You may experience the following symptoms:

• The buttons on the visual editor are missing.
• The font may be white on white.
• The image flash uploader button may not appear properly.

The solution:

1. wp-includes/js/tinymce/  should contain the following files:

2. I’ve zipped my entire tinymce directory for you.  tinymce-zip  Simply unzip to your wp-includes directory.  Refresh the page by pressing the F5 key and try editing a post.  You should now see all your buttons again.

The first trick is to install the Daiko’s Text Widget Plugin.  You could use the regular text widget, but Daiko’s is so much better for 3 reasons. 

• It allows you to execute PHP code in the widget. 
• You can choose which pages to show the widget on.
• Most importantly, it remembers the content of the text box when you remove it from your sidebar.  With the normal text widget, I have to retype the code if I want to move the widget from the right sidebar to the left sidebar.

1. Now for a shortcut.  Click “add new post” in your WordPress admin screen.  We will use the WYSIWYG editor to quickly upload our graphic and write the code for us. 

2. Click the upload image button as shown below and select the picture you wish to upload.  WordPress will then say “Crunching”.  Then click “save all changes”.  You will see your image listed.

3. For SEO purposes, be sure to fill out the title and description areas in the next screen.  Click “Insert into Post” when you are finished adding your description.

4.  I would like to link my image to a URL.  First click on the image to select it, then click on the Chain icon.  Enter your link URL

5. Now click the HTML tab and then select and copy all the html code there.

6. Click “widgets” in the admin side panel.  Add a Daiko’s text box to your sidebar and let it stay as the bottom widget.  Click “edit” and paste your copied HTML code into the box.  Click “Done” and then “Save Changes”.   Now you can move your widget up the page by drag and drop.  Click “Save Changes” again.

7. Delete the draft from your list of posts if WordPress autosaved it.  You should now see your image sitting nicely in your sidebar.

1. Run the speed test at Pingdom Tools to get a reference point on what objects are loading.  Sometimes looking at the source code you miss the big picture.  Luckily, Pingdom Tools saves your tests, so you can always go back and compare your results.

2. Remove any plugins that load a lot of garbage but are rarely used.  In my case the culprit was cformsII.  Nobody ever had used the form, but every visitor had to load the CSS for it.   Plugins take a toll on your blog.  Check your load times before and after installing each one.

3.  Count the total number of CSS files loading.  It should be 1.  Each additional call to your server will add time to your page load, even if it’s only a 1k file. Let’s look at how I combined my CSS files into one.  First I physically copied and pasted all the CSS code from the plugins into the theme’s style.css file and saved it.  Next I prevented the CSS from loading in the blog header by using the following trick.  Add a snippet of code to your theme’s functions.php file to remove the function call for each CSS file you want to remove. Shown below is the code to remove the CSS for my page navigation plugin.  You may have to use the plugin editor to find the name of the function being loaded.

<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'pagenavi_css'); ?>

4. Next up was lowering the number of images called.  Even tiny images can stall the loading of your blog.  I went from 38 images to 18 images by creating image maps.  An image map works by loading one large image and then dividing it up into smaller areas.  This is perfect for rows of icons found in navigation headers or social icons under a post.  Below you can view the code I used for the social widgets in the left sidebar.  8 images 2k in size each were replaced by a single image only 5k in size.

<img src="http://turnipofpower.com/images/social.png" alt="social
links" width="250" height="170"
border="0" usemap="#Social2" /><map
name="Social2" id="Social2"><area shape="rect"
coords="0,0,127,45" href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TurnipOfPower" target="_blank"
alt="RSS" rel="nofollow" /><area
shape="rect" coords="0,46,127,85" href="http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&amp;add=http://turnipofpower.com"
alt="Technorati" rel="nofollow" /><area
shape="rect" coords="128,46,250,85" href="http://apps.new.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=38833"
alt="Facebook" rel="nofollow" /><area
shape="rect" coords="128,0,250,45" href="http://kimchiman.stumbleupon.com/"
alt="Stumble" rel="nofollow" /><area
shape="rect" coords="0,87,127,128" href="http://friendfeed.com/turnipofpower"
alt="friendfeed" rel="nofollow" /><area
shape="rect" coords="0,129,127,170" href="http://www.cmfads.com/cp/site-view.php?id=2"
alt="CMF Ads" rel="nofollow"
/><area shape="rect" coords="128,87,250,128"
href="http://twitter.com/TurnipofPower" alt="twitter" rel="nofollow"
/><area shape="rect" coords="128,129,250,170"
href="http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/turnipofpowercom.html" alt="blog catalog"
rel="nofollow" /></map>


One downside of using this trick in the WordPress loop is that my code no longer validates because “An “id” is a unique identifier. Each time this attribute is used in a document it must have a different value. “   Oh well, you win some and you lose some.  Having valid html code is nice, having a site that loads quickly is nicer.

To create the image maps I used Adobe Dreamweaver to make things easier.  The code above is for example purposes only and not meant to be a tutorial on the process.  The idea is that by combining images located near each other into one larger image, you reduce the calls to your server.  Just Google “image map editor” to find a number of free tools online. 

5. The final technique used was to compress my CSS file.  Google “compress css online” and you will find many free utilities.  I backed up my old CSS file just in case, then pasted in the compressed code, saving an additional 2k in space. 

Anyone have additional tips to speed up page load times?

Today I had a similar panic moment.  Half asleep, I uploaded a zipped file called jeromes-query-diagnostics.zip and clicked “install” using the plugin installer.   The plugin failed, but to my horror my blog now displayed a hundred lines of some weird text and had a php error up top.  The text appeared in both the admin panel and on the blog itself.  Since the plugin had automatically deactivated itself, I could skip that step.  Here were the additional steps I took in my panicked state.

1. First I deleted the plugin from my plugin folder.  Unfortunately, I still saw lines and lines of text in both my admin panel and on my blog itself.
2. I unzipped the plugin and read the files in a text editor, nothing there that looked like it changed anything.
3. I read the error message and it pointed to another plugin.  So I deactivated all plugins.  Still no luck, but the error message changed.
4. Now the error message pointed to my wp-pluggable file.  I opened that file in a code editor and checked the line causing the error.  Comparing it to a backup, it hadn’t changed.
5. Next I uploaded a backup copy of every file in my wp-includes directory.  No luck.
6. I checked my theme templates for any sign of change in the header, functions, or main templates. No changes compared to backup copies.
7. I tried Googling the plugin itself to see if anyone had reported a similar error, nope.
8. Now I googled some of the text and found it belonged to the gnu public license.  I tried renaming the license.txt file in my main directory, no success.
9. Searching all my directories for license.txt, I found another in my plugin directory.  Duh!  Deleting that fixed the problem.

Turns out WordPress thinks anything in the wp-content/plugins directory is a plugin and executes it. The plugin had dumped a text file into the directory without creating it’s own folder.  Lesson learned.  Check all zipped files locally before using the auto-installer.  Don’t play with your settings when tired.  Finally, don’t take your anger out on your kids, even if they are banging the tv in the room with the wii controller while you are trying to fix your blog.  Now I feel bad for yelling at my kids to get the hell out of the room.  With any luck they will grow up hating blogs.