Tag Archives: wordpress

WordPress Mobile Validating Patch

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Kelson

I’ve been using Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition for a while to provide a mobile-friendly version of this blog, but haven’t really paid much attention to it since my last few phones were extremely limited in web browsing ability. Since I got the G1, I’ve been paying more attention to mobile access, including setting up WPTouch for a high-functioning iPhone– & Android–friendly version of the site. Last week I finally got around to testing the two plugins in combination, and determined that they do seem to work together with the right priorities.

I also ran the main page through the mobile-readiness evaluator at ready.mobi, and noticed that most of the issues it cited with the mobile edition of the site were really simple changes. Some were basics like fixing unbalanced HTML, and others were recommended practices like including a DOCTYPE and making sure that headings were nested properly. So I whipped together a patch for WordPress Mobile Edition 2.1a. (It’s labeled as 2.1.1 in the readme, but it shows up as 2.1a in the list of plugins.)

Changes:

  • Add XHTML Mobile 1.2 Doctype.
  • Fix unbalanced <small> tag.
  • Fix mising <ul> tags around list of recent posts.
  • Avoid empty class attribute on comments.
  • Add type attribute to style element.
  • Change non-standard value attribute on <meta> tag to content attribute.
  • Reassign headings so that h1, h2, h3 appear in order.

Download:

wp-mobile-validation.patch [removed, see below]

The patch should be applied to the wp-mobile folder that you place in your themes folder.

Update: This has been completely superseded by more recent versions of the plug-in, which use Carrington Mobile instead.

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Comicbook.com Power-Up Plugin for WordPress [Removed]

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Kelson

I’ve put together a simple plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs that adds a “Power Up” button to your posts for submission to Comicbook.com (a Digg-like site or comics-related news).

No configuration needed – just install it and activate it.

Yeah, I could have just pasted the code into my theme template, but I like to keep functional changes separate in case I ever decide to switch to another theme.

At present it will only show on individual posts. It won’t show on pages, or the front of the site, or any sort of archive page.

You can see it in action on Speed Force.

Download:
ktv_comicbook_powerup-0.1.zip

[Update:] The service no longer exists (the site is a blog now), so there’s no need for the plugin anymore.

Posted in Comics, Computers/Internet | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Running on WordPress 2.7 Final

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Kelson

I have now updated this blog (and Speed Force) to WordPress 2.7 Final — using the built-in updater. It takes a while, but it’s entirely automated once I tell it “Install” and enter my FTP info.

The built-in plugin installer is very convenient as well.

The Flash 10 upload bug is fixed!

As with Speed Force, I’ve dropped the plugin I was using for avatars in favor of the built-in feature. It still generates Wavatars for those of you who leave your email address but don’t have Gravatars, but it seems to generate them differently, so you get a new and different monster.

All my plugins work as far as I can tell (official plugin compatibility list), but there are a couple of glitches:

WP-Super-Cache doesn’t seem to be deleting expired pages on schedule. And the spot for the convenient clear-cache-now buttons for that and WP Widget Cache doesn’t exist anymore, so if I do need to clear them out I need to go to the plugin’s settings page — which is what I had to do until a month ago anyway, so no big deal.

Also, Twitter Tools doesn’t seem to be able to pre-check the “Notify Twitter about this post” checkbox. But the important stuff works.

I’m still getting used to the new admin layout, but the only thing that really bugs me is there doesn’t seem to be a quick way to get to scheduled posts from the dashboard.

Other than that, so far so good. As always, let me know if anything seems broken.

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Jumped to WordPress 2.7

Posted on December 5, 2008 by Kelson

Figured I’d give WordPress 2.7 RC1 a shot. Probably should have waited for the final release, but I figure if they’re confident enough to roll it out on WordPress.com, I might as well try it. Plugin Compatibility seems decent.

As usual, let me know if you see any weirdness.

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That Welcome Message (WordPress Greet Box Plugin)

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Kelson

I’ve been trying out something new here and at Speed Force over the last two weeks: a customized welcome message to readers who come in from certain web services, particularly social networks where I’m also set up. Twitter users see a link to my Twitter profile, for instance, and LiveJournal users see a link to the syndication feed for this blog. In theory, it should only show you the welcome box once (or once a week at the most), depending on whether you allow cookies.

I’d actually tried out a similar idea when I first launched Speed Force this summer, but the implementation I used did all the processing on the server, so it wasn’t compatible with caching. (It also only detected two built-in sites and one custom site, and I didn’t feel like hacking it up to add more.)

So when Weblog Tools Collection mentioned a new plugin called Referrer Detector, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It didn’t quite work right with my setup at the time. I fixed the bugs I could, and reported the issues to the author, then tried out a similar plugin — which, as it turned out, had inspired him to write his own — called WP Greet Box. It also had a few hiccups, and again I reported the issues I’d encountered. Both plugins went into a period of heavy development over the next few days.

I’ve settled on WP Greet Box, which seems to be more flexible than Referrer Detector (though the latter seems to be getting more attention). The author has also been very responsive to both problems and suggestions.

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Flash 10 and WordPress File Upload Problems

Posted on October 16, 2008 by Kelson

Well, Flash 10 is out with new features, security updates, and a fix for a Firefox video problem that I never noticed because it only affected Windows, and only sometimes.

It seems a little less stable than version 9 on Linux, at least 64-bit (it’s kind of complicated, because they only have a 32-bit program, so you either need to run a 32-bit version of your web browser, or use a wrapper that will let the 64-bit browser talk to the 32-bit plugin. nspluginwrapper does this for Firefox and other Gecko browsers, while Opera has a wrapper built in). But the annoying part: WordPress’ image upload no longer works.

