Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

If you haven’t upgraded your WordPress blog to 2.9 (actually 2.9.1 as of the time of this writing), you should.  With the 2.9 update, the people at WP have implemented a feature that I’ve been pining for for some time.  The only problem is it’s not where you’d think it might be.

If you do regularly keep up on your WP updates whenever you get an alert that there’s a new version, you probably saw the option to upgrade your plugins when you upgraded to 2.9.1.  But I know a lot of people (myself included) often let updates slide, and while I did run out and upgrade to 2.9, I hunted for the upgrade-all-the-plugins-at-once button and didn’t find it.  If you’re like me, this post is for you, and here’s what you do.

First off, upgrade if you haven’t already.  WordPress has made it easy to do an automatic upgrade since the 2.7 release, so all you need to do (in most cases) is click a button and WordPress does the work for you.  But what if you are at 2.9+ and you have a little red icon next to your plugins menu on the sidebar, and you want to take care of all of those at once?  It’s not in the Plugins page — which is where I assumed it would be — despite the fact that you can filter your plugins by those needing to be updated.  Instead, you’ll need to head to the Upgrade page in the Tools menu, a place that normally you wouldn’t go for anything other than upgrading WordPress.

Once you’re on the Upgrade screen, everything should make sense.  If you need to upgrade your WordPress version, you’ll have an option to do that, and if you need to upgrade any of your plugins, they will be listed underneath with checkboxes next to each one, and an option to select all. After you click on the Upgrade Plugins button, it’ll go through each one, and tell you at every point what’s going on.

…and that’s it.  WordPress will tell you when it’s done, and the whole process should be pretty quick.

Fixing problems

What it’s doing is temporarily dropping your site into maintenance mode while it does the work.  This takes down your site for a few minutes and displays a message that says “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute” (it looks like this).  It should really only take a few minutes and as soon as it’s done it will come back up.  However, if there’s a problem on your server and the script stops, it means your site is locked in maintenance mode, and even you can’t get in.

Luckily, this is relatively easy to fix.  When WordPress goes into maintenance mode, it creates a temporary file in your site’s “root” folder (the folder on the server that your WordPress installation is located that contains the wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes folders) called .maintenance.  All you need to do if your site gets stuck in maintenance mode is to delete the .maintenance file.  This may require connecting via FTP or going to your webhost and accessing a File Browser-like GUI that displays a list of files in your installation.  Once you’re looking at the files in your WordPress install, it should be easy to spot the .maintenance file and delete it.  Once that’s done, you’re back in business (although you may want to try upgrading that plugin individually from the Manage Plugins page, or manually by uploading a newer version to your server).

Saves time

Being someone who maintains multiple WordPress sites and has to periodically upgrade all of them when there’s an update available, this feature is invaluable to me.  It’s so much faster and easier to go to one screen on each site I need to update, and upgrade both the version of WordPress and all the plugins more or less at the same time, and then move on to the next site.  Even if you only have one blog, this takes a lot of the hassle out of having to do periodic plugin updates.  It’s something that a lot of us have been asking for since Automattic added in the automatic upgrade feature, and I’m glad they finally added it in.

Questions?  Comments?  We’d love to hear from you!  Let us know if this post helped you out!

there are a few of these floating around on the web…

a few months ago, smashing magazine posted an article called Quality-Price-Ratio in Web Design (Pricing Design Work).  i’m not going to recap the article, you can go over there and read it yourself if you’re interested — it’s a good read both, i think, for designers as well as people trying to shop for good designers.  there were two main points of the article: 1) price and quality do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, and 2) generally speaking, you get what you pay for.

the article posed a solution for designers for pricing their work, a formula.  yes, there are lots of pricing  your work formulas out there, but this one has a lot of room for variation depending on how much you value  your own work.  the formula goes like this:

price = creativity coefficient x cost of doing business

cost of doing business is obvious — it’s what most of these calculators are for.  but what, you ask, is the creativity coefficient?  it’s the amount by which you determine the value of your services.  anyone can come up with an estimate based roughly on the cost of doing business — the variation comes when you’re trying to figure out how much to add to that so that you can actually make money doing design.  if you’re just making ends meet to pay the bills, you’re probably in the wrong industry.  the so-called creativity coefficient includes difficulty of the project, your company’s brand strength, and your style or individuality.  there is no 1-10 scale, it’s all left open-ended and depending on  how you value your own services, a project could be valued at $100 or $10,000, it all depends on the numbers you plug in.

