Tag Archives: wordpress

Bye Bye Jetpack? Not so fast!

For those who don’t know, Jetpack is Automattic’s WordPress plugin, which connects your blog to their cloud service and provides a number of features.

I have been using Jetpack for as long as I remember having this site on WordPress. And for most of the time, it has worked well.
However, recently, I noticed that when composing posts, the block editor would get stuck “saving” and not recover at all. Over many months, it led to hours of lost work. After troubleshooting thoroughly, I found that the problem only happened when Jetpack was enabled.

Jetpack broke post saves on this blog
Jetpack broke post saves on this blog

After begging a few days on their support forums and not receiving any response, I decided to ditch it once and for all and look at other options.

I knew there’s no single plugin that can replace Jetpack in totality, but when I made a list of the Jetpack features I use and how many plugins it would take to replace it, I was shocked.

Below is a description of what I did.

Social Media Share Icons

I decided to start with the easy items and immediately found “Simple Social Icons” to replace Jetpack’s social share icons.

Share button integration with Jetpack
Share button integration with Jetpack
Simple Social Icons by Osompress
Simple Social Icons by Osompress

All good. Let’s continue.

Commenting System

WordPress’s default commenting system requires a person to create an account on your blog before they can comment. Obviously this is not practical for blogs like mine where no one would bother to do this. So I tried 2 options:

Disqus

I was already familiar with Disqus, because I used it on my blog long ago, but I seem to have forgotten that it shows advertisements. I have kept my blog proudly clean over decades, why would I let a plugin display ads? Hard pass.

Advertisements in Disqus’s comment system
Advertisements in Disqus’s comment system

More things against this plugin were the requirement to create & maintain a Disqus account and it maintaining your comments on its servers, rather than integrating with WordPress’s comments (At least by default).

wpDiscuz

In-spite of the childish name spelling, this plugin was quite powerful, even with the free iteration.

wpDiscuz Comment Examples
wpDiscuz Comment Examples

This plugin actually out-performs Jetpack by allowing users to login with many different social media accounts (Jetpack allows only WordPress and Facebook accounts).

Related Content

Jetpack’s related posts carousel
Jetpack’s related posts carousel

I like showing related posts at the end of each post and YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) did a good job. Not much to write about this.

Downtime Monitoring

For downtime monitoring, I chose Pingdom’s service. The service is quite powerful, generating detailed stats, certainly more so than Jetpack which only shows up/down alerts. However, I realised later that the free tier only supports monitoring for 30 days. Since I don’t earn any money from this website, I decided to forego this feature and stay in the blind.

Pingdom’s site monitoring tool
Pingdom’s site monitoring tool

Fetch images directly from services

Jetpack’s image fetch tool
Jetpack’s image fetch tool

Jetpack has this nifty feature which allows you to insert royalty-free images directly from multiple image services (vs finding an image, verifying the license, saving it, then uploading it). I mostly use it for the cover image of each post.

To replace this, I found Instant Images, which allows fetching images from even more platforms.

Infinite Scroll & Lazy Load

For this, I chose WordPress Infinite Scroll – Ajax Load More, which does a good job.

Site Statistics

Cloudflare statistics example for this blog
Cloudflare statistics example for this blog

WordPress shows you graphs of how many people visited your blog and from where. This data is widely disputed to be flawed. Since I was already using Cloudflare, I chose Cloudflare’s stats for this.

However, I didn’t find a way to view these statistics in a formatting suitable for mobile displays.

Cloudflare statistics: Requests by country
Cloudflare statistics: Requests by country

Email Subscription & Sign Up Form

I saved the most complicated for the last and eventually this was the item which eventually caused me to give up.

Basically, I wanted people to be able to sign up to my blog newsletters via a sign-up form on the blog page and then receive notification emails when there’s a new post. Simple, right? Not so

MailChimp & MC4WP
MailChimp
MailChimp

MailChimp is the world’s leading email marketing platform. You can use it for free if you have less than 2000 subscribers, which is not a problem for me.

Signing up for an account and starting a campaign requires a lot of verification (To prevent spam, they say), but I was done in an hour, including importing my existing subscribers via a .csv file.

MC4WP
MC4WP

To make a subscription form on my website for people to type their email addresses in, I used MC4WP, which is a nifty tool which can update the subscriber’s list on your MailChimp account.

The free account was suitable for my needs.

