wordpress at The Observer's Log

Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

WordPress 2.8 acting weird?

14 Jun 2009

I just finished a rather arduous upgrade from WordPress 2.7.1 to WordPress 2.8 (arduous only because I had to do a massive migration to get rid of a lot of old kruft in my previous WP install).

But it’s acting really weirdly. The dashboard isn’t working properly, some of the JS functionality refuses to work in any browser (and returns an error in Firefox: “commentReply not defined” when I try to use the reply shortcut). But no 404s.

Anyone else seen weirdness?

First crack at my own theme

20 Jan 2009

After years of using other people’s themes — some very good and some that left a bad taste in my mouth — I decided it’s high time to get off my arse and build my own.

Especially after seeing Schiller’s most recent redesign, and realising that mine was way too graphical for the amount of content, and it needed to be a lot lighter. Besides, I was feeling substantially ungeeky because I didn’t actually make the template myself.

Ah, but here’s the rub: I can’t design. I can’t even draw a stick person.

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Holy upgrades, Batman!

11 Dec 2008

I saw an interesting Tweet this morning from Mathew Ingram, a columnist for the Globe and Mail. He had just used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to update his install to version 2.7. Being a couple versions behind the most recent release of WordPress myself, it sounded like a heck of a good thing to try out. Especially ‘cuz uploading whole new WP installs is a bit of a chore.

That, incidentally, is something to consider — I already know what the upgrade process is like. So I know what has to go into a plugin to make it work well. And does it ever work well! It creates backups, ensures that your site is in a maintenance mode before upgrading, copies files over to their correct locations, and even nags you to clean up the residual stuff afterwards. It prompts you for every step along the way — none of this totally-automatic-and-we-hope-your-site-doesn’t-break-along-the-way sort of stuff. For control freaks who are just too lazy to do their own upgrades (*cough* like me *cough*), this is pretty cool stuff.

Sadly, I also had to heavily wrestle with a Flickr Tag update that had totally exploded and refused to upgrade or activate at all. Ended up having to wipe out the files from the system as well as the Flickr Tag entries in the wp_options table. Not a particularly fun thing to do, and I can only imagine how hard it would be for someone who doesn’t know how.

Either way, I’m all up-to-date now, and it’s running really nicely. I’m looking forward to using the Automatic Updater from now on!

Web 2.0 Expo: Friday Keynote

25 Apr 2008

Maybe it’s just me, but running keynotes every single day of a conference seems really silly, and waters down the value of the concept of a keynote. But I digress. Either way, this morning features Tim O’Reilly (again), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems), Fake Steve Jobs (aka Daniel Lyons), Matt Cutts (Google), and Matt Mullinweg (WordPress).
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WordPress 2.5 + K2 RC4 = Bad News

1 Apr 2008

Le sigh.

I had this problem [[WordPress 2.2.1 broke my site!|when I updated my WordPress to 2.2.1]]: WordPress and K2 stopped talking. Sort of like a bad relationship.

Given, the two products are made by entirely different groups. Sadly, K2 is a bit behind WP at the moment. In fact, K2 breaks my dashboard (I have to manually punch in the URL for writing a new post), and now it seems K2 RC4 has busted my columns, shrank the font size on my tag cloud(??), and renders completely differently in IE than in Firefox.

I might have to change themes until K2 is fixed.

A little housecleaning

22 Dec 2007

Those of you reading my RSS feeds have probably noticed a wad of older articles and photo pages showing up lately. Not really a lot of new stuff. No, my blog ain’t broken — I’m just tidying up a bit.

Over the last year, I’ve found that I haven’t really set up my categories that well, and since WordPress 2.3.1 supports tags, I’m shifting some things around. So you haven’t seen the last of older articles showing up.

Also, I’m moving away from Photopress, which was powering all my images. I’m moving to Flickr. The entire wad of 4,686 pictures are there now, and I’ll be moving even more there as we move along. (I’ve even created a favourites page for pictures I’ve taken that I particularly like.)

In short, I apologise for the confusion this might cause. Hopefully, it won’t last long.