So you can’t login to your admin area- not as stupid as it sounds, of course if you have literally just forgotten your password then maybe you are silly but how this can happen is that you forgot your password and then decided to use the recover/reset option which will change the password in the wordpress database but then for what ever reason the new password is not emailed to you- so you still are no better off because you still don’t know the password so therefore can’t login- yes you could scream!!!!
But wait help is at hand.
Option 1: Steven has written a couple of scripts that as long as you have ftp access to your blog then you can upload his scripts and use it to reset the password or user name. BUT read carefully his disclaimer below and remember buyer beware
As advertised it’s not a good idea to leave them up on a server!
I’ve made sure the textboxes are protected against MySQL injections and stuff like that, though if your password has a single or double quotes in it, or any backslashes you may have some problems. Though who uses those characters in a password… honestly!
Option 2: This is another one from Village-idiot.org which does the same thing and works well. Luckily haven’t used it lately But last time I used it worked a treat.
Option 3: Now I’m going to seem like the silly one but I’ve also reset me password directly through the database so if you have access to your database this to can be an option. This site has print screens to help you through this option
Disclaimer: As most readers of this blog know I am an IT teacher so for my diploma students here is an update version of wordpress’s famous 5- minute install readme.html file.
Even though most of you don’tread the readme or all install instructions!! -Smart people know to read the readme properly first. But having said that many readme’s have a real expection of assumed knowledge so this is based on my what I know about my students assumed knowledge
The install instructions on wordpress are great but below is a short version of that and a better version of the readme that comes with the down load of wordpress 2.7
Updated WordPress: Famous 5-minute install
Down load the latest version of WordPress from www.wordpress.org
Unzip the package into an empty directory. (for my student this will be our local Dreamweaver folder so this about how you are going to work with it!!)
Login into your control panel and create a new database and user for this wordpress installation (if you don’t understand this step check with your hosting provider about creating a mysql database and user with full privileges)
Once you have these details
-Open up wp-config-sample.php on your local machine with a text editor like notepad or similar and fill in your database connection details. (my student know I will have define a site within Dreamweaver and will open wp-config-sample.php within Dreamweaver because I am about to customise wordpress to the max but any text editor will be fine)
Save the file you have edited aswp-config.php
Upload everything!!!!! – this begs the question to where??- do you want your domain to be the blog or do you want this blog to be a subsection of your site- think ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT- then either upload everything to the root of your domain if you want your whole site to be the blog or to a specific folder if you want your blog to be a subsection of your domain. (If that made no sense don’t hesitate to comment me – student or otherwise)
Open http://yourdomainname/installfolder/wp-admin/install.php in your browser. This should setup the tables needed for your blog. If there is an error, look at the error properly – most of the time it what you entered into wp-config.php file, and try again. Note the password given to you. And comment me with full details and I’ll have a look and let you know if it was your config or upload that is wrong
The install script should then send you to the login page. If you get this far WOOHOO.
Sign in with the username admin and the password generated during the installation. You can then click on ‘Profile’ to change the password.
The next post next week is how to test your wordpress install.
If this post was helpful please let me know- I love wordpress so will happily have a look and write a post about your install.
This post is about Ada Lovelace as part of my pledge that “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire” so here my list list so far. Please if anyone is part of the groups that I have mentioned below please leave a comment allowing me to mention you by name as I really do genuinely admire and respect your contribution to the appreciation of technology. Or leave a comment about the women that I’ve accidentally left out
Ada Lovelace
Ada lovelace (1815-1852) who is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that had yet to be built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, focused only on these capabilities.I just love this demonstration of “stereotypical” female traits.
Ada was the only legitimate of the famous 18th Century poet Lord Byron and like her famous father died an early death but in both of their short live they left the world with eternal legacy’s.
The Learning Technology Team is a group of enthusiastic teachers at North Coast Institute of TAFE NSW. There are at least 20 of us working hard to implement and support the use of new and emerging technologies to make teaching, learning and assessment experiences more exciting and motivating for our learners. While there are male members of the team who’s contribution is very valuable the majority of the team are women and their contribution to the support and development of the use of new technology in the engagement of our students is extremely motivating to be part of.
The journey that all our student take is amazing but I always personally love to see the personal growth that many of our female students experience.
Teaching staff at Kingscliff TAFE
The teaching staff at Kingscliff Tafe and particularly the teachers in the Information Technology section who always so go above and beyond in sharing their passion for IT with students are others that I admire.
This is a great short video on creating a simple table and form in Access 2007. For any one new to Access 2007 it’s a great intro and especially for my Certificate 2 in IT class.
You should focus on more than the list of desired functions. You need to investigate the stated and implicit factors that the organisation or website owner considers to be most significant in the product’s success.
Collect and organize user needs and expectations.
Either using existing research or by performing an comprehensive user research and persona creation process, you identify what the products’ users want from it and how they expect to use it. You put this information together into a mental model of the user, an understanding of the user’s wants, needs and expectations.
Perform a content audit.
The depth of the audit depends on the final outcome-high-level navigation redesign requires only auditing a sample of content, whereas a CMS migration necessitates a rigorous page-by-page inventory. The audit is the analyzed to define primary content types, which are then laid out in a Content Map.
Create a new information architecture
By coupling the content audit analysis with your understanding of users’ mental models and the product’s business goals. This architecture will define the overarching user experience of the site and will be documented in a diagram specifying every step of the user experience within the section under review.
Prepare the documents that define the foundation of the new information Architecture
Provide detailed navigation specifications indicating the navigation elements required for every page, in order to guide the implementation of the new architecture.