However, I got stuck on the next part, which was to automatically send a notification email to my subscribers when there’s a new post. There doesn’t seem to be a native way to do this. The method recommended by MailChimp is to set up a “classic” automation which would read from an RSS feed of my blog and trigger the email sending. However, this feature was paid and I didn’t want to pay to send emails to 30 subscribers. On to the next option, then.

Icegram Express
Icegram Express
Icegram Express

The big advantage of Icegram Express was that it all runs natively within your WordPress installation, without a need for an account with them.

It took me 20 minutes to configure everything and setup the automations. However, when I tried testing the email digest (I tried both WPMail and PHPmail), it would only send emails half the time. The other half, it would say it sent the email, but the recipient would never receive it.

I tried my best, but I couldn’t find another alternative.

Eventually, I took stock of where I was. I had replaced Jetpack with 5 different plugins, created accounts with 3 new services and still I was nowhere near the functionality Jetpack provided.

I made the hard decision to give up and go back to Jetpack, with a new found appreciation for how useful this plugin actually is & how much it does for free.

If I edit my posts in Firefox, I don’t run across the “saving” problem anymore, however, I have raised a feedback with Apple to hopefully get it fixed.

The Photo Sharing Conundrum

To give you a bit of background on where this is coming from: I was into photography in the 2010s. To the point where I had a camera, multiple lenses and more assorted kit. Eventually I sold all of it, but I still like taking pictures today. This article is about how I struggled with photo sharing on the internet, especially recently. A timeline below, interspersed with completely unrelated photos:

Phase 1: 2004 to Oct 2023 : Flickr

blurred shimmering lights in cafe at night
Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels.com

As long as I remember, I have been a loyal user of Flickr. At first, I used to use it as a service to backup and store my photos and share them with family. With the advent of more private cloud storage services, I moved that function to OneDrive and eventually iClown. Still, I kept my Flickr around to share photos publicly.

For most of these 2 decades, I paid for a Flickr Pro membership, too. Although in the initial days it was not required, I paid to support the service and get rid of advertisements. Eventually, they put a 1000 photo limit for free accounts & I was forced to go Pro. Overall though, Flickr has been good to me. It has consistently surfaced my photos in search results and they have been used on almost hundred websites including Wikipedia.

Last year, I started to question why I was paying for this service. It is not like I was earning anything from sharing my photos, they were openly licensed to anyone who wanted to use them. So I decided to take the drastic step of moving away from Flickr.

Phase 2: Oct 2023 to Oct 2023 : Photo Blog

close up photo of mining rig
Photo by panumas nikhomkhai on Pexels.com

I decided to make my own photo blog and host my photos on it. I chose WordPress as my platform because of how ubiquitous it is. As you may know, WordPress natively is not a photo sharing CMS, but there are plugins that can help. I decided to move away from the album format of Flickr and post my photos as part of posts.

I spent a lot of time sifting through my photos and narrowing them down to 2200 photos I deemed worthy of the blog.

It took me 6-7 hours of work everyday for a week to finally put everything up. Time consuming tasks include:

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Setting the correct Caption and Alt Text for each photo
  3. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  4. Writing posts about the photos
  5. Renaming files
  6. Adjusting the posts for good SEO

And then I made the mistake of restoring a backup for my web hosting (Not knowing it restores all websites) and lost everything.

Phase 3: Oct 2023 to Nov 2023 : Flickr Part 2

person holding lighter
Photo by Kobe – on Pexels.com

Devastated at having lost my blog because of one erroneous click, I decided I couldn’t go through with doing all that one more time and went back to Flickr. Of course, I had deleted my account already, so had to start from scratch.

It took me 6-7 hours everyday for a week to get everything posted on Flickr. Time consuming tasks include:

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  3. Sorting photos into albums
  4. Adding photos into groups for visibility

It was nice while it lasted, but within a few weeks, I started to miss my photo blog. Two factors (in de ja vu format) led me to the next steps

  1. Why am I paying for a Flickr Pro subscription when I am not earning anything from it?
  2. Why am I relying on a 3rd party service when I can have my own photo blog.

So I went ahead and deleted my Flickr account, yet again.

Phase 4: Nov 2023 to December 2023 : Photo Blog Part 2

data codes through eyeglasses
Photo by Kevin Ku on Pexels.com

I spent a lot of time sifting through my photos and narrowing them down to 2200 photos I deemed worthy of the blog.

