Wayne Priestley

This is a repost of a blog I wrote when I first changed to WordPress but unfortunately it was deleted when I experienced my Siteground problems.

I decided to switch to WordPress after talking to David Allen on an interview I had with him on his podcast Mac20q.

A little while after that I was a regular reader of FruitBytes a blog from a Goerdie lass with a passion for Mac’s.

I was a RapidWeaver user from the start, when I first switched to the Mac it was the application I used for my blogging and website creation.

Nothing bad to say about RapidWeaver but I feel like a change and as WordPress is free it seems like a no brainer not to jump in and have a go.

The first AppleScript I wrote was a script to open two finder windows at the same time on my Desktop.

I’ve called it Twin Finder and made a nice Icon for it.

I have one Finder window open my Home folder and the other open my Downloads folder.

The reason I am telling you this is that I’m putting the script I wrote here for you to download if you want it.

If you want to modify it in any way feel free, changing the size or position isn’t hard, just open in Script editor and do as you with.
You may want to change the folders that Finder opens….

If you’re not comfortable doing it yourself drop me a line and I will modify it for you and upload it to the site.

I would suggest that once you’ve run it and decide if you want to keep it or not to open finder, go to Your_name/Library/scripts/applications/finder and drag the icon to the top of your finder window, if you hold it there for a moment it will add its self so you can just click it and the script will run opening two Finder windows.

Please download the application.Twin_Finder.zip

Or get the Script to edit hereUsers_Documents_Finder copy.zip

Here’s a PDF for download of Apple symbols you may not know about on your Mac.
If you haven’t got the keyboard viewer in the menu bar they can be hard to find.

Feel free to download the PDF.Keyboard symbols.pdf

I’ve had some major issues the last few days with Wordpress and Siteground.

Here’s where it starts…

On Tuesday 24th I installed a RSS plugin on my Site, all was going fine until I tried to transfer some files via FTP using Transmit and noticed that it couldn’t make the connection.

Just a glitch I thought.
Then after closing Safari and going off to do a few other things on my Mac I tried to log back into my WordPress admin account and the page would not load.

After a few attempts I thought that Siteground must have a problem with the server hosting my site and that it would all be sorted out later that night. It was getting late so I thought I would just leave it and all would be well the next day.

Unfortunately all was not well the next day and I still had the same problem of the page not responding when I tried to access the cPanel on Siteground.

It was time to raise a ticket, so off I went to raise a ticket when I noticed that I had an Un-read ticket waiting for me.

I was shocked to read the message from Siteground telling me that because my website was consuming high server resources my account was to be SUSPENDED if the issue was not sorted within seven days.

After several tickets to and from Siteground explaining what I thought the problem was, and how I could resolve it I decided I would simply log into my admin page and start to Un-install plugins starting with the last one I installed until the problem was solved.

It was here that I ran into problem number two.

I was unable to get access to my admin page on WordPress so I couldn’t remove any plugins.

After another ticket raised I was given alternate links to access my cPane, bit still had no luck.

Eventually I requested that Siteground remove the WordPress installation for me so that I could start again from scratch. I didn’t see this as a problem because I had only made a few posts and if I lost some data it wouldn’t be a problem.
This however didn’t resolve the issue of accessing my cPanel. One ticket later on Thursday 26th I had a response from Siteground telling me that the problem with access was due to my IP address being banned from the siteground servers……

So all is sorted now, I have a clean install of WordPress and I’m in the process of restoring my posts and settings etc.

I do seem to have lost my first post somewhere but it’s not a problem.

What I can say is that Siteground throughout this whole thing have been excellent in terms of support, I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait more than a few minutes for a response after raising a ticket. Fantastic support!

Thanks….

I’ll be spending the next few days putting my Tech Page back together and getting it posted by the weekend hopefully.

It’s a list of the Tech I have bought over the past couple of years that some of you may like to see.

There’s also a page of Wallpapers I’ve collected that I’ll post for anyone to download, thats going to take a little longer to code so I’ll probably get it started over the coming weekend.

So I’ve upgraded to the Safari 4 beta today.
After a little .plist editing to get it running with 1Password I’m loving the changes.

One thing thats a real improvement is the changes they have made when you open a new tab.
It no longer shows a blank page anymore, now you have a nice view of your top sites.

Heres an image of my top sites, not surprising ScreenCastsOnline & Mac20q are there, as well as one of my new favorite blogs at the moment FruitBytes.

Just click the here for a larger view.

A couple of weeks ago I took delivery of AppleScript 1-2-3 by Sal Soghoian.
This book is a over 1½”chick and it’s going to take a while to get through.

chapter 1 in the Apple site, It’s a good teaser and even after one chapter you’ll have written a script or two that are useful.

By the end of chapter one I had myself a nice little script for opening two Finder windows on my Desktop, one opens at my Downloads folder and the other at my Dropbox folder.

I spend a lot of time transferring files between these two folders so after writing the script I created a small icon in Pixelmator and added it to my script, I’ve now got the script saved as an application and have the icon in at the top of my Finder window for easy access..

My idea when I first got this book was to play along as I read on my Mac but I found that it just isn’t working for me.
I’ve decided to read through the book first, mostly on an evening and once I’ve read from front to back and got a good understanding of what’s going on I will play along on my Mac as I’m sure was the intention.

I will post a review of the book once I’ve come to the end of it and let you all know what I think.
So far it’s one of those books that you always want to get to the next chapter of because you just want to know what Sal will have you scripting next.

AppleScript is a powerful tool if you learn its full potential and this has to be the best book out there to do just that.

Well after spending a little time getting used to the WordPress UI I decided to go and have a quick look for a free WordPress theme.

This was a wrist numbing experience to say the least. There is certainly no shortage of themes out there for WordPress, just type WordPress theme into Google and you can sit there for hours paging through the results.

As it was a free theme I was after to start with I paged through what seemed like hundreds of sites looking for what I wanted.

I was looking for something clean, without images and I wanted a plain white page layout.

I found the Corpvox Theme while on the DailyBlogTips site.

It’s pretty much what I was looking for to start with, I’ve made a few very small changes to the code to get things looking a little more what I want, but one the whole I’m happy with it.

Now I need to look through the list of plugins available for WordPress and decide which ones I need to install.