Fatal error: Call to undefined method WordPress_Module::_weak_escape() in ../wp-includes/wp-db.php

Chances are you have the Redirection plugin. Anything prior to version 2.1.14 will throw this error when you upgrade. Of course, it would have been nice if you upgraded the plugin prior to upgrading WordPress, but you didn’t do that… did you?

I didn’t either.

No worries. The solution is simple enough:

1. Rename the /wp-content/plugins/redirection directory to /wp-content/plugins/redirection-bad (or something like that) – This will cause WordPress to disable the plugin.
2. You should be able to log into the WP admin now.
3. Go to Plugins in the WP admin and confirm that the Redirection plugin is disabled.
4. Change the /wp-content/plugins/redirection-bad back to /wp-content/plugins/redirection.
5. Refresh the Plugins page in the WP admin.
6. You should be able to use the automatic upgrade now on the Redirection plugin.

If you have other blogs to upgrade, try upgrading the plugin first… unless you like this sort of thing.

I love the simplicity of the wp-quotes plugin by Zombie Robot. It does what it’s supposed to do and it does it well. Until it doesn’t of course.

There was a wee bit of a problem with the latest WordPress update to version 2.6.2: it broke the admin interface for wp-quotes.

This happened because I used the InstantUpgrade plugin. InstantUpgrade is excellent, but overwrites files in the wp-admin directory with impunity. Of course, it might be a good idea if the author of wp-quotes hadn’t put the edit-quotes.php file in the wp-admin directory. But let’s not quibble, shall we?

So here’s the fix for wp-quotes admin interface after upgrading to WordPress 2.6.2:

• Visit Zombie Robot and download wp-quotes 1.3 again.
• Unzip the archive
• Upload the file edit-quotes.php to your /wp-admin directory
• Enjoy wp-quotes again until the next upgrade.

Pretty simple, I know. Just thought I’d note it for posterity since I couldn’t find the answer anywhere else and just tried it for the heck of it.

While I enjoy wading through these articles, it’s a bit much for the casual user. So, I thought I’d focus on 5 special plugins I put on every blog I create.

The first two plugins focus on driving more discussion on your site, the next two help you manage your content, and the last two give your site a little search engine boost. Wait a minute, that’s six plugins! Well, number 4 is actually both a site management and a search engine helper, so consider it a bonus!

5 Wordpress Plugins You Need for Your Corporate Blog

1. Subscribe to Comments – Once someone posts a comment, you should make it easy for them to keep track of the conversation. This is where Subscribe to Comments comes in. Subscribe to Comments puts a small checkbox under your comment box. Visitors leaving comments can check the box to receive an email notice each time someone else posts a follow-up. This convenience helps turns commenters into active participants in the discussion by keeping them up to date on the conversation and providing a quick link back to share additional thoughts.

2. Comment Luv – The URL field in the comment block gives a visitor an opportunity to get a link back to their own website. This provides an automatic incentive to leave a comment worthy of a click, but you can encourage more comments by adding the Comment Luv plugin. Comment Luv reads the URL left by the commenter, pulls back the first entry in the RSS feed from that site, and inserts a link to the post (with title) at the end of the comment.

3. In Series – If you write multipart articles, you know just how much fun it is to go back and make sure all of the back posts have the links to the latest articles. The In Series plugin allows you to define a series and assign articles to the series much as you would a category. In addition, the plugin places a nice table of contents at the bottom of each post for quick access.

4. Redirection – This plugin allows you to set up special URLs on your site to redirect visitors to certain posts or articles. For example, you could set up www.somesite.com/turtleracing to point to your latest article about Turtle Racing. In addition, the plugin will also set up redirects automatically when you change categories or permalinks for a post. This is absolutely a lifesaver and a must have, even if you never set up that Turtle racing page you will be glad you have Redirection installed.

5. All in One SEO Pack – This nifty plugin automatically adjusts your Wordpress to take advantage of many SEO best practices (copy, titles, noindex tags, etc). Note: the author is no longer actively developing this plugin but I’ve found it to be extremely stable.

I hope this helps. If you have a few special plugins that you like, please drop a note in the comments and subscribe to comment updates.

The plug-in is really sweet because it allows you to tell AdSense about the relative content on your page (thus improving the ad targeting):

Section Targeting is a way of embedding special tags inside HTML to give Google’s omnipresent spider a better idea of what’s important on your page. This is a really simple plugin that wraps posts and comments inside these tags, in the hope that they’ll lead to better search rankings.

Even if you don’t use Wordpress, the idea of section targeting is powerful.

Why Google AdSense Injection?

We all know about television ads where the natural volume has been cranked up. It’s jarring, but you look (I tend to follow-up looking by turning the television off). Recently, I’ve noticed some start and stop ads on television. The commercial will begin, run 2-3 seconds and then “skip” back to the beginning. The effect of this “random” problem focuses attention on the screen and the content. Of course, like the volume trick, viewers become desensitized and eventually their attention goes elsewhere.

A better technique would be to randomize the stop and start, the jitter. Only show the jitter X number of times per 30 minute block of television and position the jitter in different places during the commercial.

Online, we can’t really stop and start a webpage, but we can randomize the way we show ads. This is where the AdSense Injection plugin comes in. As Hammer notes on his website, a random dispersement of ads within content is likely to drive higher clicks by evading what is known as banner blindness.

Why AdSense works

Google AdSense puts little text, image, and now video ads on your website. The ads are served based on the relevancy of your site content to the advertiser’s copy and content. As a site owner, you get paid when visitors click on the ads, and visitors tend to click when the ads are relevant.

So, how does AdSense know what to serve?

When a visitor happens by a page with AdSense ads, it triggers a the Google Mediabot crawler to visit the page and grab the content. AdSense looks at the position of the Google AdSense include code to visible content along with overall page content to determine the right ad to show. Soon enough, relevant ads should show up on the site. This is why your first tests may show some odd results.

If don’t have an AdSense account, you can sign up using the ad below:

Why Randomizing with Google AdSense Injection is Good

I talked briefly about changing up the location of ads could be important in getting visitors to read them as opposed to passing them by. I’ve also talked about how AdSense determines which ads to show. So, if we mix these things together (randomizing and importance of placement), we should get more relevant ads that get a visitor’s attention which should lead to more clicks and revenue for you as the site owner.

Options in the Plugin

Hammer’s AdSense injection plugin automatically places AdSense blocks in your content. This means you don’t have to go back and edit all of these entries you’ve saved before (very good). You can also skip editing your theme (also good).

When you configure the plugin, you decide how many ad blocks to show and how many ads per block. The plugin does the rest.

Other options include:

• Setting the color
• Choosing a variety of ad block sizes to randomize
• Ad positioning
• Pages where you DO NOT want ads
• Ad visibility for certain users

In addition to these options, version 2.0 of the plugin also allows you to turn off AdSense injection for an article by including noadsense in content (enclosed in an HTML comment). I’ve used that option on this page in fact since I am also displaying and AdSense signup ad above.

[Get the Wordpress Google AdSense Injection plugin from Dax Herrera]

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