No more support from me starting 4/22/14

Hey everybody — not that many of you will likely care one way or another, but I will no longer be pitching in to offer support help here starting tomorrow April 22 as I will be hunkering down to solve number of issues on our business portal, ecom system upgrade, image enlargement fix for WP/Newspaper for our news portals (will update you all on that adventure once I have a yes or no solution).

As noted previously, I have no relation to TagDiv beyond being customer and have been offering some help to others to pay forward all the help I’ve gotten over the years on stuff where I was pulling my hair out.

Peace and well wishes to all!

Thanks man for all your help! You are an example of the goodness of the world! Very much appreciated!

While your input has sometimes been helpful — why are you providing support for newspaper if you’re not part of the team?

• This reply was modified 12 years by Daniel Finch.

I sometimes think that you don’t have anything better to do — I don’t mean to be rude.

OMG..I have read many of your comments(your friendly face was in the Yoast website too) and gained so much knowledge over the past month. Thanks.

Thanks for all the kind words @OTIS and @AJ – and all. I’ve been happy to help out. Glad it’s been useful to some folks with the page speed stuff, image stuff, customizations, general wordpress WTF stuff, etc.

@snowwatchGB
Um. Because it’s a nice thing to do? Sorry that’s an alien concept to you, based on your post. Something to look into down the road perhaps.

Nothing better to do? I run a business which was an Inc. 5000 listed company, blah blah.
I’ve been an award winning graphic designer since a teenager in the 70s, have design award from Apple (!), widely interviewed in the press (Entrepreneur, Chicago Sun Times, etc), used to write monthly column on web design a decade ago for Digital Imaging, Micro Publishing News, Graphic Artist Guild; started building websites 1995, SEO and ecom 1996, built Oprah Winfrey’s ecom solution (and hosted it) for her “Begin with Love” video series; CEO of a design and publishing company, webdev, seo, PR, marketing, etc. Was on annual judging panel for PRSA “Excellence in Tech Journalism” awards. My websites generate 10 million page views per month. Some stories have gotten one million views for ONE story, in one week. Most sites have been online for 15+ years.

So, upshot my time is very valuable and I work huge hours and am involved with thousands of pages of content at any given time (google ‘Neotrope’ or ‘Send2Press’ to see what I mean).

But since you asked:
I often multi-task on my two 23-inch Apple cinema displays; and during the day I often have to do multiple things at once, like waiting for a bunch of things to FTP, waiting for mailing list system to run, run ecom system optimizations and backup, wait for client reply to do a same day project. Talk on phone to clients, etc.

So, I often have some “free time” where I check in on technical issues which may impact my business, from Heartbleed bug, PCI-DSS compliance, or support forums for the various commercial products I use.

Or as I stated to begin with:
....offering some help to others to pay forward all the help I’ve gotten over the years on stuff where I was pulling my hair out.

This means that I’ve been lucky to get help from many others over the years on stuff simple and complex and unsolvable without a forum poster saying ‘go look at this dummy’ and then I figure it out. A LOT OF WEB STUFF HAS CRAP DOCUMENTATION. There are whole websites in the webdev world just for this kind of thing …and I’ve had numerous issues with my ecom platform (NOT woocommerce), or issues with our dedicated servers which I would never have been able to sort out without help form somebody on a forum when the company tech support was clueless.

So, the time I’ve put in here has been to HELP others … to pay back the help I’ve gotten from so many over the years. I also pop in to the forum for my ecom software, have provided feedback to Yoast on bugs in his programs (e.g., beta of the news addon, issue with the twitter account field, etc.), and various other arcane things related to the web dev world.

For the average joe running a blog, that person doesn’t often have time or inclination, or sometimes the braincells to FIGURE IT OUT, which some of us do as matter of course. So, folks like me who post back some tips, tricks, or stuff that tagDiv might not even know, is useful. I’ve been managing WordPress sites daily since Jan 2006. I’ve learned more than a few things.

So, this is where the term “paying it forward” came from.
Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor.

In any case …. happy earth day to all, and to all a good night! 🙂

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Hey Simmons,

Do not bother replying to those internet d-bags.
Personally you have(and few good souls like you in the internet) helped me save enormous amount of time and money.

Those people who run those charities..do you think they have nothing better to do?
You ran your own personal charity by helping people like me.. Your work means a lot.

I will pay it forward when I can.

Big thanks for interesting discussions and valuable answers in this forum, and good look in the future!

Thanks for the help, it’s appreciated 🙂

I just want to thank you Christopher and all the people that help others with his knowledge. I try also to help everybody I can, not only online because I have also received a lot of help during my life.

Hey, thanks everybody for the kind words. 🙂 I’ve really only pitched in a very small amount of time, but now I need to “focus” on couple of critical things, so no more posting on my FB page for awhile either. That 20 minutes of lunchtime wandering now has to be curtailed to meet some deadlines by end of May.

I’ll check back in to update the issue with enlarging images via a plugin, as that is the last remaining “darn it” item for our sites using Newspaper.

My hope it to use Auto Post Thumbnail Pro as first step as this creates an image from first item in post, even external from our mothership news portal (Send2Press.com), sets as featured image; then “perhaps” thumbail upscale plugin to grab that and make the larger thumbs for the “featured” category toppers and larger zoomed images for featured boxes on the home page. Since most of our images are 500×375 for the legacy news sites (like CaliforniaNewswire.com), or 700×405 on others (some are even 600×300), this will hopefully replicate the old timthumb behavior we need. Hopefully WP 4 will eventually have this capability. Sadly they assume everybody should be uploading giant 1024×768 images and then going “down” from there, while in fact zooming a 500 pixel image to fit a 700 pixel width feature box with overlay of text/headline, works just fine.

So, I’ll be back to update that adventure later on!

Peace out! 🙂

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Also a big thank you from my side.

After installing the theme for the first time I run into several issues (mainly customizations) and used the search function in this forum a lot.

I could save myself and the newspaper-team a lot of time – because you already answered several questions.

Good luck with your upcoming challenges.

Cheers,
Norman

That dude is a douche. Thanks for the help. Though we’ve not interacted directly until now, I’ve read your comments and often thought about how to send you a message to thank you for your FREE and GENEROUS help on a lot of issues and ideas related to WordPress, usually not just limited to Newspaper. But alas, there is no messaging on this forum and a new topic for that seemed douchey in and of itself.

Regardless, good luck getting your image issues resolved and ecom bugs worked out. Ninety-nine percent of us will be glad when you’re back to your helpful form on the forums. Thanks!

I would also like to thank you Christopher for all the detail and clear explanations you have generously given. You support has personally helped me get this site, and others, up an running a lot quicker and with less angst. You will be missed and your rewards will be great.

On a side note with the images my site was a mess changing over but Marius solution of using Thumbnail Upscale and Force Regenerate Thumbnails has worked well. Although I hate running lots of plugins so if your solution works I would be interested in hearing what you come up with.

Good luck and thank you.

Peter

Thanks again for kind words 🙂

Stalk me on twitter: @tophersimmons

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Christopher,

Thank you for all of your help in the Newspaper theme community! Really appreciate it! Best of luck! 🙂

Thanks man!!

Hi Christopher, we don’t know each other, but from what I have seen, I am quite impressed with your knowledge and your willingness to help others.
Peace to you too.
Vincent