Stats not working on WordPress blogs

It seems that a lot of users on WordPress self-hosted blogs have seen their stats vanish on their admin dashboard pages. There hasn’t been any official word from WP Support, but I did find a solution to the problem. Installing the Jetpack plug-in enabled my stats to work again on both my blogs. I actually like the Jetpack stats display better than the former WP stats—I see them as a vertical graph now, and it loads much quicker. Hovering your mouse over any of the date bars will cause a window to pop up, informing you how many readers visited your blog on that particular day.

Besides stats, Jetpack offers a host of other features:

Bear in mind that for Jetpack to work, you need to upgrade your self-hosted WP blog to the latest version (3.1 as of now) The plug-in will only work with WP versions 3.0.5 and higher. Hope this helps those who have problems viewing their stats. Have a nice day.

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WordPress 2.9 arrives

I’ve hosted my blog with WordPress since I started blogging more than one and a half years ago. Apart from a few minor niggles I’ve been very happy with WordPress. They have made upgrades so much easier now ever since version 2.6; just go to your Admin panel, click on Upgrade Automatically, and voila, you’re done. Back up your databases before the upgrade but so far touch wood, I’ve never had any untoward incidents happen during my upgrades.

And so it was with this latest 2.9 upgrade, nicknamed “Carmen.” This page details all the improvements and fixes (and has the video above too) but two improvements alone made me want to upgrade as soon as I saw it:

  • Global Undo and Trash feature What happens if you have itchy or nimble fingers and accidentally delete a post or comment you actually wanted? In previous versions of WP, you’d be stuck. Not in 2.9 which now boasts a recycle bin, where deleted posts and comments will be kept for 30 days, so if you change your mind you can bring them back.
  • Batch plug-in update and compatibility checking In previous WP versions it was a chore for me to upgrade each plug-in individually (well yeah, it doesn’t take long, but still I had to do one plug-in upgrade after another) That’s done away with in 2.9—all your plug-ins which have new upgrades can be done altogether at once. Not only that, WP checks to make sure all of them are compatible with it, and issues a warning if some are not. One curious thing is that to get to this batch plug-in update feature, you’ll have to go to Tools > Upgrade in your WP admin panel. I’d have thought that putting the Upgrade tab in the Plug-Ins category would be more logical no? Just my personal opinion.

So go ahead and upgrade to this latest version of WordPress. They’re making it better every time!

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Opening another shop

I’ve thought and toyed with the idea of creating another blog just for my musical ramblings; I think about this most often when I’m in the pool, in-between laps. And the mind (at least my mind) sure is funny, it tries to cook up excuses…so I was saying to myself something like “Nah, it’s too difficult, I have no idea how to create a new self-hosted blog…” This went on for a couple of days and then I decided I had to do something. I IMed a friend or two, picked their brains, and scoured the web. And good grief, it’s so easy to create a new blog when you already have a web host. All I had to do was go to Fantastico in my control panel, select WordPress, fill in some details, and before I could even make a cup of java my new WordPress blog had been installed and was ready to go. Yay!

No flourish of trumpets, no drum rolls, no swank parties at the Ritz-Carlton…well maybe someday. Anyway, I hope you’ll check out my new blog and see what you think. I’m gonna chronicle my musical teaching career and my cocktail piano stints throughout the past 25 years. Yeah it’ll do wonders for the old grey matter. It will also keep me out of the devil’s paws, muahaha! Read it and please let me know what you think. I thrive on comments. And leftovers too.

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The ABC’s of Me (F)

F: Facebook, Friendships, Food

Ah yes, Facebook. The cyber opium social networking network—some people love it, others wouldn’t even touch it. I haven’t been on Facebook for very long, in fact I only signed up last year but I love it. I can understand why it has become the #1 social networking phenomenon—it has almost everything (text, photos, apps, quizzes, chats, groups, marketplace, etc.) integrated into one convenient center. You just decide how much and what you want to do with it. The wide range of options makes Facebook very customizable, but you’ve got to learn to be careful not to divulge stuff that might come back to haunt you later on (ah yes, heard the one about employers searching FB for information about their prospective staff?)

I use Facebook primarily to connect with my friends and to publicize my blog posts, whenever I write a new one. And the quizzes—well I won’t talk too much about them, because there are some absolutely stupid and banal ones there (imagine a quiz titled “How stupid are you?” and you get the picture) Still, it’s great when you have time to kill or you’re just about fed-up with computer work or games. The chat program is very rudimentary; I still prefer Windows Live Messenger. However, it’s convenient for a quick chat when your friends are logged in.

One thing I’m grateful to Facebook for is that recently I had the chance to reconnect with an old friend from my University of Arizona days. We haven’t been in touch for something like 28 years, and through FB I managed to find this friend and reconnect. It was wonderful, and I think this is something that FB excels in doing…thanks, Facebook!

