Archive for the 'WordPress' Category

Line Breaks

Friday, June 4th, 2004

I’m having line break problems again here in WP 1.2. The fix that fixed 1.0.2 isn’t working as well as it did before. It still fixes the big problem of old Blogger line breaks in posts, but it messes up those posts in which I used MovableType’s “convert line breaks” option. (Maybe it did in 1.0.2 as well, and I somehow missed it.) Fortunately, I didn’t use MT linebreak conversion as much as I did Blogger, so I can go back and edit those posts easily.

The code to fix has moved to wp-includes/functions-formatting.php. Change function wpautop($pee, $br = 1) { to function wpautop($pee, $br = 0) {. This seems to cause some odd double-spacing inside pre tags, which I may try to fix in the future.

Redesigned Again

Tuesday, June 1st, 2004

Despite my fears of the dreaded lost password problem, I upgraded to WordPress 1.2. I did, indeed, experience the Dread Problem, but deleting my wordpress cookies solved it for me. Others have not been so lucky. (I backed up the database before making any sudden moves, of course.)

The new version spontaneously reordered my categories, but this advice fixed the problem. I’m hoping to use the subcategory feature to organize my categories better, although it’s kind of flaky.

Note the new blog design. If it looks dull and grey, give it a minute. In a real browser, color will slowly trickle in. I’m using the colorpress script under a semi-transparent greyscale PNG background image to get the colors. Since Win/IE is a piece of aging junk that can’t handle transparency, the most you’ll see with it is some pretty text colors. I’m also seeing some wackiness with the tabs and post content in Mac/IE - the workaround is, as always, to use a real browser. Tell me, though, if Win/IE munges the entries as well. Thanks.

[Update:] With Seema’s help, the Win/IE flashing problem has been fixed and the floating comment box is more or less anchored in the right place. To fix the latter I reduced the number of columns in the textarea from 70 to 40. (I had to edit wp-comments.php by hand to do that. While I was in there I upped it from 4 rows to 6.) The stylesheet then resizes it to the correct size in real browsers. Mac/IE’s float bug is beyond my power to fix, but if you make the window narrow enough (just over the width of the tab bar), the blog will become legible.

Colorpress

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

This spam in a can blog entry was brought to you by WordPress and the Edit Timestamp checkbox.

I’ve converted Eric Costello’s old technicolor Blogger template to WordPress. Back in the days of MovableType I’d converted it to MT, which was much more of a headache. This switch was relatively painless. See the demo! Download the two required files: colorpress.css and colorpress.js. The instructions are simple and can be found at the top of either file.

As you can see, I’m not actually doing the trippy technicolor thing myself, but I converted it because I do want to incorporate a similar effect into the blog at some point. As I write this, it’s late, late at night, but if all goes well this blog entry will become visible tomorrow morning. Future canned blogging will also be labelled “spam in a can” because I like the way it sounds.

Paranoid Android and Paranoid Bloggers

Thursday, May 20th, 2004

Some timely Mac and blog links:

Blog Rolling

Wednesday, May 19th, 2004

WMD of the day: See No Sarin, Hear No Sarin, Speak No Sarin

I’ve added my NetNewsWire subscriptions to the sidebar. I have 85 subscriptions, so I set the link list to bring up two or three at random from each category, plus a couple of fanfic links. I hope that suffices for anyone wishing to surf on.

[Update:] I also did a WP hack to display the list of recent posts. That shouldn’t require a hack but it does, at least in WP 1.0.2. It was - as all WP tweaks seem to be - frighteningly easy.

Rat + Sinking Ship = WordPress

Sunday, May 16th, 2004

If this blog is green, then you’ve made it to the fourth major revision of Speak Stiltedly etc., etc. Long, long ago on a server far, far away, my blog began in a wiki. It quickly moved to Blogger at Blogspot. In a minor change, I gave up Blogspot and started publishing to my webspace at Freeshell. Blogger was annoying, and after the umpteenth mangled post, I made the big switch and installed my own MovableType at Freeshell.

Next came a minor move to my lovely free host here at irth.net, where mine is just one of many blogs on their big blog server. And there’s the rub, for the sad news came out last week that MovableType will be charging the big bucks for MT 3.0 for all users running more than 3 blogs (upped to 5 this weekend) on their MT installations. You can follow the details on any geek blog - I’m way behind on this bit of /. fodder, which seems to have blown the Google outsourcing scandal right off the blogrolls.

Needless to say, I don’t expect my free host to pay hundreds and hundreds and a couple more hundreds of dollars so I can have a relatively insignificant update from MT 2.661 to MT 3.0. But I am a geek, so I can’t stagnate at MT 2.661 for the rest of my blogging life.

It was time for a change, anyway, so I took Mark Pilgrim’s tale of Freedom 0 to heart and installed WordPress. It’s a lot like MT, but it’s PHP based with no static pages. I was a little disappointed by the lack of staticicity, but it does seem to whip the pages out pretty quickly on the fly and seems cleaner all around.

On the down side, I had some troubles testing it on my Mac - I couldn’t get mod-rewrite to rewrite URLs (perhaps because WP didn’t have permission to write an .htaccess file), and the keychain choked on the beta I downloaded (RC1.2). At the moment I’m running version 1.0.2 with a slightly tweaked version of the wp new template. I was also tempted by Toni and Scandinavia (all from Alex King’s contest). When I get a chance, I’ll convert my MT blog style over to WordPress to get the navigation buttons back.

Some links that will help you join me and the other rats here on dry land: