Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
I have all sorts of messages littering my blog dashboard this morning telling me to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.1; I suppose that I’d better set to work with upgrading then. However, this is never something that I do without first testing on my offline blogs. And then, there’s the need to save some tweaks to WordPress source code ahead of time. I know that I could create my own plugins but that involves finding the correct hooks and it’s a subject for another time, anyway.
There seems to be a percolation of plugins that aim to change the appearance of WordPress administration pages from their day-glow blue to something more pleasing; Earthtones is the one that I use for this blog but I have also been known to use WP Tiger Administration as well. Both options work well, though the latter needs some adjustments to work as well with WordPress 2.3 as it does with the 2.2 line. One area that they both fail to influence is the appearance of the upload screen. It doesn’t help that upload.php, the underlying PHP script, is a dual purpose animal: used in an iframe in the post editing page and standalone for upload management. Curiously, you can only upload files on the post editing page and not on the upload management screen, a definite quirk. The thing that really stops these admin theme plugins gaining any sort of purchase with upload.php is that it also uses an auxiliary stylesheet, upload.css, that is called after the WordPress function hook has been defined; if it came before this, then the styles in upload.css could be overridden. You could edit upload.php and edit the replacement stylesheet but the former activity would require repeating at every WordPress upgrade. I chose to edit upload.css and will keep that is a safe place so that I can replace the file following an upgrade. If upload.php was treated like every other admin script, then this would be unnecessary. A useful suggestion for Automattic, perhaps?
Having had a pretty fallow summer when it came to ideas for this blog, I am now lucky to enjoy a flush of them. Also, because of the my now established one post per day rule, I am currently writing my posts ahead of time so that you can be assured of something new everyday rather than a load of stuff one day and nothing on the next. That works for me because I am largely a proactive blogger rather than a reactive one. As a result, I am not bothered by a need to break something before everyone else and I simply couldn’t do that anyway; I have learnt that there are many others who can make a much better job of it. Nevertheless, I do get inspired by what’s going on in the technology world and it’s just that I take my time over things before sharing with others; the chance for some additional consideration before post goes public is a very useful one. And then there are my own explorations that surely will turn up more ideas.
Here’s something that I would really appreciate: a book on code cutting for WordPress customisation and extension. Having the Codex is all very fine but having a dead tree compendium that you can peruse at your leisure is a definite bonus. If there was a way to get the Codex on PDF and print it all off for easier reading, that would be progress. I believe that a publisher did plan to bring to the market something like what I want but author and publisher parted company, a pity. It would be great to see something like Apress’ Pro Drupal Development for WordPress. What about it, Automattic folks?
I was ambling around the web and came across a website that, while it appeared to be a blog, isn’t one in the vein of that to which we are accustomed. It does, however, have a blogroll and that is where Blogrolling.com comes into this piece. Blogrolls are very much a feature of the blogging (WordPress call them that anyway) world and act as a repository of useful links relevant to the subject of the blog. I also use them as a bookmarking station for myself and a way to return the favour when someone links to my blog. For a blogroll, you generally need a database sitting behind in the background or you end up creating a list of links in (X)HTML.
Blogrolling.com offer another option: placing your links at an external website and including them on your webpages using a piece of code to pull in the information. RSS, JavaScript and PHP are among the methods on offer from Blogrolling.com; I used PHP when I gave the service a whirl on one of my offline blogs and that really does give you a lot of customising power over and above using CSS. That’s not to say that there aren’t customisation functions on offer from Blogrolling.com, I found a few of these distinctly useful: ordering of links in a blogroll is just one. When it comes to categorising your links, you don’t get the category option but you do get to create as many blogrolls as you want so there is a workaround; moving links from one blogroll to another is mouse intensive but straightforward. Also, because you are reading each blogroll in turn, you have the ability to order the categories as you want them. With WordPress’ category approach, ordering categories involves widgets and plugins or getting your mits dirty with some code cutting. All in all, Blogrolling.com seems to offer an intriguing and useful service.