Friendships and friends mean so much to me. I don’t have a lot of what I would call close friends. Just a few of them and with the exception of one (yes you, Boss!) all the rest are in the good US of A. I know, we can’t like hug or throw friendly punches at each other, but Windows Live Messenger more than makes up for it. To all my friends out there (and you know who you are) I love you all. Thank you for your friendship!

“I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, who has sight so keen and strong
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Uh oh, someone’s going to call me a piggy when I mention food. I remember one of the best advice I received from my dad as I was about to depart for the UK was this: “You eat to live, not live to eat.” In other words, don’t be a glutton. And if eating isn’t enjoyable, then why do it? The same goes with sex, I suppose…but oops I am getting side-tracked. Many people are envious of me because I can simply eat whatever I like and yet not put on weight. What can I say, I have a high metabolic rate, LOL. However, I don’t use that as an excuse to pig out—no no no. I’ve been more careful with my diet now that I’m close to hitting the big 5-0.

Speaking of which, I’m absolutely a breakfast person. I need my breakfast! It has been cereal for the past years but recently I converted to oats because of their ability to purge the bad cholesterol away from my body. Honestly I am not a fan of oats but hey, if it’s good for me I’ll eat it. I have regular meals (and leftovers yes) and I indulge in the occasional pizza and burger, though not always. And since I’m managing my boss’ food blog it is sometimes a wee bit overwhelming to look at all those glorious food pictures and become hungry and salivate—but fortunately I can stand it!

As a fitting conclusion to this subject of food, just take a look at this whopper of a burger from Burger King. Can you finish this monster in 7 minutes? Tongue out

P/S Watch the video here.  The final comment from the guy who ate this makes this video well worth watching.

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My blog turns One

It is a wet Thursday morning as I write this. After 193 posts, 424 comments and a readership hit of almost 10,000 my blog has arrived at its first milestone. I’m quite surprised myself (don’t snigger) since I’m not a diary sort of person. I remember when I was young my dad would give me a diary without fail at the end of each year. I’d be very enthusiastic writing down the January entries. Then entries for February would be less, March even more so, and by the time April arrived my diary was practically devoid of content. Nonetheless, I started this blog last April without any expectations; the main thing different is that this is read by readers all over the world, who are free to comment on my musings (which makes it more enjoyable and exciting for me)

Of course the neat thing about having my own blog is that I can write about anything that I want, though I steer clear of religion and politics. I believe my ebook (see the sidebar) has received much exposure here, and hopefully that will help its sales along. I’ve even extended an invitation to a close friend to guest-write here (she’s still thinking about it, you know who you are, K) And last but not least, a big thank you to the folks at WordPress.org for giving me this vehicle to ride (write?) on, and for free, to boot. Thanks to Windows Live Writer too, an excellent tool for writing my posts and drafts before publishing.

Finally, a big THANK YOU to all you guys and girls out there in cyberspace who have visited and read my blog. I hope you’ll keep coming, and please feel free to drop me a line—it can be quite lonely when I’m writing by myself. Have a good day.

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Happy 51st, Malaysia!

Today (August 31) was Malaysia’s 51st birthday. What did I do? Went to church with the wife and kid, and sang the National Anthem in church, believe it or not. Then went for a bit of shopping before chowing down some lunch. Nope, I didn’t buy anything, but the missus bought a Nikon Coolpix L16 camera. Then came back around 3PM, had a quickie nap, as always.

After that, checked my emails, my blog, my web site, and then played with Google Analytics. Yeah, this is my current “toy” and it’s completely free of charge. If you have a web site or blog that you want to track, Analytics will do that for you and very comprehensively, too, I might add. All you have to do is sign up, and paste the Analytics tracking code into the web pages you want to track. It takes about 24 hours and after that, you can see a whole bunch of statistics about your web site. Pretty cool. Here’s a world profile of where my site visitors came from today. As you can see, I’ve had visitors from Canada, USA, Malaysia, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia.

What’s next for me? Total world domination! Just kidding.

Google Analytics for me

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Settling into my new home

Well this WordPress.org thing is certainly different from my old and free WordPress.com. For one thing, much of everything is customizable. That has its pros and cons, but a big hurdle for me was, where to start? I missed the Blog Stats from my old blog, you know, the counter on the first page which tells you and me how many people have visited my blog. I found that this was not among the list of widgets available in the theme or themes I had selected. What to do? I managed to install a Blog Stats plug-in from WP’s plug-in directory, but that only shows up when I access my dashboard. And so far it hasn’t even updated yet: it’s showing that no one has visited my new blog home. This can’t be true! Disappointed

So yeah, it’ll take me a while to get used to this new place.

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