Blogging 4 Jesus » -Browsers http://www.bloggingministry.com Exploring the Use of Blogs and New Media in Ministry Fri, 03 Feb 2012 04:33:06 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 -January: A Good Time for A Tune-up? http://www.bloggingministry.com/2011/01/10/january-a-good-time-for-a-tune-up/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=january-a-good-time-for-a-tune-up http://www.bloggingministry.com/2011/01/10/january-a-good-time-for-a-tune-up/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:30:54 +0000 Dr.D The logo of the blogging software WordPress.

                                (Image via Wikipedia)

When the first of the year rolls around it is always a good time to take a breath and evaluate how everything is working on your blog and whether or not a change of some sort is in order. Maybe your site is beginning to look rather stale and needs an update? This is always rather subjective and change just for the sake of change is never a good idea. Your readers get use to the way your blog looks and how it is organized and some features may even be part of its identity so care should always be taken to retain at least some important characteristics even if radical change is in order.

Sometimes program and browser updates force you to make major changes even if you don’t want to.

I have all of the major browsers on my computer in order to check out what all of my blogs look like on each. I can remember the first time I discovered the importance of that when my daughter who has a Mac came to me and said that one of my blogs didn’t look right. Sure enough on ‘Safari’ it did look rather horrible with the main article starting in 1/2 a page down instead of at the top. Obviously it needed to be tweaked. Since then I have gotten into a habit of checking out all of my blogs after any of the major browsers go through an update.

Lately the WordPress blogging program has been going through some major updates. I checked all of my WP blogs after putting up 3.0 and found no problems at the time. However after the 3.03 update one of the major plugins I was using stopped working right on some of my blogs and I ended up with the dreaded ‘white out’ page till I deactivated it. Then with the recent 3.04 one of my blogs no longer will call up the site pages and you end up with a 404 instead. Obviously a major change is in order and a new WP theme will need to be installed on that site.

Now comes the problem. I want to maintain the looks and organization of the current theme so will need to find an updated one that can support the same features. Meanwhile the site is not working right and immediate measures are in order. Maybe I will have to put up working temporary theme till I get a new one fully developed and tweaked.

Nevertheless, January is a great time for a blog tune-up and even for major changes. Somehow everyone is primed and ready for changes this time of the year.

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]]> http://www.bloggingministry.com/2011/01/10/january-a-good-time-for-a-tune-up/feed/ 0 The Importance of Browser Checks http://www.bloggingministry.com/2009/04/17/the-importance-of-browser-checks/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-importance-of-browser-checks http://www.bloggingministry.com/2009/04/17/the-importance-of-browser-checks/#comments Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:56:35 +0000 Dr.D http://www.bloggingministry.com/?p=495 image A couple of weeks ago I noticed that some of my blogs were loading slowly (30 seconds) and at other times not at all. At first I attributed it to a possible database attack like I had experienced early last year.

After checking everything out with my hosting co. and doing a bunch of different things to get a grip on the reason for the slow load I finally figured out that it was my dated theme that was not working so well with the WordPress 2.71 upgrade and with the latest Firefox browser which upgraded about the time when I started noticing the problem.

In the meantime, overnight I had lost nearly 1/2 of my traffic on those sites using that particular WP theme. I checked it out on Internet Explorer and found that it still loaded ok using that browser, that’s why I still had at least retained half of my normal visitors. Then I checked out how the sites worked on Safari and found that they would not load up on that browser either.

So here is a lesson to be learned at my expense:

It is a good idea to check out how your blog or website reacts and loads on different browsers!

I have known this in the past and have noticed that by blogs look somewhat different using different browsers. My daughter alerted me one time a couple of years ago that my site looked somewhat distorted on her Mac–she was using Safari as many Mac folk do. After that I had her checking it out once in awhile. Also another time by accident I discovered that some of my blogs looked different on IE 6 than they look on IE 7. So it is important to even check out different versions of the same browser at times.

Right now I have the current versions of Firefox, IE 8, Safari, and Chrome installed on my computer just for a quick check. However, it takes up a lot of memory. Here is a great site where you can check out how your blog or website resolves on all of the different browsers and versions currently in use:

<<<Browser Shots>>>           *Top

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