miahz » WordPress

WordPress Chokes On “Web 2.0″

Jeremiah — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:15:56 +0000

Ironically, WordPress’ Texturize filter chokes when the phrase “web 2.0″ is quoted. Texturize automatically makes semantically-correct curly quotes and other punctuational fixes to regularly typed text. Normally that’s great for people like me who care about stuff like that. But when a quoted phrase ends in a number, it turns the closing quote into a double-prime character as if it were a count of seconds or inches.

I noticed this a few minutes ago when writing my previous post.

To complete the irony, i have to use a hack to get WordPress to correctly display the closing curly quote on the phrase “Web 2.0”—exploiting its behavior to turn two apostrophes into a right double quotation mark.

Comment Subscriptions Enabled

Jeremiah — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:54:48 +0000

Hey, gang. You can now subscribe to the comments on posts here at miahz.com—which is to say, you’ll get an email notification when someone comments on a post you’re subscribed to. That way you can keep track of the on-going conversations and know when someone replies to one of your comments. Just check the little box next to “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” when you leave a comment to join the club.

Now for the behind-the-scenes portion. I’m using Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe To Comments 2.0 plugin for WordPress. Installation was too easy, just dropped the new files and activated. All i changed was the “from” email address for the email notifications. Let me know if you have any problems.

Akismet 1000 Spam Barrier

Jeremiah — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:09:02 +0000

Sometime a few days ago Akismet intercepted the 1000th piece of blog spam before it could touch my site. I installed it about four months ago. There’s currently 169 comments in the 15 day cue. Seems to be high tide—it fluctuates down to around 60 or so. Still no false positives. I’ve had to moderate about 75 comments.

Link Posting Strategies

Jeremiah — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 02:04:58 +0000

I have been trying to figure out the best (and easiest) way to feature the crap i stumble on and think people need to check out. I actually keep a dated linklog of sorts in my AIM profile to entertain all the away message stalkers. That works okay, but it’s not public and i can’t add stuff if i’m not at home. And it’s a little tight on space—and completely manual. The natural extension is to do something on this site. But what? I have used “Asides” in the past, but those broke when i upgraded WordPress and not my theme. I take too long to write things because i like to use clever “headlines” for the link text instead of the page title. So i end up with a cue of bookmarks to post that just keeps piling up.

I noticed that Natalie Jost is feeding a sidebar on her homepage with some Ma.gnolia links—i assume from their Linkroll feature. And i just realized that the “Links for YYYY-MM-DD” you see everywhere are from del.icio.us’ daily link post feature.

Markku’s Inline Links Dilemma. He brings up questions about the relevance of links to the regular posts and overall blog content, as well as their affect on the usability of his site.
Dougal turned off auto link posting. He cited the primary negative of link posts is they aren’t as interesting as originally written content.
Matt’s Asides catch “everything else.” They were created for all the little stuff that wasn’t quite big-post material.

Markku’s Recent Links plugin for WordPress makes monthly archivable link lists that are separate from the regular post flow. The Asides technique uses specially formatted normal posts that remain in the normal chronology. Both Markku and Matt cited Kottke’s remaindered links as inspiration. Daily posting tools from social bookmarking services are nice and automatic—if you bookmark a link, it’ll end up on your blog—but can get cluttery. They solve the simplicity problem i run into. But i loves me some metadata, and having timestamps and comments and stuff.

This makes me wonder, if you’re just bouncing folks to other sites, wouldn’t it be easier to just send them to your del.icio.us page?

The Spoils Of WordPress 2.0.1 & Akismet

Jeremiah — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:31:59 +0000

WordPress 2.0.1 is alive and kicking on miahz.com. The upgrade from 1.5.3 went hitchless[ly?]. Initial impressions: i like the cleaner admin interface, the abbridged reverse-order drafts list, the Akismet plugin included by default, along with all the other i’ve-been-spoiled-by-wordpress.com features like in situ file uploading and on-the-fly new categories. I’m especially relieved by the prospect of Akismet, as i’ve been getting increasing comment spam over the past few weeks. Interestingly, Akismet found and displayed all the comments in the database i had tagged as spam before the upgrade (i didn’t delete them) on plugin’s management page. It’s now telling me, “Akismet has caught 3 spam for you since you installed it,” which was only about an hour ago. And three in one hour is quite a bit for this meager parcel of the ‘sphere. I’ve been spoiled with no email spam in Gmail. I’m hoping to be equally spoiled by Akismet.

Welcome Home, miahz.com

Jeremiah — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:10:14 +0000

Well, i finally got around to doing a little remodeling.

If you’re expecting to see the LCD page, it has moved to miahz.com/projects/lcd/.

Now the WordPress-powered blog which used to live at the undiscoverable URL http://miahz.com/index.php is at the root, which should make things flow much better around here. I’m wondering if and hoping that it will boost the ratings of my blog posts, as they didn’t seem to be doing well with the hidden home page. It definitely was not SEO’d.