Primarily because of the WordPress plugins that I use, a few inconsistencies have leaped out of the woodwork that needed to be fixed. Here are the issues that I encountered:
Database errors appearing in web pages
This was a momentary discovery along the upgrade trail, entirely caused by the way in which I was doing things. As usual, I went and copied over the WordPress 2.3 files to my web server so I saw these errors before I ran the upgrade script. Then, they were banished, confirming that WordPress 2.3 code was trying to access a WordPress 2.2 type database; 2.3 has made some database changes in order to incorporate tagging.
Dashboard Editor no longer fully functional
The move to JQuery meant that some of the things for which its was looking had changed. They also changed the incoming links provider from Technorati to Google, now that the former is having a tougher time of it. It took a while to track down why I was unable to remove components from the front page of my dashboard as before but a quick comparison of 2.3 code with its 2.2.3 forbear revealed all. I can make a copy of the updated code available for those who need it.
WordPress Admin Themer
The plugin works as before and does its job so well that you end up applying an old stylesheet (in the blog’s theme folder) to the latest release. It only took a spot of tweaking to put everything in order.
I am not complaining about any of these, partly because they were easy to resolve and, in any event, I don’t mind a spot of code cutting. However, I can foresee some users being put out by them, hence my sharing my experiences.
Update: Dashboard Editor has since been updated by the author. Even so, I will stick with my own version of the plugin.
The final release of the next version of WordPress is due out on Monday and, because there are sure to be security fixes included, I have been giving the release candidate a go on my offline blogs. 2.3 is another major release so I have been doing some preparation. In fact, WordPress have a blog entry dedicated to such things for this release. Thankfully, I think that my hillwalking blog should emerge unscathed by this upgrade; I still need to have a go with an offline version of this blog.
The special feature in the new release is tagging and it is good to see that it has had no impact on legacy set ups. I had the same reservations about 2.2 with its inclusion of sidebar widgets but the backward compatibility was enough to see me through without any hiccups. Tagging is not something that I see myself using with categories fulfilling much the same type of role; I am unconvinced by the idea of tag clouds, the type of thing that it powers. However, there are some useful extras here and the filtering of posts by edit status is one of these. Having pending review as a publishing status sounds like a tweak that I might use to allow myself a cooling off period before I publish a post for all of the world to see. Revisiting something with a fresher pair of eyes might stop typographical howlers from emerging into public view…
Update: Another 2.3 feature discovered! I have picked up on multiple category widgets by virtue of the fact that category styling disappeared with the upgrade of the offline version of this blog to 2.3 RC1. Adding "-1" to the relevant CSS class definitions soon sorted things out. It does support the idea of testing before implementation even if no other unexpected changes were spotted. I still am not sure why anyone would have multiple category listings, though.
To get to the blogs hosted by SAS Institute, all you need to do is go here. I have to say that there is quite a spread of subject matter ranging from the high level business strategy offerings through to detailed snippets for SAS programmers. There seems to be a lot here for anyone interested in SAS and business intelligence. I must take a longer look.
Update: I have since discovered a central listing of SAS Institute RSS feeds. The list is well worth your perusal.
It was on this date several months ago that I moved my hillwalking blog into the world of WordPress. It’s a self-hosted WordPress instance and has been for all that time. Because of the move, I was taken into the world of MySQL, a world that intrudes still to this day. Most of the time for the migration was spent setting up a theme to fit in with the rest of the website of which it forms a very important part. The matter of importing all the old posts took up time too, especially when it came to fixing glitches with the XML import. Still, it was all done within a weekend and my website hasn’t looked back since. More people now have a reason to visit, and the blog may even have surpassed the photo gallery as the site’s main attraction. I kept up the old blog for a while but have dispensed with that by now; I was keeping both blogs synchronised and that became a tiring manoeuvre. Another upshot of the whole experience is that I have become more aware of the UK outdoor scene and learnt a thing or two too. It might even have encouraged me to go from day tripping to multi-day backpacking, a real-world change that is well removed from the world of technology.
A little while back, I took to using the wonders of .htaccess directives to make my WordPress deployments more secure. It does work but has the disadvantage that desktop blog editors like Windows Live Writer, Word 2007 and w.bloggar cannot be used to update your blog. I must have a look at getting around this but I am sticking with using WordPress itself to do the editing for now (Dean Lee’s port of FckEditor for WordPress is working out very well, spurious codes notwithstanding).