Enemy of Entropy

Gravatars and Plugins and WordPress, Oh My!

5 April 2008, 11:03 pm. 8 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Geekery.

Since Word­Press 2.5 has Gra­vatar sup­port, I’m attempt­ing to add Gra­vatars to my blog tem­plate. Unfor­tu­nately, I just keep get­ting errors, or a the default “no Gra­vatars” image (even for com­ment authors who I know have Gra­vatars, like me). I’m cer­tain that the author of this tem­plate isn’t going to update it to include sup­port, because her web site and busi­ness are up for sale. She hasn’t ever responded to ques­tions in the past, either, so I fig­ure it’s silly to look for help there.

I tried on another tem­plate, with the same errors. I really don’t want to switch themes again, because I couldn’t even start to remem­ber every­thing I’ve cus­tomized in this one, and I’d rather not do it all over again. I’m annoyed, though. If any­one can help me, I’d appre­ci­ate it!

Update: Squee! They’re work­ing now! The clue I needed was in a post at Weblog Tools Col­lec­tion. Now I can try updat­ing the other blogs!

Oth­er­wise, Now Read­ing is work­ing now, thanks to help from the author. I’m thrilled, as it’s one of my favorite plug-​​ins. When I get Read­er­Ware set up for us again, I’ll try to fig­ure out a way to export data from it to NR.

Cys­tats is not work­ing, though. I didn’t even real­ize that it was bro­ken at first, because the error only shows up for users who aren’t logged in. Oddly enough, it works on some blogs that are run­ning 2.5, but not this one. The author of that plug-​​in hasn’t responded to my ques­tions, though. It might be due to a lan­guage bar­rier, as his blog is writ­ten in Ger­man. Now it’s work­ing again, as ran­domly as it quit work­ing. Why? Who knows? If you see an error on the site at any time, please com­ment and let me know!

I just real­ized that Live­jour­nal Cross­post also died in the upgrade. For­tu­nately, there’s a fix described in the issues board at the devel­op­ment site that should make it work again.

Now I get to go back and see how many posts didn’t go to LJ, and try to fix that lit­tle omission.

Mouse-​​Mouse and WordPress Oddity

14 March 2008, 1:57 am. 5 Comments. Filed under Geekery.

I will not pro­vide a photo, but I fig­ure this point­ing device would be all-​​too pop­u­lar with any felines or canines in your house­hold. I wouldn’t ever imag­ined such a thing if the Instructa­bles peo­ple hadn’t sent out an email plea to who­ever abducted Mouse-​​Mouse from their table at SXSW to please return him.

As slick as Word­Press is, wouldn’t it make sense for it to fig­ure out some­thing like day­light sav­ing time? I mean, if you could just click some­thing, the way you do in Win­dows, to say, “Yes, I’m in an area that observes DST” it would be much, much eas­ier than going through every bloody WP instal­la­tion for which you’re respon­si­ble and man­u­ally chang­ing the time, which is what I just real­ized that I need to do. I’m sure I would have noticed if there’s a plu­gin to pro­vide that func­tion­al­ity in the Plu­gin Repos­i­tory, and I don’t think there is one.

I tried Time Zone Cal­cu­la­tor, but it just seems to fig­ure var­i­ous time zones and will dis­play them in a wid­get or wher­ever you want to call it via php. That doesn’t help me. Auto­matic DST change func­tion­al­ity seems a no-​​brainer to me, so why isn’t it built in, and since it isn’t, why isn’t there a plug-​​in?

Have I men­tioned lately how incred­i­bly stu­pid I find DST? I’m totally unsur­prised to learn that it doesn’t save a bit of energy, any­way.

Livejournal Crossposter and LJ as an aggregator

25 August 2006, 7:53 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Geekery.

Live+Press works, but it gives me lots of messy error mes­sages. I don’t like error mes­sages, even if the post does even­tu­ally go where it’s sup­posed to go. Oddly, it works just fine on Katie’s site. We’re using the same ver­sion of Word­Press on the same server. Very strange.

So now I’m test­ing Live­Jour­nal Cross­poster. We’ll see how this one works. It’s sim­pler, with far fewer options. I can’t cus­tomize the LJ post in any way (user pic­ture, mood, etc.) but most of those options weren’t really work­ing in Live+Press anyway.

I’ve got­ten the idea that some of you just won’t com­ment if you can’t do it on LJ, so I’ll just go back to hav­ing com­ments in both places. At least I’ll get noti­fi­ca­tions (or should).

That’s a real prob­lem I have with using LJ as an aggre­ga­tor: there’s no way to get LJ to dis­able com­ments on the syn­di­cated feed account, and the blog author never know the com­ments are there. Few peo­ple actu­ally go back to the blog to respond, and blog­gers (on LJ or else­where) want com­ments. They are the ego-​​cookies that make us happy. You wouldn’t want to miss your com­ments, would you?

 

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