robinadr » robinadr.com

Titan

Robin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:21:10 +0000

I’ve switched the site over from a very customized Grid Focus theme to Titan by the Theme Foundry. I found it after searching through many pages of the WordPress theme directory. What I especially like about it are the colors as well as the layout.

It also comes with extensive options for customizing what goes where, especially in the sidebar and the header, which was a nice surprise. I originally intended to design my own theme, but that is honestly too much work.

Housekeeping

Robin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:01:05 +0000

With a bit (a lot) of spare time over the holidays, I’ve done some housekeeping around here. Including updating plugins (more on that in a bit), deactivating plugins that I haven’t used in, well, years, and poking around in cPanel. I can’t tell if it’s just a Placebo or not, but it definitely feels a lot faster.

As for updating plugins, it was less than pleasant. I seem to remember WordPress directly downloading the plugin ZIP files (presumably with fopen and etc) and writing the files directly. In recent releases, however, installing with FTP seems to be the only option.

To say this doesn’t always end well would be an understatement. Sometimes it makes WordPress unusable for minutes, and I say only WordPress because everything else served from the same web server works fine in the meanwhile. And there seems to be a weird bug that causes a mdawaffe-test.zip file to download instead of the actual plugin, which caused some irritation too.

In the end I just opened SSH up and used wget and did it myself…

I’m not sure why they got rid of the original system, but I suppose the security risk of making all of wp-content writable could be part of it. Then again, I haven’t really kept up with WordPress at all since I left.

Back to ASO

Robin — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:34:27 +0000

So seeing as how I don’t use this site anymore at all (it took me 30 seconds to figure out where the write post page was in the new WordPress menu), I’ve shifted it back to A Small Orange for their dirt cheap $25/year Tiny plan. Compared to DreamHost, this is about a fourth of the cost.

Surprisingly enough, I didn’t completely screw it up.

WordPress 2.5

Robin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:43:05 +0000

Soo, WordPress 2.5 has been released. Upgrade went fine, but I definitely cannot say I like the new admin. The navigation, especially, seems unfinished and not thought through. Oh, and the submit buttons are ugly as hell.

My new excuse of not blogging is so I don’t hurt my eyes straining to decipher the extremely non-contrasting colors in the new admin design. Ugh. I even have to turn down my screen’s brightness so I’m not blinded.

At least they got rid of the DBX boxes.

An Influx of Updates

Robin — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:13:59 +0000

I haven’t written anything since December 15 of last year, so I guess I’ll just post a bunch of small tidbits to make up for it.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. 2008 feels the same as 2007, so far.
My main reason for lack of posting is that I’ve begun playing World of Warcraft. Gotta… level… to… 70… Only 39 more levels to go — this is worse than heroin.
IPv6 may not be a pipe dream after all. Yippee, I guess. As long as it doesn’t bite me in the ass.

WordPress 2.5 Admin

(This is going to take a bit more space.)

Apparently parts of the admin, which is about 10% there, are being checked into the WordPress SVN repository. It makes no sense to me why they would commit them to the public (note, public) repository in such early stages, and Chris Messina has something related to say about that, which I agreed with.

That said, I can’t say I’m too impressed with what’s been checked in so far, but I’m holding judgement due to the faith I have in Happy Cog Studios (and the fact it’s only 10% done). That color scheme reminds me of something, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what. Oh, and I can’t say I’m really with that comments bubble on the menu item. Looks a bit tacky, but maybe that’s just me.

That’s that.

I hope to redesign soon. But, then again, when don’t I. Apparently my Footnotes plugin is incompatible with recent versions of Habari, which I should really fix. I’ll give them all a quick checking-on, too.

Please Excuse the Mess

Robin — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:13:14 +0000

Right now, if this website were a building, it would have scaffolding around it and be marked off limits. Which means that [yet another] redesign is in progress, and while the biggest parts of the design are done, much of it is still broken. Feel free to give any opinions about the design as it progresses.

I tried to find an image of Han Solo from the fourth Star Wars movie, for the whole “sorry about the mess” thing. Unfortunately, Google Images failed me.

Greedy WordPress Rewrite Rules

Robin — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 05:28:05 +0000

I’ve just spent the better part of, oh, say, 20 minutes, slamming my head over and over again into the wall that are the WordPress rewrite rules. What I’m struggling with is that WordPress seems to be sweeping up all the requests that aren’t actual files or directories.

More specifically, I’m trying to get an SVN repository set up at /svn. You can view it in a browser and check out the repository, but I kept getting 404 messages when I tried to commit to the repository. After a bit of troubleshooting, it turns out that SVN uses URL’s like this for committing and whatever else:

/svn/!svn/act/1c27da90-583c-0410-adbb-8f0d4583dd3e

Of course, this file/directory doesn’t exist, so WordPress sweeps it up and shows my lovely 404 page. So I tried some magic with RewriteCond to ignore all requests that begin with /svn. I tried every combination I could think of — no cigar.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t found a solution yet. I’m sure it’s something very, very simple I’m missing (the order of the rules, etc.) but I’m completely done with mod_rewrite and Apache today. So, once and for all: I hate WordPress’ greedy rewrite rules. At least I have for the past 20 minutes.

(Oh, and on another slightly related note, Dreamhost’s automatic SVN creation absolutely rocks.)

Update: Well, screw that. I gave up and just used svn.robinadr.com.

WordPress 2.3

Robin — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:23:48 +0000

Before the WordPress Development Blog even announced it, I’ve upgraded to the 2.3 branch and everything seems to be going fine. Quite a few new features (a good list is here), and most of my plugins went through 2.3 fine. All except for the Google Sitemaps Generator, but a quick upgrade was all that was needed.

The UTW tag importer went fine, and I guess I’ve got to change some things around on the site to reference this new tag feature set. 2.3 seems very nice so far.

Update: The official announcement is out.

Also, the tables you can manually drop in your database are wp_tags, wp_tag_synonyms and wp_post2tag. That’s for people who were using UTW before.

Note: Make sure you have your UTW tags imported before you drop these tables (Manage › Import › Ultimate Tag Warrior). Otherwise, you lose everything.