Category: Admin

The upgrade to WP 2.0.2 seems to have been successful. I’ve disabled live preview for comment composition, because I want to try a slightly different approach in the future. Apart from that, everything should work the same. If you notice any problems, please add a comment to this posting.

I’m about to upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.0.2. (I’m presently running 1.5.2.) Various bits and pieces may stop working for a while, but hopefully things will be OK. See you on the other side….

I’ve posted my new PGP key on the Contact me page. I also uploaded it to wwwkeys.pgp.net. (I tried to add it to http://pgp.mit.edu/, but it wouldn’t accept the keyblock.)

You may have noticed that my post about Czech cheese and wine just got truncated. What happened was that I decided to edit it slightly from the Blazer web browser on my Treo 650. It turns out that this browser has a limit on the size of a text field that it can handle, and rather than warning the user it silently truncates the data. This is clearly unacceptable, and if anyone from Palm is reading this….!
(Is there a better browser available for the Treo?)

There’s something odd going on. I posted two items today, but they’re not showing up on my RSS feed. I suspect there’s some kind of timestamp issue, or perhaps an interaction with the various posting tools I use.

Just testing the 1.1 release of MarsEdit to see how well it plays with WordPress. And now I’m just editing the previous posting.

This theme is called LactPlate. I like the clean look, but the text colours and header font are unfortunate. I’m still exploring the vast world of WordPress themes.
One thing that these themes are revealing is that I have far too many categories. I need to cut them down to a dozen or so. I’ve just found a neat plugin to do bulk category management, so when I get a chance….
In my previous blog (still available here) I hand-crafted a set of pages which I linked from the top of the sidebar. WordPress makes it easy to create such pages (even a hierarchy of such things), so I’m starting to migrate the content from the old files.
I still haven’t done anything with the blogroll and links. In the old blog, this material was hand-edited into the MT index template, with much use of [very] raw HTML. There’s no easy way to import this stuff: I’m going to have to do it by hand.
UPDATE: I think I’ve got the fonts the way I want them, including the mouse-overs, and I’ve started to make progress on the sidebar. I need to find a plugin to provide a better editor for new posts: right now it’s easier to author a comment (with live preview) than it is to enter the original blog item. The default handling for picture uploads is very crude….
UPDATE: I imported all of the entries from my old MT blog into the new one. However I’ve left the original pages around in read-only form to satisfy any links back from search engines and other blogs. I’ve also (just now) disabled all of the MovableType CGI’s, so any attempt to comment on the old content, or use the search function, will simply 404
Anyone who gets to my blog through RSS (directly or via an aggregator) shouldn’t notice any problems; I’ve added an .htaccess rule to rewrite the requests. In the long term it’ll be more efficient if you switch to the correct URI.

I just installed a WordPress plugin to support comment preview and markup, and it seems to conflict with the complex stylesheet used by my previous theme. So I just reverted to the default theme.

Let’s see what this looks like.

This theme is promising. It’s based on Neuron, which I found at Alex King‘s archive of WP themes.
To-do list: push new RSS links to the various aggregators (and exeriment with an RSS redirector); import my blogroll; test MarsEdit compatibility.
Here’s how I’ve configured comments. The first time you submit a comment (with username and email address), I’ll have to approve it. If I do so, your subsequent comments will appear immediately. We’ll see how this works.