wordpress

I finally took some time to update to WP 2.2.2. Naturally, this update broke Democracy again, so I have to go through my mini-hack that lets it work with WP-Cache and figure out what changed from the original 2.0 to 2.2.2. I also have to go through my plugins to figure out what else I broke. I'm starting to feel nostalgic for Drupal's file structure. More on that later.

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It's been 20 days since Wordpress entered unstable. Why the freeze? I thought we had something special. Coffee?

Actually, I'm still waiting for Wordpress 2.1 to enter Debian testing, so I can try it out on Hackwater.net before I go and frag Hackwater.com. Uh, I mean, deploy it on Hackwater.com. But I'm getting antsy. I want to play with the new toy, just like everyone else. I could just install from source, but I like having the Debian-sanctioned packages.

Wordpress 2.1 came out a couple of weeks ago, so I'll be installing that here soon. I just have to get my plugins and other custom crap out of the way so that I can put it back after installation.

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I was asked to present sample Python code recently. I figured since it was close to hand, digitally speaking, I might as well put it here as part of my code samples. The code below stems from my attempts to keep my dynamic IP address updated with my DNS provider (Zoneedit, if you're keeping score). That can be tricky sometimes; I've had instances when the Zoneedit DNS servers seem completely unresponsive, so no matter how clever the script, it can't really update anything. This is fairly rare, but extremely frustrating when it occurs.

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A List Apart came through for me again, helping me build a two-column ordered list for my resume. Getting it to work in IE was much more difficult, requiring the use of one CSS hack and one clever (if I say so myself) relative position CSS property that allowed me to use relative widths for the two list columns. Testing the code in IE brought a slight rendering problem to my attention: the title widget and white background were not loading correctly in IE, but only for pages, not posts.

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I ran my page through the W3C's validator and discovered that it was not XHTML 1.0 strict. It had several errors, and tracking these down led me to discover that my hack to get Democracy to play nicely with WP-Cache still had a bug: I was getting a MySQL error in the code for the poll form, where the form action would appear. This didn't interfere with the page rendering (as far as I can tell), so it was invisible until I looked at the source or, better yet, had a validator do it.

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How I got the Democracy poll plugin to work with WP-Cache

WP-Cache is a useful plugin. Although I've never been Slashdotted, other people who have and are using Wordpress swear by it. It does have a minor flaw. I have a poll plugin, Democracy, that is obviously supposed to be dynamic. It's rather lame to go to a page, vote on a poll, and not see any results because the page is cached. It turns out that WP-Cache has a mechanism for getting around this, allowing dynamic plugins on static cached pages.

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I've been thinking about comments. Specifically as they pertain to posts, in threaded vs. flat format. The advantages as I see them:

• Threaded allows a person to reply directly and obviously to a specific comment in a post. Comments are children not just of the parent post, but also of parent comments.
• Flat comments allow a person to see comments in a timeline. Comments are children only of the main post.

The disadvantages:

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It occurs to me that I don't know enough about routers and the web servers that love them. One of the minor annoyances I have with Wordpress is that I can't view the site as if I were accessing from outside of my LAN when I'm on my LAN. Wordpress uses PHP to fill out the paths for its various components (i.e. theme files, specifically stylesheets, functions, etc.).

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I've eliminated most of the things in my TODO list from November (yikes, that took a while). Things that are left: books page, music page, other interests page. Perhaps my song and poetry parody page. And naturally, technical issues like getting my header to work cross-platform. With my newly created TODO category, I shouldn't have to resort to kludges to remember what I still have to do. I just need to find all my posts on the subject. Why didn't I think of this earlier?!

But wait! There's more . . .