so i made a spreadsheet with formulas to come up with a couple different quotes based on different sets of variables as a way to get an idea how to price each project.  the reason i like a range is because another factor is the audience — who you’re proposing this quote for and what they’re expectations are.  certainly you could give them a high bid and if they walk away, well, that’s their loss, but we don’t typically work that way.  and anyway, we’re just getting started and don’t have heavy brand strength or traffic yet.

because i’ve used this a few times, i thought it would be useful for other designers, or for people shopping for design to get an idea of how our pricing systems may work.  so i’m offering up my version of the designer’s cost calculator.

how it works

the first thing you do is plug in your expenses.  for designers this is your cost of doing business, and if you work from home, you can include things like a percentage of your mortgage or rent for the space you use as your office, internet service, software and hardware upgrades, etc.  basically, all that stuff that you should be itemizing on your taxes that help you run your business.  that creates your operating cost.  i then break down the operating cost to cost-per-day, which divides your monthly expenses by 25 (for 25 business days in a month).  then my formula branches out — i have a set of numbers based on 8-hour days, and a set of numbers that divides your daily operating cost by 24 (for instance, if you’re including things like electricity bills or other expenses that are an always-on sort of thing).  i also have a place to enter your hourly rate for comparison.

that’s all the setup.  so you have a project, what do you do?  first, figure out approximately how long it will take.  i break this down in days and hours.  then you plug in the difficulty, brand strength, and individuality variables of the creativity coefficient. and that’s it.  now you have a range of quotes based on different variables.  i have a quote based solely on number of hours x hourly rate (and does not take into account the creativity coefficient), one that is based on the 8 hour operating cost, one that is based on the 24 hour operating cost, and one that is based on the daily operating cost.  then i take a median of all four and offer that up as well.

it’s a bit of overkill, but it can be tweaked and customized, and i like having options.  and that’s why i’m offering it up.  you can take it and do whatever you want with it, change the formula, hard code your creativity coefficient, whatever.  it’s yours.

the zip file contains 3 versions for different formats; xlsx for office 2007, xls for all other versions of office, and ods for OpenOffice.org and other open office projects.

download designer cost calculator 27.3 kB
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Hey again.  Been super busy around here lately, but something I found made me want to share.  This is a quick and easy trick that looks awesome and will save valuable space on your website.  Ever seen those boxes where you enter your email address or a search and it says “enter search/name/whatever here” and that text goes away as soon as you click there?  If you’re not using a Revolution/StudioPress theme, it’s probably not built into your site for you.  Here’s how to add that functionality.  (Note: for anyone familiar with javascript stuff, you don’t need to worry — there’s no external files attached to this one, just a quick code snippet and then you’re on your way.)

First, a little setting: this will work in any <input> box — that is a box that you type into.  So a search box, email submission form, whatever.  Also, you will need to edit code.  I am going to use WordPress as an example, and I am going to use the search box, but this can be applied to any input box once you know the basics.  Ready?  Here we go:

Find the default search form (searchform.php).  If your theme doesn’t have one, you can make one by copying searchform.php from the WordPress Default theme (or, really, any WP theme).  The searchform.php just handles the actual search box itself, so you’re not likely to mess anything up.  Once you have it, open searchform.php in your favorite text editor, HTML editor, or the Theme Editor in the WordPress admin.  You’ll probably see something like this:

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
<label class="hidden" for="s"><?php _e('Search for:'); ?></label>
<div><input type="text" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s"  />
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
</div>
</form>

That’s your search form.  To make text display in the input box (which is where you type stuff), replace this line:

<input type="text" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s"  />

with this:

<input type="text" value="Search this website..." name="s" id="s" onfocus="if (this.value == 'Search this website...')
{this.value = '';}" onblur="if (this.value == '') {this.value = 'Search this website...';}" />

If you want, you can change the “Search this website…” to be whatever text you want, but make sure you change it everywhere.  What it’s doing is a simple if statement that is triggered when you click inside the box (onfocus) or somewhere else (onblur): if the text in the box says “Search this website…” change the text to ” ” (i.e. nothing).  if the text in the box is ” ” (i.e. nothing), change it to “Search this website…”  Easy.  And now you can get rid of this part entirely:

<label for="s"><?php _e('Search for:'); ?></label>

thereby saving space.  Handy, and also visually interesting.  Also, as I said, no external javascript files to upload, and can be applied just about anywhere, once you get the hang of it.

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