It took me 6-7 hours of work everyday for a week to finally put everything up. Time consuming things include

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Setting the correct Caption and Alt Text for each photo
  3. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  4. Writing posts about the photos
  5. Renaming files
  6. Adjusting the posts for good SEO

Then I had to go back and ask the people who has previously subscribed to my blog to subscribe again. Embarrassing as fuck. The honeymoon period lasted all of 2 weeks.

Eventually, I began to notice that the traffic on my photo blog was not as per my expectations. Eventually, I found out that search engines were not indexing my photos. In fact, Bing straight up blocked my domain. I request an appeal but it was denied.

After consulting with the wise people of Reddit, I came to the conclusion that WordPress is not good for photo SEO and nothing could beat Flickr when it came to indexing photos on search engines.

So I deleted my blog, yet again.

Phase 5: January 2024 to January 2024 : Flickr Part 3

row of shiny candles near glass wall
Photo by Erkam Hayta on Pexels.com

On my third Flickr account, it took me 6-7 hours everyday for a week to get everything posted on Flickr. Time consuming tasks include:

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  3. Sorting photos into albums
  4. Adding photos into groups for visibility

Voila! I had to wait a few weeks, but eventually my photos began to appear on search engines again.

It was nice while it lasted, but within a few weeks, I started getting disillusioned with Flickr. Two factors led me to the next steps

  1. Why am I paying for a Flickr Pro subscription when Iam not earning anything from it?
  2. Why am I relying on a 3rd party service when I can have my own photo blog.

So I went ahead and deleted my Flickr account, yet again.

Phase 6: April 2024 to May 2024 : Piwigo

Free computer server room image

This time I decided that I won’t use WordPress for my photo sharing, so did a lot of research and narrowed it down to Lychee and Piwigo. I couldn’t get Lychee installed, so decided to go with Piwigo. I immediately ran across a few problems

  1. The interface was dated and the theme selection was limited
  2. There was no SEO to speak of, even with plugins
  3. Like all Open Source software (But unlike WordPress), it required a lot of tinkering in PHP to get it to work correctly .

Thankfully, I didn’t waste time posting 2200 photos, rather posted just 2 albums to see how they perform.

After waiting for a few weeks, I realised that my photos weren’t appearing on search engines and decided to scrap it.

Phase 7: May 2024 to May 2024 : Unsplash

man people art girl
Photo by Sohail Nawaz on Pexels.com

Someone on Reddit recommended me Unsplash so I decided to use it. Again, thankfully, I only uploaded 2 albums. Unsplash is a beast when it comes to surfacing photos. I was receiving likes within minutes and had up to 100 downloads in 48 hours for 20 photos.

Unsplash seemed like a dopamine dream come true, until I read their licensing. Long story short, Unsplash lets anyone do whatever they want with your photos without requiring attribution. I may have been OK with it, till I read horror stories from photographers about their photos being used on other platforms, while being attributed to someone else. This was a deal breaker for me, so I deleted my Unsplash account.

Phase 8: May 2024 to June 2024 : Wikimedia Commons

By this time, I was dead tired of doing the same things over and over again, so I decided to take a step back and list down what I wanted and what I didn’t want:

  1. I did not want to earn money from my photos.
  2. I did not want to the dopamine fix of likes and comments.
  3. I did not want to share personal photos and did not want an image storage platform.
  4. I did not want to pay for hosting my photos.
  5. I did want my photos to be indexed by search engines.
  6. I did want my photos to be used freely by others, but with attribution.

When. I thought long and hard around the above requirements, the answer came to me. Wikimedia Commons, one of the most extensive media repositories ever.

I was already an occasional contributor to Wikipedia, I could just extend my contributions from articles to media. Many of my photos have already been uploaded to Wikipedia (and consequently wikimedia) by others, I just had to complete the collection.

It took me around 10 days, working 6-7 hours a day to put around 2200 photos to Wikimedia. Time consuming tasks include

  1. Setting the correct copyright & license information for each photo
  2. Setting the correct Title, Caption & Description for each photo
  3. Assigning photos to the correct category (Quite tricky with nested and overlapping categories)
  4. Assigning depictions to each photo

Finally, when it was done, I heaved a sigh of relief and promised myself not to do this all over ever again. Indeed, even if I wanted to, there’s no easy way to mass delete my photos from Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, once you upload photos, there’s no temptation (or a way) to see stats, likes or comments. Luckily, 1 month in, I don’t regret doing this.