WordPress stuck in maintenance mode on upgrade

Thursday, September 25, 2014 By John Garner Leave a Comment

I just came across a situation where on upgrading 3 plugins on WordPress the system got stuck on the first and after 30 secs had not moved at all. This was the first time it had happened to me and I have upgraded WP sites, plugins and themes hundreds of times so it is rare in my experience.

So it took me by surprise and also I didn’t have a clue what to do. I came across this post on the WP forums that was the perfect answer:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/30-stuck-in-maintenance-mode-after-failed-plugin-upgrade

You basically need to delete a file called .maintenance in the root of your site’s web folder, via FTP or a web file management system that allows you to see and delete files starting with a dot: “.maintenance”

For example in CuteFTP you would need to select “enable server side filtering” by clicking on the filter button in Actions (right click on site properties of the site to get this) and add the following command “-a” as a filter (without quote marks).

Elements of UX: Hicks Law

Sunday, September 7, 2014 By John Garner Leave a Comment

Elements of User Experience series:
“Hicks Law”

Summary

“Hicks Law: the time required to make a decision increases, with the additional number of alternatives you are presented with”

Principal

The principle is: a) you are presented with a task / goal / issue, b) you analyse the situation, judge your options to achieve the given task c) you make a decision / choose an option d) you apply / execute your decision.
In this context Hick’s law predicts (algorithmically) that the more alternatives you provide users with the harder you are making things for them. You should aim at presenting users with only the options they require to achieve the task.

Context in UX

In a moderately complex to simple situations like with a website design Hick’s law can be an interesting principle to check. Do you really need all that content / all those options / all those images to help the user achieve their goal? As explained in further detail by Smashingmagazine,  it usually makes sense to “take a step back” and think of your project in general rather than applying this principle religiously to each sub part and element of the overall structure one by one. Consider the user journey, the objectives and via testing if necessary clarify that certain elements are not superfluous.

Hick’s Law

Kindle sales are up the day after Apple’s Mini launch

Sunday, October 28, 2012 By John Garner Leave a Comment

Most people expected that the launch of Apple’s mini thingy would put Amazon in a really difficult position. However it seems on the contrary Amazon sales are up and went up soon after the announcement from Apple. Could that be people that realised that the Amazon offer was a) from a hardware point of view more interesting and b) paying a fixed amount to consume all you want in terms of films, series an music was better than just giving money to Apple?
Probably !

A Hero’s video

Friday, October 26, 2012 By John Garner Leave a Comment

Wow this is just a pleasure to watch the images are great and sometimes breathtaking on a large screen at 1080 Full HD, enjoy!

Felix Baumgartner’s record jump

Monday, October 15, 2012 By John Garner Leave a Comment

I came across this my pure chance from an article on Mashable linking to the live video feed and it was just amazing. The courage you need to do what Baumgartner did is astonishing, just watching it, in pretty poor quality video as some points was however, riveting…

Social Media: little to no effect on purchasing behaviour

Friday, April 29, 2011 By John Garner Leave a Comment

A report from Forrester Research and GSI Commerce illustrates the fact that social media has little to no effect on purchasing power.

I’ve often thought this was the case and that people were far more inclined like myself to follow results from search engines and newsletters I get especially reghardware for example, but that might show a bit about what types of things I purchase.

I like to make up my own opinion and with what I know about Social Media I rarely trust what I see. What I can obtain myself through searching the web I trust more but not fully.

Having seen among the people I know, who are so called Social Media experts or gurus (for the others I don’t know, don’t take this personally) I wouldn’t trust them one bit to help a company truthfully promote their product nor do it in an efficient way.

Android now has the most free Apps

Thursday, April 28, 2011 By John Garner Leave a Comment

A report that you can find over at Distimo (you need to register to get it) shows that there are now more free apps for Android than there are for any other platform as you can see below in the chart:

More free Android apps than any other platform

So the journalists and bloggers that just can’t spend enough money at Apple were right, people do spend more money when they own an Apple (for now) and maybe even for what would be cheaper on Android?

The report shows that PowerAmp is at the top of the paid apps, it is really good and has some nice functions. Beautiful Widgets (which are great I must admit) is in at 7th place…

Android now wins over the hearts

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 By John Garner Leave a Comment

Following the situation whereby Android OS has taken lead in market share, the latest Nielsen report on the mobile market shows that it is taking over the hearts of the market or should we say the “wants”. People are now more swayed towards an Android phone than any other as can be seen below (click to enlarge):

From the same report (see link below) this is reinforced in the recent acquirers trend in the chart below where Android takes 50% of the market share:

Via Nielsen blog

Lego guys gone wild

Monday, April 18, 2011 By John Garner 1 Comment

Below is a video of a Great Ball Contraption circuit that takes nearly 8 minutes to complete and probably took weeks to build if not months. This is like Lego 5.0 compared to what I used to be able to do with Lego when I was kid!

Reblogged from TNW

Drop in Flash used on top websites

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 By John Garner Leave a Comment

Thanks to Steve Souders (who works for Google), significant data shows that among the top 17 000 websites there was a 2 percent drop in Flash usage, in just over 4 months. You may consider that to be a small drop. But 2 points over such a short period of time is actually significant especially in the website industry, that in many cases, takes about 3 or 4 months to think about changing something…

Not great news for traditional Ad agencies that love Flash and have strong Flash development skills. But good news for the companies that are focusing on HTML5 and a more multi-platform compliancy approach…