Items of interest about this site.
I’ve updated the blog software to WordPress 2.0 and things seem to be moving along fine. Over the course of the next few days I hope to be using more of the new features it offers.
This may mean some broken or strange looking pages. Bear with me while I figure it all out and get things back to normal, or at least a general state of working-ness.
I saw a post earlier this week proclaiming a new version of WordPress (my current blogging software) was out. Having missed the previous two updates, I downloaded it, checked it over, read the directions and installed it. After putting a post in, everything seemed to work. I got a little text message that looked odd, but all seemed fine. Peachy.
On Saturday I got back around to looking at what caused this text error. To my horror it had gone from mere annoyance to full blown site wide chaos. Text error messages sprung out of nearly every page. When I poked around to find out why nothing jumped out. Worse still, some of my images were now broken. What had happened?
To shorten this story to its final conclusion, there was an old plug-in I was using on a previous version of WordPress that went south, taking everything it touched (which was the whole site) with it. Now that it is disabled things seem fine again… until the next time I try to be smart with the upgrades. Doh!
I’ve finally completed my novella and posted it online. Go take a look at the latest creation, almost 15 months in the making: MS Insights Newsletter for 2004
Go on, read it. You know you want to.
Oh how I hate comment spam. I have tried everything and it just keeps coming. Now I’ve found a site with the best way to kill it for your WordPress 1.5.x install: CJD Spam Nuke. You install it, activate it, go to the comments moderation page, then nuke every single last lame posting. It happened so fast I had to check it twice to make sure it worked.
If you have comment spam, go get this plugin and kill it dead. I did.
Looks like I now have a way to highlight pictures from my Gallery based photo gallery setup without having two copies of the images hanging around and eating up space. Yay php hackers!
I have finished updating this site to the latest version of WordPress, version 1.5 as of this writing. A few bumps came along for the ride, since it asks you to delete you old directory (after backup!) and then pull back in only the parts you need. It seemed a little cranky after install, but I’m slowly dropping things back in as I find them busted.
It seems a bit faster than before and the templates promise to be much easier. We shall see what new features appear as I learn more about this release.
You can get it here: WP 1.5
I’m giving up the fight to allow real folks to comment on this blog. It seems that no matter what I do I just can’t stop the flow of dumb marketing spam for online gaming, viagra, and other such internet institutions. So comments are now off indefinitely.
I didn’t know if it was going to happen there for a bit, but I’ve managed to pull together a cleaner, faster loading look for the site without too many personal headaches. You should find everything running quite a bit faster now as I eliminated a large chunk of the graphic files that had to be loaded each time the pages were built.
The downside of all of this is that the new layout is even less IE friendly than the one before it. IE just seems to suck at dealing with standards, and this site is using more and more of the CSS and XML layout goodness so that I can continue to support it over the long haul. That means if you are viewing this site with IE it will probably (no, definitely) not look right. I recommend you go get Firefox and try it. It is far faster and more standards compliant (not to mention newer) than IE.
This is a test of a new plug-in that should allow attachments to “just drop in” to this blog. Does it work?
MP3 Test
After some fussing (and there are still some broken plugins) I have the latest version of WordPress, V. 1.2.2, installed and running on this site. Let’s see if it runs more smoothly than before.