help – but, first, some background and chatter.

Way back in 2008 WordPress added Revisions to its core features, and the feature persists today in the newly released version 3.3.

This is the amount of WP revisions I can create in a single week of editing if left unawares.

Revisions captures every published iteration of a post you are working on, so that if you republish with some minor changes you still have the prior version available to roll back to, if necessary.

This feature can be helpful if you make a lot of major changes to your work, or if you are on a multi-author blog and need to occasionally reverse someone’s edits.

It can also be detrimental, or plain old annoying.

The revisions feature nearly destroyed Crushing Krisis. Because, you see, my managing editor is an OCD Godzilla that lives inside my abdomen and due to his influence I have been known to spend my spare time making literally hundreds of tiny edits to spelling and spacing across the million-plus words of this site. Each edit I published spawned a new post number in a new post ID. My database ballooned by thousands of lines, I was using more RAM on my server, and legacy posts and pages linked by their post IDs were suddenly appearing at new permalinks!

There have been plugins to turn Revisions off, but when a new version of WP debuts sometimes those plugins don’t work right away. That’s why I am sharing the manual way to turn off Revisions.

This involves editing core WP files. You do so at your own risk. I am not a WP developer, and I cannot provide support to you if you hobble or destroy your blog. Unlike a plugin, this will not still work after a reinstall or upgrade of WP, so when you move to WP 3.3.1 you need to do it again.

Ready?

  1. In your root directory you have a file called “wp-config.php.” Save a copy of it elsewhere in case you mess things up terribly.
  2. Open wp-config.php and scroll down. At some point you should see a comment that reads “/* Stop editing */” – we will insert our new code just above that.
  3. Insert this code:
    /* Disable Revisions Feature */
    define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );    If you would rather just limit the revisions that get saved, change as follows:
    /* Limit Revisions Feature (by number of revisions) */
    define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',6);
  4. While you are here, you could also choose to add a line to define how frequently you would like WP to make single autosaves of your posts, which frequently saves my ass in the case of a browser crash. That code is:
    /* Set Auto-Save Timing (in seconds) */
    define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300 );
  5. Voila! Though WP will still inform you of your revision number in your posts table, it is no longer saving revisions.

Keep in mind, you do still have a number of revisions in your MySQL database, sitting around doing nothing like some vestigial appendix-like organ in your body that may or may not cause a later explosion.

(If you are me, that number of revisions is 250 in the one hour since you installed WP3.3. Yes, I literally make that many edits to CK in an hour. OCD Godzilla is a terrifying beast.)

To do away with them you simply need to delete all of the rows in your post table identified as revisions. Any time you directly edit your MySQL is potentially bad mojo, so I am not going to specifically advocate doing that. However, if you have backed up your DB and know what you are doing, visit WP Recipes for the simple one-line SQL query that will wipe out your revisions.

I hope this helped you! Personally, I get completely frantic when WP updates and one of my old plugins stops working to provide (or, in this case, block) a feature I rely on.

Crushing On: WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin

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If CK frequently seems like bursts of organized, topical posts followed by droughts of randomness and silence … well, that’s because it is.

Not that it’s meant to be that. As CK has transitioned from a personal blog to a blog about my music, Philly, and other specific topics, I finally settled on the perfect mix of posts for the current incarnation. I even made myself an Editorial Calendar – basically, a forward-looking schedule of what content is in which stage of readiness for the weeks ahead. EdCal’s are traditionally a tool of newspapers and magazines, but in recent years they’ve become an important resource for bloggers.

The WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin is a drag-and-drop calendar that lives in your "Posts" screen. It's also my communications-nerd dream come true.

Then I hit a barrier: how would I keep the editorial calendar updated?

It was a barrier I couldn’t overcome with blogging as a part-time exercise, fighting for time against my three musical incarnations and dealing with the new house. Paper EdCals were a chore and got lost. A Google Spreadsheet was great for planning, but I just kept planning and never wrote. Penciling drafts into WordPress was meaningless without some structure, and I wound up with endless lingering drafts since I couldn’t see an overview the lineup of an entire week or month.

I thought, maybe WordPress has an EdCal plugin! It seemed like the sort of plugin motivated bloggers would create. Alas, I searched and searched, to no avail.

I keep re-drafting my own EdCals, but they never lasted more than a few weeks as they were interrupted by actual work and my musicianship. Despite a myriad of ideas for CK, I just didn’t have the spare time to wrangle them, write them, schedule them, and post them.

Then, in an actual work meeting about WordPress during actual work hours, Mel & I were glibly showing off our personal blog plugins to the social team at the office. I showed some of my favorites (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin being primary among them), and the she whipped out WordPress Editorial Calendar.

