How to Embed and Promote Your Google Helpouts Listing on Your WordPress.com Blog

For those of you that have a listing on the new Google Helpouts service you know that you have the option to promote your listing via Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. There is also the option of selecting Embed so that you can grab the HTML iframe tag code and post it on the web site of your choosing. For the free WordPress.com blogging service, this is not an option, so it was not an option for me. There are workarounds out there that will allow you to do this but some aren’t so easy. This is a workaround I figured out and I hope it helps you too.

It’s best to view this video in 720p HD quality.

Blog Moving

As per the last post, I was questioning whether I should continue paying for web hosting on my edwardcrosby.com domain as I have done for almost 7 years or move to a free service on WordPress.com. Well, if you were redirected successfully from my old site then you will notice that I have moved.

If you go back to some old post and find some of the media missing I will gradually be going back to fix those issues. It may take me a while to move the blog completely being that there is over 6 years worth of blog post. If you find something that I haven’t fixed please send me an email via that Contact form on my About page with the date and post heading information.

New RSS Feeds

I didn’t realize this until a gentleman pointed out to me on a comment in a recent post that I didn’t have a RSS feed link visible on my site. I changed the WordPress theme default a few months back and never realized it wasn’t visible. I’ve since remedied that.

On the right side you will see a Subscribe section to add the RSS Feed to the RSS Reader of your choice. I have also added a means of email subscription so that every time I have a new post an email can be sent to you with the contents of my post.

If you decide to subscribe, thanks.

New Page of Pictures

I don’t know why I didn’t add this to my blog years ago but as you can see above I now have a photo gallery page. This photo gallery is made up of albums from my Picasa Web Album.

Enjoy.

WordPress Update to 2.7

So I finally updated. What prompted me to finally update was I decided to redesign my entire site with a new theme and other changes and thought that it was time to finally upgrade WordPress to 2.7.
If you’ve never managed WordPress for your site/blog, then you must know that in the past it has always been a huge chore to upgrade as it’s all a manual process; you have to backup the database, backup all the WordPress files, download the update, disable plugins, delete the old files, upload the new files, re-enable the plugins, and hope that it all runs smoothly thereafter.
Well, this time, I wanted to try some automation. I heard a few months back on a discussion board somewhere that there was an automatic upgrade plugin for WordPress that someone had design. I searched, found it, loaded it on my server on GoDaddy and used it. The process was pretty simple, I just had to click links every so often after an automatic task had been completed, sort of like a wizard. But, I had a glitch at the very final stage. The upgrade finished without any issue, it just locked me out, I wasn’t able to log back in. Well, I used the ‘forgot your password?’ option and it emailed me a new password. Only issue was that the new password didn’t work. I finally attempted to clean all my Firefox data: the browser data, form data, history, cache, cookies, saved passwords, everything. Once I did this and closed Firefox I was then able to open it back up and log in with the new password. Wooooh! I was freaking out there for a couple of minutes. If you can’t log in, you can’t administer the site (plugins still needed to be reactivated since the automation didn’t do that at the end) or write new blog post.
What I have seen so far in the update seems to have been worth it. Once I logged in I went to the plugins section to reactivate everything and found that most of them had updates also that I needed to install. Well, this new version of WordPress has the automation built in now that it will go out to the various plugin web sites, download the updates and install them for me. I also see quite a few other changes to 2.7, like a brand new revamped dashboard.
I think I will like this upgrade a lot.

iPhone WordPress App

This post is a test.
I found a iPhone application for my iPhone that allows me to post entries remotely from my iPhone. I’m not sure how often I will use this but it’s still cool.

WordPress upgrade

I just completed an upgrade of WordPress on this site to 2.5.1.
There was a problem with the Contact Form plugin after the upgrade so I had to find a different version.
If you find any issues with the site, let me know.
This upgrade will not have any affect on the Live Journal entries crosspost. Live Journal peeps can view my main site from the link above.

WordPress site upgrade

I just completed a major upgrade of the WordPress software on this site. It’s been almost a year since I last completed an upgrade; I upgraded from 2.1.x to 2.3.1. As I understand it, there has been quite a few versions in between.
So far, from what I have seen, there are some nice additions to this version. A lot of neat, new plugins to add also. As you can see on the left (if it is still there at the time you are reading this post) is a new Flickr plugin to display the photos I have uploaded to Flickr.

WordPress upgrade

I just finished upgrading WordPress on the site from 2.0.6 to 2.1.2, which is actually a pretty big jump. For some reason, as of today, I was getting some MySQL errors (see below) when I attempted to post. I called Go Daddy support and they recommended I upgrade WordPress. They did not give me an actual reason why – since I was speaking with a first level support person, he was speaking to second or third level. I can only assume that they recently upgraded MySQL and that is why I suddenly started getting the error messages, newer version of MySQL didn’t like the older version of WordPress too much.