Gonna be playing with a few things here; pay me no mind.
When I tried to display the hr tag with my usual width and align attributes, by using “code” or “pre” tags, I lost the right sidebar. Ick.
This is block mode.
Now I switch to Visual.
Huh, there seems to be no indent mode, which is what I used in 2.6 for blockquotes.
I’m currently running WP 2.6.1. I want to upgrade to 2.7.1, but Fantastico only goes to 2.7.
The WP Blog blathers about going to the”Tools->Upgrade” menu, but 2.6.1 has no such thing; I’m hoping that’s a feature of 2.7.
So, once again, the magic upgrade process begins. If the site disappears, you’ll know why….
Blooey.
Damn.
I got the “Cannot redeclare is_sticky()” error, described in Hosting Matters’ Knowledgebase here.
Regrettably, I did not check the KB before attempting to roll-back the upgrade, and for some reason, I could not apply the SQL backup Fantastico made.
Annette, HM’s very helpful and patient Tech Support, was able to import the file, very promptly; I copied the Fantastico file backups into the ../Blog directory, and all is fine again. I’m going to try again, after disabling all the plug-ins, as I should have done the first time.
And a one and a two and a here we go….
Ha! Worked that time!
…and in general, I like the look of the new dashboard.
Now to do the bugfix upgrade to 2.7.1…
…And that worked too! Very slick; I like the new Upgrade tool.
OK, I need to go do other things, then I’m coming back to play with my new toy.
Again, thank you Annette. Couldn’t have done it without you.
WordPress is currently running its second usability poll on Dashboard features. (The Dashboard is the page that allows registered users to post new articles and generally administer the blog.)
It’s concerned mostly with two things: position of a search box, and the behavior of Scheduling, which allows you to set the date that an article will appear.
They solicited suggestions for new scheduling features, to which I replied:
Expiration date: the ability to set a date and time after which the article would fall off the front page. I know of one project whose manager, normally a WordPress advocate, rejected Word Press as a framework for her project primarily because it lacked this feature.
I’m thinking of a project Friend Pat is working on. Pat, you should pile on yourself.
[update: Blogger has acknowledged the problem, and is working to fix it, "despite it being Friday afternoon", which last I am entirely sympathetic with.]
Blogger, the blogging tool hosted by Google, has for maybe a week now been blocking many sites on apparently false charges of being “spam blogs”. Although the sites are still viewable, victims cannot author new posts. Judging by the posts on the Google Help Group here, Blogger is not responding to appeals in a timely fashion. (Granted, though, that they’ve got more than a thousand requests to work through.)
I first became aware of this via David Codrea’s excellent The War on Guns. Codrea was able to activate a sidebar widget (over there on the left) explaining the situation.
Oddly, comments seem to work.
Codrea is, rightfully, I think, reluctant to move, since War on Guns is a very active site with huge archives. (Including the absolutely invaluable Only Ones archive.) It doesn’t help that apparently WordPress cannot import any images associated with Blogger posts. (Can that be right? It seems like such an obvious thing to fix.) Also, he has been using a free Blogger account, and if he goes to WordPress, he’ll have to pay for hosting.
[update: I've been checking around, and it looks like there are migration tools that will in fact bring your pictures over.]
Nevertheless, he’s set up a WordPress site here, holding it in reserve pending resolution of the Blogger glitch.
This is a very tempting tin-foil-hat moment, but it’s not limited to gun blogs, or right-wing blogs, or even political blogs. Knoxviews speculates it might be some kind of anti-spammer bot that Blogger unleashed on itself, which then ran amuck on a rash of false positives. I wonder if it’s a denial-of-service attack which robotically clicks “flag as spam” buttons.
I am so very, very glad I elected to use an independent host (thank you, Hosting Matters), even though I have to pay for the privilege. (I’ve registered the domain through 2011, and my hosting fee is currently $11/month — negligible even on my very limited budget, and there are cheaper hosts out there.) And I think WordPress is a vastly better tool than Blogger, even out of the box with little or no customization.
Fair warning to those who find themselves investing time, effort, and other resources on free sites they do not control.
I upgraded WordPress from 2.5.1 to 2.6 last night — and just discovered that the permalinks to articles are now broken. You should be able to click on the title of a post, and be taken to a page that has that post and nothing else on it. Instead, you get “404 — File not found”.
Damn.
[Update]
Ah. According to the WordPress support forum, this is a bug in the 2.6 release.
I used this workaround:
…On the Settings->Permalinks screen, add some values in for the category and tag bases. The words “category” and “tag” will do just fine. As long as they are not blank, this should work around the bug.
Weird, but OK. That did indeed make the problem go away.
This should be fixed in the next release, 2.6.1.
Bad Behavior has blocked 200 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Ricketyclick: Comment Preview and JavaScript
Thursday, July 31st, 2008As noted in the previous post, I’ve installed the “Ajax Edit Comment” plugin, but I was not happy with it, because it did not provide a preview capability.
This post announces the installation of the Ajax Comment Preview plugin. Again, this depends on Ajax technology, which may not work with all browsers.
The great advantage this plugin provides is that the preview is filtered through the WordPress display engine, so that your preview should look exactly as it will appear when it is posted.
Testing another feature: Show ▼
Wow, I was mistaken. I did not have JavaScript turned off in Firefox. It’s turned off now, and although you can still post a comment, you cannot preview it or edit it after posting. I’m going to have to think about this. Not running JS breaks other stuff in the WordPress posting editor as well.
The Spoiler plugin I’m using (which protects text with Show/Hide tags) doesn’t work with JavaScript off, and it is not graceful about it, either: spoilers are invisible. I’d prefer a failure mode where spoilers show if JS is not present.
Somehow, I doubt that any editing or spoiler plugin will work without JS.
On the other hand, the spellchecker I’m using in Firefox does work with no JS.
OK, I’ve turned my JS back on. I’m keeping the current plugins, because turning off JS breaks so many things, I think most people will have it on.
Tags: Ajax, Ajax Comment Preview, JavaScript, Word Press
Posted in Ajax, Meta, Word Press | 4 Comments »