Screenshot of the quick-draft screen in action, from the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin page.

WHAT IN THE WHAT NOW!?

(I may have actually screamed that in the middle of the meeting with our Director. Luckily, he is already well aware of my insanity.)

Yes, about 13 months ago someone came up with a fully-functioning EdCal plugin for WP. Set up a schedule of posts, start a draft right on the calendar, and drag and drop them to your heart’s content. When a post is ready, just move it over to “Publish” status via a dropdown – or, edit it the way you’d normally edit.

Ta-Da – instant blog organization.

Needless to say, the next time I logged into CK I immediately installed the plugin. I’ve been working with it all weekend, and for the first time ever I have a month of planned posts. That doesn’t mean I wrote them all today – it just means I finally have a living schedule of what I hope to talk about and when I hope to say it.

I’m positively aglow about it. I hope you dig my first week of EdCal content, starting tomorrow morning!

Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

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This post could easily be about how I spent the last two weekends sweating my physical and intellectual butt off to completely reorganize my home office and upgrade CK to WordPress 2.8, but you would be like, “Whatever, it looks the same to me,” or “Um, I’m reading you on my RSS feed, so I don’t really care,” or possibly, “Dude, I haven’t read blogs for two years. Send me a tweet about it.”

Which is fine. I mean, should I also tell you about how I swept the floor? Backstage is backstage for a reason. Props people work hard to keep actors focused on their performance, not for the applause.

(Plus, at CK I’m the prop person and the actor. And the box office manager, the technical director, and the old lady ushering you to your seat. You get the idea. Excelsior…)

In my increasingly uncluttered life I’ve been trying to make some more time not only to read other blogs I admire, but to interact with them. That means reading carefully and responding, which sometimes yields thoughtful comments.

I’m sometimes hesitant to leave my thoughts lying around in other people’s homes when they could possibly lead to interesting content back here at my own homestead, but I’ve arrived at a happy medium – I’ll link to all of said intriguing posts as well as giving you a snippet of my reasoned replies.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the discussions I’ve weighed in on in this past week.

(If you find yourself wanting to do the same, try subscribing to Backtype, a simple monitoring service which will doing all of the the keeping-track for you.) [Read more…] about Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

Illuminated Pickups, et cetera

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(1) Elise bought me a gift certificate for a pickup replacement on my primary electric guitar as a birthday gift, which is perfect timing, as Gina and I were already plotting on evolving Arcati Crisis into the electric realm over the course of the next few months.

My guitar is an Epiphone copy of a Gibson 335, and after several years of playing it and digesting online reviews it would seem that the only non-esoteric detail separating my guitar from the equivalent Gibson is the style/tone of the pickups (and also the nut).

My original birthday gift plan was to outfit my guitar exactly like a brand-new 335 – with two Gibson 57 Classic humbuckers. However, at Arcati Crisis’s Tin Angel gig I got into a conversation with our friend Chris about the possibility of buying two different types of pickups so my neck tone is differentiated from bridge.

And, um, I am not quite rock enough to know anything else about this life-altering decision.

I spent a few days researching my various indie-rock heroes, but none of them has a distinct enough setup for me to emulate. Also, I can’t turn up anything on the guitar rig of Garbage ax-slinger Duke Erickson (he being ostensibly the reason I bought this particular guitar in the first place). However, I did locate the eminently informative Guitar Player Gear Guide blog.

Do any of you wonderful people know anything about this? I have to drop my guitar off at the store on Saturday if I have any hope of getting it back before the next Arcati Crisis gig.

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(2) I want a WordPress plugin that will insert illustrated initial letters into my posts, both automatically and on-demand. Bonus points if they are illuminated.

I know enough PHP to be a minor threat when it comes to WordPress, but this particular concept is out of my realm because it involves live rejiggering of text as its being called out of the ether of my database.

Anyone?

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(3a) After an inexplicable one week delay the new PJ Harvey disc, White Chalk, came out yesterday. It’s been billed as PJ’s piano album, but that only tells a fraction of the story. It’s really more like her indie, piano-based, acoustic, English-Appalachian folk record. Sort of. Full review forthcoming.

(3b) Also inexplicable: Bruce Springsteen‘s lead single (“Radio Nowhere“) is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard in months, and the production is all tight and sparkly and curiously “Since U Been Gone” sounding.

A quick sample spin through the rest of his newly released Magic yields similar results on at least three others songs, leading me to (for the first time ever) want to buy a Bruce Springsteen CD in a bad way. But, then I’m like, dude, you so do not like Bruce in any way, shape, or form. In my youth he was relegated to my mother’s forbidden trinity of vocal idiosyncrasies – Bruce, Bob, and Neil.