These specifications will be supplemented by wireframe schematics indicating the placement of all navigation elements. You can also provide a style guide that will outline naming conventions for key content areas, URL conventions, and conventions for site-wide way-finding cues.
Ok I’ve now had a bit more time to play with CS4 and I must admit its growing on me. Not in a bad rash kind of way- more like a new “know it all work colleague” who has just joined the company who “knows a better way to do absolutely everything“- that we all take an instant dislike to!!! But once we get over the initial shock we realise they actually do have some good ideas.
Getting over the initial shock was helped greatly by going to the Adobe CS4 roadshow in Brisbane and seeing the potential of the software demonstrated by true professionals. I must also thank Paul Burnett Senior Adobe Evangelist for taking the time to email this photo below.
You may not be able to see the Kingscliff TAFE students but we certainly can.
Pauls mad.com.au web site is another great addition to our resource sites along with adobe tv and where I spotted the photo. I must also mention at this time that the other presenters Mike McHugh, Michael Stoddart were just as entertaining and informative. OK they do it all day – everyday and are paid to make it look easy but they also made it look good.
Click on the photo below and on the new window which opens see if you can spot us. (It uses a cool javascript to zoom in)
First the disclaimer- I have only had Adobe CS4 installed for a few weeks and haven’t really dug deep deep down yet but I have had a play and I have updated some commercial work so I think I’m at a point of to be able to comments on the the CS4 update.
In Dreamweaver I love the new workspaces- it was always a pain for me that I couldn’t undock the panels and move them to the my second monitor so I have more design view room. So now that I have the option of dual screens
I love the having the code inspector open all the time big so as I edit in design view I can see properly whats happening in the code. No more split screen and having to scroll up and down continuously.
I also love that I can now open and tweak the original Photoshop documents that my images are based on directly from within Dreamweaver when previously this was only possible for Fireworks based images.
One thing that still hasn’t improved is Dreamweaver FTP client – while it may mean that I have accessed to feature such as collaborative features such as checking in and out it really is still painfully slowwwww!!!
Another feature which I like is the updated data set wizard which is a lot easier or at least seems alot easier now to add some ajax interactively. The movie below is a great intro and very easy to follow.
In the last week I have been setting up blogs for clients so I thought I’d share with you my views on WordPress vs Blogger based on my experiences this week. I must state these are just my opinions and I do have some previous experience with WordPress as this blog is my own self hosted WordPress blog-but until this week I had no experience with a blog hosted on wordpress or blogspot.
The basic requirements for the blogs were:
very easy for the clients to use with the image upload built in and a wysiwyg editor for formatting and adding hyperlinks
Quick for me to customise and brand including turning on and off options like blog rolls, comments etc
For one client the ability to create pages as well as posts was a definate requirement
So you can see nothing fancy was required.
My first instinct was to go for WordPress but for the clients are on Windows servers and I didn’t feel like risking it turning into a drama trying to get php/MYSQL based WordPress installed on the Windows server so I wimped out of tht option and decided to research some Windows based blog software for these ones that could be installed within the clients hosting accounts. But again I wimped out and decided to take the quick and dirty option of externally hosted blogs.
Hence the WordPress vs Blogger options, my first option was to signup at WordPress.com but once I was in after being used to being able to change everything in my self hosted WordPress blog I suddenly felt very restricted. Also because I tend to modify my WordPress files on my own machine and then publish them up to the public server I didn’t like the new work flow so after an hour here I thought I’d give blogger (blogspot.com) a go.
Quicker than any of the the other options I had the first customer blog ready for the client to take over – this is probably because even though blogger has only a few templates to choose from one was a good match for the client site so I only need to upload the banner and turn off a few of the side options and we were in business.
Deal Direct Fashion Club web site
DealDirectFashionClub blog on blogger
The next 2 were relatively painless as well so for these clients blogger was definately the go.
foxybabes website
Foxybabes blog on blogger
For the client who definately needed “pages” as well as posts well blogger wasn’t the go and nor was using WordPress at WordPress.com for that matter but this is probably because I want to use the blog more as a CMS than a blog so a self hosted WordPress was definately the go here.
So what is the conclusion.
Well for the quick and dirty option where not alot of customisation is actually required then blogspot is the go but one problem I foresee is if the client ever wants to move their blog elsewhere then this is definately going to be a problem and if they decide they want alot more visual customisations then it is going to be a problem. I also tried the blogspot option of hosting some of the files on our own FTP server but even after following all the instructions and all the help documentation I couldn’t get it to work properly so these aspects could become “issues” in the future.
self hosted blog being used as a CMS
For blogs where complete visual control is required, the option to customise absolutely everything is neccessary and you want to use it as a quick and dirty Content Managment System then I can’t go past WordPress sure you need to use alot of plugins to get it the way you want but the fact that there are so many plugins avialable is a definate strength not to mention the available themes and support community.
To get your free 1000 Google ads just follow the link or click the image to right to sign up and get 1000 Free Google Ads through Hot Goanna . You’re under no obligation to continue with a campaign after the 1000 ads are used up which would take about 3 days. After that Hot Goanna will send you a report on the performance of the ads.
This will enable you to make an informed decision on
whether to continue with a fully fledged campaign. Hot Goanna are authorised Google ads resellers and do this because they are confident that they can prove their value to you or your business in this time.
This is a list of links our wonderful x student Jaymie Jones from Triverse Designs . Have a look at some or all of them and leave a comment to let everyone know what you think of them or if you feel there are other sites that should be on “best of bookmark list”.
You should focus on more than the list of desired functions. You need to investigate the stated and implicit factors that the organisation or website owner considers to be most significant in the product’s success.
Provide detailed navigation specifications indicating the navigation elements required for every page, in order to guide the implementation of the new architecture.