I used WordPress’ Pages feature for the new LCD project pages. They had been static HTML pages sitting in the root directory, and i wanted to try to move everything into one interface and database—managed by WordPress. I had never really done much with WP’s Pages or Templating before so wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. A little poking around at the Codex gave me a push in the right direction. I wanted to keep the exact same page design and layout for now, just changing the location.

I created a couple of new Pages: first, “Projects” with the slug of “projects”, then “LCD for Firefox” with the slug of “lcd-firefox” as a child of the Projects page. Now i had two empty Pages. At first i just copied and pasted the the source of the HTML file into the content box of the Edit Page screen. But that resulted in mangled content in a busted Kubrick layout. The problem is that the layout of Pages is determined by the Page Template they are set to use. So i needed to build a new template using the design of my HTML file. But bump that.

I quickly realized that i could just paste the HTML into the page template and link an empty Page to it. The content isn’t actually living in the database this way; i was essentially pointing to the same static HTML files via WordPress. Nevertheless it achieved the exact effect i was after—quickly. Repeat for the Screenshots Page which i set up as a child of the LCD Page. Just make sure to add the PHP comment that defines the template to the top of the file, and make a unique template name for each “static” page.

In this case the Title of the Page just determines what is listed in the blog sidebar – the page title displayed in the browser window is already in the HTML i pasted into the template. The Slug, however, is more important, as it defines where in the site structure the Page lives. With that in mind, i wanted to make sure these would be as permanent as possible. I wasn’t crazy about ‘projects/lcd-firefox’ being the address to this page. So i ended up shortening it to ‘projects/lcd’, and moved the Flock variation to a subpage at ‘projects/lcd/for-flock’.

Oh yeah, the only other thing i had to do was correct the links to CSS and image files in the Pages templates, as they now lived deep in the bowels of WordPress. And i think that’s all there was to it.

Next: adding some furnishings. Then maybe some redecorating.

WordPress 2.0.1 Released, As Predicted

Jeremiah — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 03:40:17 +0000

I called it. A little less than one day after i surmised that 2.0.1 would come soon, the release announcement was made on the WordPress Dev Blog [via the Dashboard]. Not that it was any big secret—i’m sure tons of people knew. It was just interesting that i happened to peep the 2.0.1 roadmap when i did. I’ll probably lay back a day or so and read up on any fallout before diving in.

WordPress 2.0.1 Soon?

Jeremiah — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:23:32 +0000

Just took a look at the WordPress 2.0.1 roadmap, and 99% of the issues flagged for 2.0.1 are resolved with only one remaining [via Ryan on WordPress]. So hopefully we’ll have a bugfix after not too long. I’ve been wanting to move up, but jumping onto a point-zero release can be sketchy sometimes.

technorati tags: WordPress, WordPress 2.0, upgrade, blogging

TextDrive Outtage – Pendrell MySQL

Jeremiah — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 17:04:28 +0000

Well, apparently, Pendrell went down some time last night, which i didn’t notice. But i did notice that mysql.pendrell.textdrive.com was down for a bit an hour or so after that reported outtage. I logged in to my WordPress Dashboard, and when i hit the Write link, i got the Error connecting to database page. I checked mysql.pendrell.textdrive.com directly, and got a “too many connections” error when trying to log in to phpMyAdmin. It cleared up after 30 minutes or so, but looking at the Status Blog is a little disconcerting. Several issues. Every day. I never noticed the service before moving to TextDrive. It was invisible—just there—just working. Which has me wondering if this was a worthwhile investment.

technorati tags: miahz.com, TextDrive, WordPress, web hosting

miahz.com, meet TextDrive

Jeremiah — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 13:57:28 +0000

20060114-0520
We’re dark. Just waiting for the internet to catch up…

After only a few hours with the lights out, i’m posting this from miahz.com’s new home, TextDrive. I FTPed the files over from 1and1 and moved the database early this morning. Then i flipped the name servers on the domain name, and it looks like it only took a few hours to bleed out.

I snatched up this space almost a year ago as part of TextDrive’s VCII fund/hype-raiser. And up until now it had been gathering dust. Honestly, i never really had any problems with 1and1 aside from one minor snag that was easily fixed. Plus it was free. This new space wasn’t technically free, but it’s paid for, so it feels free. And i had to move at some point before that 1&1 deal expired, so why not now?

This will hopefully be just the first of many updates around here. Others planned:

Upgrading to WordPress 2.0
Moving/integrating LCD pages into rest of site structure so the blog is accessible from the root
Revive and update my old theme for this site
Update and release LCD for Firefox 1.5
Developing some other projects and ideas that may make an appearance somewhere around these parts…

technorati tags: miahz.com, TextDrive, WordPress, web hosting, 1and1, Firefox theme, LCD