Even having disposed of a few of those systematically programmed prejudices (e.g., I do not ridiculously eschew middle Beatles) I can’t seem to succumb to the Magic of Asbury Park’s favorite son. I even tried paying for a copy with Elise’s credit card to try to alleviate some of the hard-coded guilt, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it.

Maybe if i just buy it track by track from iTunes I can avoid any imperative towards self-immolation my mother may have embedded in my unconscious psyche in my infancy through a series of flash cards.

(3c) OMG, I forgot to mention the best part of last week’s happy (six) hour(s): Melon is going to go to the Kelly Clarkson concert with me. Oh yessss.

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(End Note) Not only does me + Gina = awesome rock stars, but as of a few minutes ago I completed the first draft of a standard notation transcription of one of our songs, complete with guitar tabs and harmony.

I cannot express to you the undue amount of excitement this is causing me, a major sheet music fetishist.

Sheet music! Of our song! Necessary because we forgot how to play it!

(Or, more accurately, because we recorded it in one night for SongFight, so it never really existed as a song that we could play together in a physical space (though I believe we once attempted it at a Lyndzapalooza).)

Alright, enough chatter.

Will I?

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I’ve been remastering seven-year-old audio and chipping away at installing WordPress 2.3 for twenty of the last twenty-four hours, and at this point I’ve lost track of which thing I’m doing for fun and which is the chore.

Oh, I’m sorry, they’re both supposed to be fun? I must have missed the memo, because at the moment I can’t wait to get to work in the morning to do some project management and be free of this insanity for eight or nine hours.

I’ve been in overdrive every since I spent all of a gorgeous yesterday sitting naked on the couch, eating an entire box of veggie chicken patties, watching inane commentary tracks on fucking Heroes just because that’s what I would watch if Elise was here, followed by wandering off to the bedroom for a three-hour nap while my audio project takes ten minutes to process.

Clearly some atonement had to occur for that seven-hour period of my life, which is what lead to the weeks-early install of WordPress 2.3, which at the moment fails to impress me in any way, shape, or form. So far it’s fucked up everything I liked about WordPress, resisted the installation of every theme that serves my esoteric organizational needs, and provided me with a useless little box to manually write tags in. They call that a feature? It helpfully suggests “cats, pet food, dogs.”

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing posts tagged as “you can shove those cats up your ass,” or similar.

On the plus side, now through almost three hours of archived audio I am getting uncannily good at making seven-year-old Real Audio sound reasonably listenable with 12-band parametric EQ and other assorted magic of GoldWave, which I’ve now been using for almost a decade and which is still hands-down the best audio editing tool you can purchase for under $100. If only it had a project history a la Photoshop it would be perfect…

(If I was really serious (re: masochistic) I would actually bring multiple tracks of each guitar vocal into my mixing software and tease out each one for a specific purpose, like guitar, vocals, room sound, et cetera, thus creating an artificial four- or eight-track version of something I’ve got on a dismally compressed single take. I’m pretty sure that’s what they do when they remaster old-school wall-of-sound stuff.)

I seem to have defeated the mid-mastering naps by heading into the hallway to sort laundry, and now that I’ve run out of laundry I just go do sit ups until I start to wheeze, which is usually a sign that my audio is done processing.

It’s a glamorous life, this pseudo-bachelorhood.

Success to the Successful Thistle Sifter!

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In the theatre program at Drexel we had one particularly favorite vocal warmup, which we did before every show i ever acted or teched. It went like this:

Theophilus thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
While sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb.

Now, if Theophilus thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
While sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb,
See that thou, while sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles
Thrust not three thousand thistles through the thick of thy thumb.

Success to the successful thistle sifter!

Much like Homer Simpson’s classic “I am so smart! S-M-R-T” (which i hear least once a week in my corporate office), the Theophilus jingle has stuck with many of us theatre kids, none more so than Elise and i. Whenever we overcome a major household obstacle we are known to proclaim loudly, “SUCCESS! To the successful thistle sifter.”

The charm of the phrase comes, i think, from the fact that sifting thistles by hand is a sortof thankless excercise to take joy in.

Well, as of this post WordPress is (somewhat) unbugged and live on ck.com. And that was not a thankless endeavor. I’m going to write a whole Blogger-to-WordPress walkthrough soon (yeah, and that Bonarroo walkthrough, too), but the thing that really sticks out is that there was an actual, tangible, workable answer to every single question i had through the installation process – right down to the last issue that was keeping me from going live. Most of those answers came directly from the WordPress Support wiki.

Thank you for your patience with me as I spent a few days to complete the changeover. I’m like a kid-on-Christmas with all of these new features to play with – especially categories. Please continue to comment whenever you find something broken, especially if it’s broken in a well-rendered browser like Firefox.