Finally, I should hopefully be categorising posts at the same time as creating them. This may seem like a silly aspect of blogging to focus on, when there are quite a few more major changes than an AJAXed movable layout for the boxes in the Add New Post page, but being able to relocate the Categories (and other obviously) box to the top right, where I’ll notice it BEFORE hitting the Publish button means a lot less hassle for me. I tried out the upgrade on my test site first, and having seen no major issues (the FireStats beta (1.60) plugin needed an update from Beta2 to RC3 to prevent an error being displayed on the dashboard) went ahead (following database backups) with this site. If anyone notices anything (NEW!!!) looking weird or out of place, do please drop me a line.
Nov 11 2008
Awww. Cute. Or Not?
Saw this one recently over at FailBlog, and I wanted to post it here.
Although the comments go into some details on this method of postage being accepted as the norm in some parts of America a while ago, my initial reaction was that a young child has posted it, and it was just plain cute, rather than backwards/stupid…
see more pwn and owned pictures
OK, further reading of the comments bring up the claim that this was actually an experiment to see if this method of paying for postage would work or not. It still reminds me a little of children’s Christmas letters to Santa, or addressing a letter to “Bob Jones, that house opposite the shop by the Church, Munington” 🙂
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Oct 28 2008
Tom’s Blog
Readers of our friend Tom’s blog ( http://lifeof2me.blogspot.com/ ) may have noticed that posting has slowed down a little recently. With his multiple projects (teaching, making and selling his clothing lines and contra dancing), it looks as though letting us know about all the New York movers and shakers has taken a back seat. Can’t really blame him, I’m just looking forward to reading more regular posts when the next sales season is over 🙂
You’ll need to click the August and July archive links for the foreign (Aghanistan and Tajikistan) posts. Quite why blogspot/blogger blogs don’t have the Previous/Older post link (like most WordPress blogs) at the bottom of each page I’ve never understood. Maybe it is a theme dependent option, and most don’t have it?
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Oct 25 2008
Area Specific Widgets
Long term readers (as in REALLY long term, those who were pressganged encouraged to start reading 18 months ago) will remember the fun and games I’ve been through to get area specific widgets to display on this blog. Originally I used the King Text widget, though WordPress 2.2 (2.3?) broke critical parts of the code, and no updates were to be found. I then moved onto using some PHP code within ExecPHP widgets (probably fixable, but I’m a hacker of other peoples code, not a proper coder), though this then prevented me from using PHP within the actual widget I wanted to display. Now it looks as though there is a decent solution. Slayer’s Custom Widgets is able to ensure that any of your current widgets are only displayed on certain pages/categories/posts etc. This would mean I can once again play around a little more with code, and find new and interesting ways to break this site 🙂 As I don’t have the time or inclination to repair my potential goof ups for now, I’ll leave experimenting with this plugin for now, I just wanted to post a quick heads up for other WordPress users who might be interested.
Oct 25 2008
WordPress 2.6.3 Released
Check here for details. Basically a security fix has been released. The RSS feeds that WordPress site owners see in their dashboard are presented via the Snoopy library, and this is where a vulnerability has been discovered.
I am about to upgrade this blog, so if anything happens to go wrong, and I’m not able to post for a while, you know why 🙂 Alternatively, no posts might be visible at all if it goes horribly wrong, in which case you won’t see this post until I’ve fixed any problems.
[edit]
OK, all went fine, and I’ve just noticed that a slightly annoying bug with the brilliant WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin has gone – plugins that were previously disabled are no longer automatically re-enabled during the WP upgrade process.
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Oct 16 2008
White Skinny Dipping
Head over here for the BBC report, or if you find their streaming video has problems with your internet connection, see the following three YouTube videos. On what? Well in case you missed out on the news, a British man dove into the Moat surrounding the Emperor’s residence in Tokyo. The undeniable facts are that he was naked, not likely to get cold this winter with his in-built insulation, either a litttle unhinged or drunk, and splashed water and threw bricks when the police attempted to catch him.
Thanks to Japan Probe for the following picture (and preceding videos)…
So why my interest?
Well I saw the following image over at Pundit Kitchen, and wanted to find out more about the background to it.
see Sarah Palin pictures
So what happened to the crude and aggressive tourist? Detained under the equivalent of Japan’s Metal Health Act? Received a good public beating after throwing bricks around? No, he had a slap on the wrists and was released! At least according to the Daily Telegraph’s article.
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Oct 06 2008
Busy Night So Far
I’ll post more details later, but I have been testing the UTF-8 converter plugin that I previously mentioned (see the Ooops – Sorry For All The ??? post). I used a blog that doesn’t get much traffic or have many high-income adverts placed on it, just in case the crap hit the fan. After a few minor headaches and periods of intense head scratching, I think I’ve found a way to bodge everything into place after the plugin does it’s work. It will mean that all posts containing Cyrillic letters will have questions marks in their place, however searching WordPress for multiple ?s luckily works well. Now I need to go and grab the laundry baskets, stick on the washing, grab a shower and head to bed… Well maybe a couple more posts first 😉
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Oct 01 2008
Ooops – Sorry For All The ???
The previous post was supposed to include some Cyrillic characters, however a bunch of question marks are displayed instead. This has reminded me that I really need to convert my SQL tables from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_unicode_ci . This will mean that older posts that included non-Latin characters should finally display properly again. So instead of typing out Pamctop in latin letters, I can use the true ??????? instead.
I have two options – either run a lot of commands I’m very unfamiliar with, or rely on someone else’s plugin. Strangely enough I’m hoping the UTF-8 Database Converter plugin will do the job, but I’m waiting to hear back from the author first, as it may have ceased working since WordPress 2.5 onwards. So for now, just ignore the question marks…
Sep 07 2008
Looking Forward To WordPress 2.7
Why?
Because I have just had to go back and edit another handful of posts where I had stupidly forgotten to assign them a category.
So?
Wordpress used to have the category selection box towards to the top of the page, above the fold on the post creation page. It currently resides below the fold. There are plugins to bodge the position, but I don’t like fiddling with key files too much unless really necessary. WordPress 2.7 will apparently allow the various panels to be moved around. This will mean I can see the category box before I hit the publish button, meaning less posts will hopefully find themselves mistakenly in the default ‘Personal‘ category.
Ah, so your laziness/forgetfulness is the key problem?
Yes 🙂
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