Technology Tales

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

Changing the appearance of WordPress admin pages

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?

What about a book on WordPress development?

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?

A penchant for strange decisions?

WordPress.com has retired its Feed Stats feature. While there might have been problems with it for some, I do find it a strange decision not to spend some time on it. After all, given the existence of Google Reader and its kind, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that more people read blogs with RSS readers than by going to the sites themselves. In fact, I peruse blogs more often with Google Reader than by visiting the websites themselves. It’s enough to make me wonder if I could use FeedBurner with this blog.

To follow on from this, I am beginning to wonder if that Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, seems to be a quirky company that makes decisions that are questioned by its customers. After all, they did remove the post preview functionality from blog post editing screens and that has generated a good deal of comment. On self-hosted WordPress, you can add a plug-in to correct this but that option is not open to WordPress.com users. The answer that I got to a theme change request earlier this year adds to the impression as does seeing a company having staff apparently work from home all over the world.

Automattic seems an unconventional beast alright; could that lead to their undoing? It is king of the hill with blogging world for now but there is nothing to say that will last forever.

WordPress 2.2

WordPress 2.2 made its début yesterday and, after a spot of cautious testing, I upgraded my hillwalking blog to use it. The reason for the testing was that self-hosted WordPress blogs can now have what WordPress.com blogs have had for a while: built-in widget capability. It was this that upped my level of caution but the changes weren’t as drastic as I had feared: you need to amend your theme for widgets to be supported and not having done this causes no untoward effects. Making themes widget compatible is something that Automattic describe in a helpful article on their website. Other than this, WordPress 2..2 doesn’t cause much upheaval and, apart from pieces JavaScript snagging on occasions in Firefox, all seems well. I am still sitting on the fence as regards those widgets though…

WordPress anti-spam plug-ins

I have just learned about and started to use two new tools on my other blog to combat comment spam. Akismet was doing well but I was moderating more than I should. One plug-in is Bad Behaviour and this interrogates incoming traffic and blocks anything that is attempting the nefarious. This cuts off spam bots before they can even see the blog. Spam Karma 2 is the other new weapon in my arsenal. It is another spam detector and using it alongside Akismet is following the defence in depth approach: when spam gets past one, it is unlikely to pass the other. Both can coexist together and there apparently is an Akismet plug-in for Spam Karma that does away with the need for Akismet itself. The array of options offered by Spam Karma may put off some but that means that extra power is there should it ever be needed.

Want comment spam on your blog?

This is an observation that surprised me: a title on one of my blog posts was helping to drive my Akismet counter a bit wild as the thing was busying itself detecting and quarantining the rubbish. Since changing the offending title, things have calmed down a bit. For me , that’s food for thought…

Blogging with Word 2007

It seems strange to say it but I am making good use of Word’s blogging capabilities. Having had WordPress.com’s blog editor mangle one of my posts – incidentally while using Opera as my browser -- is the cause of this turn of events.

When setting up new accounts, there are a number of presets available to be used to work with major blogging providers such as Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad. This is not all though as it is possible to hook up to other blogs in a more generic fashion. In fact, I have able to hook up to my other WordPress-powered blog; hosted on the same server as my personal website and with all of the associated programming and scripting handled by myself. Where you have a number of accounts set up in the application, a drop-down menu appears in the post so that you can select the account to be used.

Speaking of drop down menus embedded in the post, you can add categories to a post from the blog server’s own collection and you can have more than one in any post. This feature is a boon as is the ability to edit posts that are already on there but Word only seems to show a subset of all the posts on the server, about 20 I think, rather than every single one. Another caveat is that you need to use a separate window for each post or you’ll end up overwriting posts in error. Whether this is a result of RSS feed settings or is intrinsic to Word itself remains something that I have yet to discern. As it is Word, formatting, insertion of objects such as hyperlinks and images is very much part of the package. That said, uploading images via this route was not something that I tested until I was writing this post but it seems to work well.

Apart from the irritations discussed above, I did find Word crashing a few times but no data were lost thanks to its seemingly excellent file recovery capabilities, a definite counterpoint to some of my experiences with Word’s file recovery feature in previous versions. Eventually, the Office Diagnostics tools kicked in to see if all was well and, after carrying out both hardware (memory, hard drive, etc.) and software checks, an installation repair was performed. Let’s see if this resolves the issue. Even so, the crash repair and diagnostics were not something that I had seen to the same extent in previous versions of Office and they did look pretty impressive.

In summary, Word does seem to be good blogging tool but I wouldn’t use it on its own because of its inability to download a full list of posts for editing. A blog’s own interface will remain necessary for that. Also, Word is far from being the only “offline” blog editor out there and I am tempted to take a look at the likes of BlogJet and w.bloggar.