Current versions of WordPress use SWFUpload to provide an enhanced file uploader. If you don’t have Flash installed, it will just use the standard upload dialog built into your web browser, but then you’re stuck uploading one image at a time — a real pain if you’re making a photo gallery post. Unfortunately for upload libraries, Adobe removed the ability for the Flash API to open a file dialog for security reasons.

So now, you can click on the button, but the dialog never opens. WordPress is tracking the issue in ticket 6979, which mentions that SWFUpload is discussing workarounds, and the YUI Uploader has already released a new version that works with Flash 10.

An update of some sort is likely to happen soon. In the mean time, WordPress users have two choices: hold off on updating Flash, or stick with the browser uploader for now.

Update October 31: SWFUpload has a new version in beta which works with Flash 10, and WordPress is working on integrating the update. It’s targeted for WordPress 2.7, which comes out in a little under two weeks, though the 2.7 writeup lists it as a feature that “didn’t make it” and might be in 2.8. (This seems like something that would affect enough people that I’d hope they would include it, even if it means pushing back the release a few days for more testing.)

There’s also been talk about implementing a file uploader using Gears, which I’d find really appealing if I weren’t 64-bit Linux both at home and at work.

Update November 1: I’ve tested WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 (not on this blog) and can confirm that the fix is included, as I was able to upload two images in one transaction.

Posted in Computers/Internet, Troubleshooting | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

Improving Browser Reliability

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Kelson

The IEBlog recently posted about their efforts to improve reliability in Internet Explorer 8, particularly the idea of “loosely-coupled IE” (or LCIE). The short explanation is that each tab runs in its own process, so if a web page causes the browser to crash, only that tab crashes — not the whole thing. (It is a bit more complicated, but that’s the principle.) Combine that with session recovery (load with the same set of web pages, if possible with the form data you hadn’t quite finished typing in), and you massively reduce the pain of browser crashes.

I’d like to see something like this picked up by Firefox and Opera as well. They both have crash recovery already, but it still means restoring the entire session. If you have 20 tabs open, it’s great that you don’t have to hunt them down again. But it also means you have to wait for 20 pages to load simultaneously. It would be much nicer to only have to wait for one (or, if I read the IE8 article correctly, three).

Edited to add:

On a related note, I’ve run into an interesting conflict between crash recovery and WordPress’ auto-save feature. If you start a new post, WordPress will automatically save it as a draft. If the browser crashes, it will bring up the new-post page, but restore most of the form data you filled in. So the title, the text of your post, etc will all be there. But WordPress will see it as a new post, and you’ll end up with a duplicate.

This wasn’t a major problem when I encountered it — I had to reset the categories, tags, and post slug after I hit publish (since I hadn’t noticed that they’d been reset to defaults), and I just deleted the older, partial version of the post — but I can imagine if I’d uploaded an image gallery, I would have been rather annoyed, since there’s no way (that I’ve noticed) to move images from one post to another. Reuse them, sure, but not such that the gallery feature would work.

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bits and Pieces

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Kelson

At lunch today, I saw a woman, probably in her 50s, wearing a fitted black T-shirt that said, in sparkly letters, “BOTOX”. Srsly. I couldn’t find any pictures of the design, but a commenter here says it’s a promo handed out to staff at plastic surgery clinics.

Comic-Con has completely sold out. Hmm, let me rephrase that. There are no more memberships available for this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego.

Spam Karma has gone GPL — After years of support Dr. Dave has decided to stop maintaining his spam plugin and turn it over to the open-source community. The project is now on Google Code.

Posted in Comic Con 2008, Computers/Internet, Strange World | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

WP 2.6

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Kelson

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.6. I probably should have held off a bit, but there were some things I really wanted to be able to use, like the new Gears support, version history on posts, Opera-related fixes (too bad Gears doesn’t work with Opera yet), and improved image management. And the theme and plugin APIs are supposed to be “pretty much identical,” so there wouldn’t be much risk of breaking anything.

Call it an impulse. :-D

Fun facts from the Dashboard: This is the 1,649th post on K-Squared Ramblings. Hard to believe. Also: there are currently 2,744 comments. Admittedly that includes local pingbacks, but still, that’s a heck of a lot of comments!

Judging by the comment IDs, roughly 40,000 spam comments have been deleted since this blog went online. Fortunately, most of those are handled automatically by Spam Karma. And just think, that’s not counting however many Bad Behavior blocks before they even get processed!

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WordPress Update & Plugin Request

Posted on April 25, 2008 by Kelson

WordPress 2.5.1 is out, with a slew of bug fixes and one “very important security fix” which will reportedly be disclosed soon. It’s worth upgrading ASAP. You don’t want your blog hacked.

Highlights are listed at that first link, but for me the most noticeable change was a fix in the new media uploader. When uploading images on Linux, the thumbnail+properties form would display 3 times, none of them actually usable, for each image uploaded. Once I clicked on the gallery and went back, it was fine, so I could still use it, but it was an extra step that shouldn’t have been necessary. I kept meaning to report the bug, but it looks like someone got to it ahead of me. Thanks, someone!

And now, a request to WordPress Plugin Developers. When you release a new version, please tell me what has changed. Some plugin authors are good about this, including announcements on their web pages. Some even include a changelog with the download. But some don’t do either, and the only way to find out is to download the new files and compare them to the old ones using a tool like diff.

Now that I think about it, putting a “release notes” section in each entry in the Plugin Directory would go a long way toward making this work. It would put the information right there in the directory, and it would encourage plugin authors to compile the information int he first place.

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