Saturday 20 October 2012

My Edited Posts Re-appear in the Portal

We have had contact from several people (thanks very much) alerting us to the fact that posts reappear in the portal whenever they've been edited, and asking what can be done to stop flooding it with multiple posts.

At the moment the portal is inhibited by my absolute lack of knowledge about any of this stuff.  I am learning quite quickly I think, but not quickly enough obviously!   I currently have no way of preventing edited posts from re-appearing and I can't put a time on when this might happen.

In the meantime, could we simply ask for assistance, by requesting that if old posts are to be edited, that they are limited to no more than two or three every twelve hours or so.

We also need to ask for the general community to show some tolerance to this, although if any blog whether by accident or intent does "flood" the portal with an excessive number of images, it will be removed for a 24 hour period to allow me to correct the problem manually.

Thanks
Peter

Thursday 18 October 2012

I CAN'T SEE MY PHOTOS (Wordpress)


If your photos are not publishing on our feed, but your blog is.  That is, if everything is there alongside a blank space where your photo should be, there is a fair chance that you are publishing from a Wordpress Site.

The solution seems to be quite simple though.   Before you post your blog, please go to your Wordpress Control Panel and mark your photo as a "Featured Image".

This will then tag the photo with the necessary HTML to allow our feed scanners to find it.

UPDATE- if your template does not allow "featured images" there are several Wordpress plugins which can be used to achieve the same thing.  Search for "Featured Images - RSS" plugin.

Thanks,

Peter

Tuesday 16 October 2012

I'VE BEEN REGISTERED FOR YEARS BUT CAN'T SEE MY BLOG

After the launch of this site two days ago, the most common "question" we have received is the one in the title.

We welcome any advice in this regard as we are aware that many, many blogs are not yet on the portal. (October 2012)

Just to make things perfectly clear, we are still building our database from a blank sheet of paper.  Nothing of use was saved from the old portal, everything we have at this point of time comes from Gerald, memory, and hard slogging detective work on Julie's part.

If you don't think your blog is here, please firstly check that you have uploaded a post within the previous 24 hours or preferably less, then check under the region you are from:
Europe, Asia, Africa and America.

If your blog is not there, please leave a message (including your email address in the place provided) on our Contact Form.

Please DO NOT use the feedback form, comments in this post, or our Facebook Group for this purpose as we simply do not have the resources to read every post in those places and respond is a reasonable time frame.

Thanks for your patience,

Peter



Friday 12 October 2012

I CAN'T SEE MY PHOTOS!


Ahh… that's just one of the problems with not having an IT guru hiding in this place.  We've scratched around to try to fix the problem from this end, and for the time being we can't find a solution.  We're working on it, but in the meantime there may be something you can do:

Every instance that we've found of this occurring to date has been with Wordpress, so there's a fair chance that you have a Wordpress Blog which in its standard configuration does not serve "thumbnail" photographs to your RSS feed.   There are many sites offering instructions as to how to fix this, and in a few weeks if we can't solve the problem we'll try to post some directions here.

In the meantime, if you could try to work your way through the instructions found by searching Mr Google for "Wordpress Feed Thumbnails", apparently there is a plug-in available to do the job, or  perhaps you could try the following solution (found at the above link).    Please note we have not tested this code so do so at your own risk;

Paste the following code in your functions.php file. 
Apparently the post thumbnail should be visible once you saved the file.

function diw_post_thumbnail_feeds($content) {
global $post;
if(has_post_thumbnail($post->ID)) {
$content = '<div>' . get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID) . '</div>' . $content;
}
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'diw_post_thumbnail_feeds');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'diw_post_thumbnail_feeds'); 
 Don't forget to let us know how you got on so we can share your success (or learning curve) with others.

WHY CAN'T I SEE MY BLOG ON THE PORTAL?


First things first, do we have you registered with us?

If so and we have your blog online, please note that the portal front page serves a maximum of one hundred and fifty blogs at any given time, with updates occurring irregularly, but at intervals as small as fifteen minutes.   If your blog has been updated it will appear for approximately twelve hours, constantly being "bumped" from the top to the bottom of the page as new blogs are published.

On the "Region" page (Europe, Asia, America and Africa) the latest post from your blog will remain exposed providing you post each day.

Please note that posting more than once per day is not permitted as this will displace someone else from the queue.

Thursday 11 October 2012

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

I suspect that if on launch day of any website help pages were filled with questions "frequently asked" one could quite rightly be a little suspicious of the motives of the authors!

We have no responses pending at the moment, which is a good thing, but if there are questions to be asked we will be pleased to attempt to answer them once our contact arrangements are in place.

In the meantime if you do have a question regarding the City Daily Photo community, blogging, photography or even setting up your own photo blog, please have them ready to ask.


Hopefully you will find the answer to the most common issues we find with the here. If you can't find the answer you need, please contact us and we'll try to work with you to solve the problem.

HAVE YOU GOT ONE?

Even a baby could install one of our banners in the side bar of your blog. Find them on our MEMBER'S BADGE PAGE!

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