Technology Tales

Some nice things coming through…

While everyone is making good use of WordPress 2.5.x, development continues apace for future releases of the popular blogging platform and there are some goodies coming through on the functionality front. Google Gears are being brought into play for speeding up the administration dashboard; this started out being more prominent before being made more unobtrusive. The other big change has been an overhaul of the theme gallery and, if the theme is compatible, an overview facility has been added too. So WordPress is being tweaked and improved in the background to make 2.6 an interesting release.

A change in appearance

Over the course of it’s short history, this blog has had four different themes, the latest of which being my own customised variant of Dezzain’s Zoxengen. It’s predecessor’s have included Andreas04, Andreas09 and Prosumer. I have tinkered with all of these to varying degrees but each has offered me a certain something before I set about my tweaks. Zoxengen is no different and its clean lines and Web 2.0 feel attracted my attention. Other little features like seeing related posts listing on a post’s comments page or listing the tags associated with a post under its title line are, I hope, useful little extras. Correcting English (I may be digging a hole for myself here) and removing advertising slots (for me, this blogging business is a hobby so you’ll find no ads on any of my blogs) both seem to be a necessary tasks when implementing themes these times but the really major change was to make the design more flexible when it comes to different screen sizes, something that I hope to have achieved by allowing it to fill more of the browser window. There may be more changes, hopefully small, but I hope that you find the result as pleasing on the eye as I do.

Update: The blog’s current theme came with a lot of text that was written in poor English. While I should have got rid of all of it from the theme by now, there may be some still lurking here somewhere. If I find any more, it’ll get sorted. If something has escaped my notice for whatever reason, please let me know.

A spot of WordPress 2.5 administration panel colouration

The final release of WordPress 2.5 isn’t out yet but that hasn’t stopped me playing around with it and spotting a bug or two. Along the way, I have taken the chance to create a plugin that takes the old Earthtones palate into the new world. To accomplish this, I have taken the WordPress Classic colours stylesheet along with some template code from planetOzh and tweaked it accordingly. I may not have got to every possible nook and cranny for colouration but I hope to have covered most of them. You may even find it useful yourself.

Download Countrytones

Keeping an eye on WordPress development III

If the milestone date was to be believed, WordPress 2.5 was due yesterday. However, it has yet to show and a quick look on WordPress Trac reveals why: loads of outstanding tickets relating to bugs. In fact, there seem to be more tickets associated with this than other releases. I suppose that we can expect the new release when we see it then. Interestingly, the administration screen theming references have been removed from the pre-release version so that’s a functionality for a future release and it’s not hard to see why. Otherwise, the style of the screens in the latest Subversion revision looks a bit smarter and my blog themes are not getting broken. For my online blogs, I’ll be sticking with 2.3.3 for now.

Alternatives to WordPress

Movable Type was the leading blogging platform before Six Apart disappointed their users with their licensing and WordPress came into being. Now that WordPress would seem to be king of the hill, it’s tempting to conclude that there’s nothing else out there for those wanting a self-hosted blog. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

These days, Movable Type is available as an open source entity and I have been giving it a quick whirl. Importing from a WordPress export file is very swish and a quick spot of tinkering gets you a running in no time. Getting the thing set up can be a little confusing because the processing is done by CGI scripts and they need to live in your website’s cgi-bin directory while the actual blog is instantiated in another location. Aside from that complexity, things are not that offputting and the style of the administration and content management dashboard could show WordPress a thing or two. It’s partitioning of trackbacks from comments is another useful feature in this world pervaded by comment spam.

Habari is another option that I have encountered and it seems like early days for this one. The first impression that struck me was its minimalist feel but it will do most of what you ask of it when it comes to blogging. Nevertheless, importing and exporting is one area that needs more development and its handling of themes is a matter that warrants more exploration on my part. In summary, it seems to offer most of your needs, even if there is nothing to make it stand out from the crowd at this time.

I encountered another alternative platform in the pages of PC Plus called Expression Engine. It is commercial software but there is a free cut down version available without some of the modules. There is a bit more to the offering than blogging but you have to buy it to get features like wikis, forums and the like. As it happens, the blogging capability in the free version is creditable and it seems that you can manage multiple blogs through the same interface, a feature that has potential when it comes to using the software as a kind of CMS. It cannot directly import from WordPress but a Movable Type export file is accepted without a bother. With regards to changing the look and feel of the blog, I found that editing the index and stylesheet files through the administration interface produced good results quite easily and quickly. Maybe creating a new theme might be a worthwhile project to see how one can make a blog’s appearance fall into line with the other parts of a website. After all, Ellis Labs claim that the software should work the way that you do.

