Yesterday, was my tinkering day and I decided to update the way the authors posts are displayed when you click on the author’s name in the blog posts.

So after creating a new author.php file and taking the information for the layout for the theme I am using and adding it to the new author file, I decided that it would look even better if I utilised the “author box” that is at the bottom of all the posts here on my blog, just thought it would look even better.

So after adding that piece of code, I added the section for the articles that an author has written, with the information such as date posted, comments received etc. Giving the author page something that little bit more.

Over time I may add snippets from the blog posts to the lists of articles in the author pages, but for now, I think they look a lot better than the default author archives that I originally had.

Check out the my new look author page and let me know what you think.

Got the message in my WordPress dashboard today that WordPress 3 was available to upgrade to, “Awesome” I thought, so I clicked the upgrade button and got ready to use the new version of WordPress….

But a problem arose while trying to upgrade and I kept getting the error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2516315 bytes) in /home/mydomain/public_html/blog/wp-includes/http.php on line 1363

OMG! So now it would be a case of doing a manual upgrade, which I hate doing as it seems to be such a cumbersome method, so after checking with a friend, who’s in the know with these sort of things they recommended me doing the following to make this work.

1. Open up the file wp-settings.php which is in the main directory of your WordPress installation
2. Find the line that reads define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’32M’);
3. Change it to define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
4. Then start the upgrade process again.
5. Hopefully everything should have updated for you.

The problem is memory limit and by doing the above you give your PHP a little more memory to play around with and therefore giving WordPress that extra elbow room it needs to update correctly.

Please note, I’m not a PHP expert, so please BACK UP you WordPress installation before any upgrade that you make.

The mighty CommentLuv plugin has now been updated to version 2.80 and it seems faster than the previous versions and also has some nice new features included in the latest incarnation.

Which I will list for you in a moment, but first let me mention the nice surprise I had from Andy from CommentLuv via Twitter, I was reading in my Twitter time line that the new version was listed in the WordPress Plugins Directory, which I have to admit I don’t visit that often, I use the search from within WordPress for updates etc. But, after receiving this tweet from Andy, I had to check it out!

@BlazingMinds have you seen the new screenshots page for commentluv 2.80? http://bit.ly/bGUe44

June 5, 2010 8:40 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@CommentLuv

Andy Bailey

Imagine my surprise and excitement when I saw the second image on the page, were my red headed avatar is in pride of place in a screenshot of how the plugin is displayed.

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The other day while reading through my RSS feeds on Feedly I came across a post at Potpolitics titled ”What is the best toolbar for your blog?”, now most of you that visit my blog will now that I have used the Wibiya Toolbar and though it is quite good and fairly fast to load, after reading John’s post I decided to give the Skysa Toolbar a shot and boy am I glad I did.

Not only is it a tad faster than the previous toolbar that was installed on Blazing Minds, but it allows you to make a little money back on it, yes you read that right, each time someone follows the link here on my blog and installed the toolbar I get $1 and then I think , if I’m right, my good friend John over at Potpolitics gets $0.25, anyway here’s a breakdown of the tier system etc that Skysa use.

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What’s this [intlink id="wordpress-stops-pinging-fix" type="post"]another blog post about WordPress 2.9[/intlink], yes that’s right I’m bringing you some more [intlink id="565" type="category"]blogging tips[/intlink] in the hope that I can help out fellow WordPress users that may be getting that awful message “Sorry, that file cannot be edited” when trying to edit a theme file with the [intlink id="52" type="category"]WordPress[/intlink] 2.9 built in theme editor.

So what is the solution to the problem?

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It’s been a funny old week since I updated to WordPress 2.9, don’t get me wrong the new update is fantastic and some of the new features are extremely useful to use, but, and this is a big but, after installing the update, every time I made a post or used a ping back or trackback my WordPress blog would not ping or send pingbacks to other sites!

But now since making a tiny little tweak to the file “wp-includes/cron.php” I’ve fixed the problem!

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It only seems like the other week when WordPress upgraded to 2.8.5, now another release is available, WordPress 2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges.

I’ve just backed up the database of my blog and used the auto update option in the WordPress dashboard and it’s updated to the latest version, so far everything seems to be running ok, and all my plugins seem to be behaving themselves.