I only have done a quick spot of fiddling with any of the above but there is potential for further investigations to see what else they have to offer. I am sure that there are other alternatives and the CMS Drupal comes to mind for its having a blogging module, even if I didn’t find the main CMS functionality to be sufficiently flexible for my needs when I last tried it (a new version made it appearance recently); overly complex CSS was one bugbear for me. Even with all the possibilities, I won’t be spending too much of my time exploring this area. Suffice it to say, it’s not a completely WordPress world…

Keeping an eye on WordPress development II

I don’t know if this might become a series but a sequel to an earlier post might be a sign of things to come. I was pulling another version of WordPress from Subversion and noted a lot of updated files coming through, more than usual. Curiosity led to my having a look and there have been a few obvious tweaks. The most noticeable of these is that the Plugins portlet was now active, making its role clearer. The role? Apparently, it feeds a random selection of WordPress plugins from those included in WordPress.org’s own listings. It might be useful or an annoying diversion but we’ll see what comes; it is unconfigurable for now. Otherwise, the admin screens look a little sharper, especially to the ones for editing and managing content. I’ll continue to await the arrival of the ability to apply admin screen themes: its a "TODO" on the dashboard screen and could be interesting if it were to come about. We’ll see…

Keeping an eye on future WordPress releases

While I haven’t mentioned WordPress in a while, it’s now heading for version 2.5 after 2.4 was skipped. Because I want to ensure that upgrading doesn’t cause problems for my blogs, I have been picking up nightly builds with Subversion from WordPress.org. The following is the command to be used and it works fine on my Ubuntu system in the folder where I want the WordPress installation directory to live. If you wish to find out more about Subversion, there is a free book on the web.

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/

The main event is the new dashboard and that seems to be taking cues from Movable Type (I gave that a whirl recently so I may say something here about it yet). Everything is still there along with tantalising hints of prospects for customisation. In the interim, you can change the front page feeds so that they originate from other than the world of WordPress, not a bad thing given that I found WordPress Planet feeds were annoying often. Alternate theme support for the dashboard seems to be on the to-do list, as is something for plugins; we’ll see what comes of the latter. Otherwise, nothing seems to be changed or, more importantly, broken and I am able to get a mirror of my outdoors blog up and running with the only problems of any note coming from the new web address, not at all major. For now, I’ll continue to keep tabs on what’s happening and being forewarned of any future problems is a big bonus.

Update:

Recently, I found a good summary of what to expect on Blog Herald. This is one for a return visit, methinks.

A case of bad behaviour?

On my blogs, I use the Bad Behaviour plugin to keep spammers at bay. It usually works very well so imagine my surprise when it started kicking me out when I tried logging into the system. I started to wonder what happened to my IP address… It now turns out that the repository being used by the plugin got moved by its author and that was the cause of my predicament (and his: he locked himself out of his own blog too!). A new version was duly released to fix the issue and all is well again. It is a tale that emphasises the important of regression testing to check that you don’t change anything that you shouldn’t.

Correcting or updating blog posts

I have grown to notice that certain bloggers are not removing old content from a blog but merely striking it through using something like CSS. There is a place for this but it does strike me as overkill sometimes and can look untidy. Sometimes, that lack of neatness is a trade-off since the highlighting of a correction itself conveys a message. I have been know to tweak posts immediately after publishing without leaving the previous content on view but my changes generally are readability improvements more than anything else. Typos and spelling mistakes also get corrected like this; nobody needs them highlighted for all to see. I am not trying to fool anyone and, if I want to update the content, I either add another post or use another tactic that I have seen others use: updates at the bottom of the post that are denoted as such. It’s another transparent approach that preserves the authenticity of the piece.

Want attention? Just mention Ubuntu…

According to Google Analytics, visitor numbers for this blog hit their highest level one day last week. I suspect that I might have been down to a mention of two of my posts on tuxmachines.org. Thanks guys. Feedburner activity has been strong too.

That brings me to another thought: the web seems a good place for Ubuntu users to find find solutions to problems that they might encounter. I certainly found recipes that resolved issues that I was having: scanner set up and using another hard drive to host my home directory, all very useful stuff. When I last played with Linux to the same extent that I am now doing, the web was still a resource but it wouldn’t have been as helpful as I found it recently. I suppose that there are people like me posting tips and tricks for computing on blogs and that makes them easier to find. That’s no bad thing and I hope that it continues. Saying that, I might still get my mits on an Ubuntu book yet…