Enemy of Entropy

Whoops! WordPress Plugin Update Issue

13 April 2008, 8:47 pm. 6 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Geekery.

One of the neat things about Word­Press 2.5 is that when a plu­gin that’s in the Word­Press Plu­gin Direc­tory is updated, you get a mes­sage ask­ing if you want to down­load the new ver­sion or upgrade auto­mat­i­cally. If you use the auto­matic option, Word­Press down­loads the new ver­sion, deletes the old one, unzips the down­loaded file, and reac­ti­vates the plu­gin. It’s mar­velously sim­ple, com­pared to down­load­ing, unzip­ping, delet­ing, upload­ing, and reac­ti­vat­ing things man­u­ally. Until last night, it worked beau­ti­fully.
Read on…

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.

WordPress Upgrade Woes

30 March 2008, 8:53 pm. 7 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Geekery.

Ack! I upgraded to the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press (2.5) yes­ter­day, and now one of my favorite plug-​​ins (Now Read­ing) isn’t work­ing! You can see the books I’m read­ing at the moment over there in the side­bar, and I can get into the admin­is­tra­tive inter­face, but the library dis­play doesn’t work. Any of the actual book or author pages come up 404. Meep!

It isn’t just on this blog, either—Fibrant Liv­ing has the same problem.

The WP admin­is­tra­tive inter­face has been com­pletely redesigned. I’m not sure what might have been changed behind the scenes, so I’m a lit­tle wor­ried about try­ing to go back to the pre­vi­ous version.

I’ve posted mes­sages in the plug-​​in author’s forum and bug tracker. I’m hop­ing to hear from him soon! Rob actu­ally responded in the com­ments, and the new ver­sion resolved the prob­lem. Yay!

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.

Adult: FMS from What?

5 February 2008, 11:50 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Geekery, Humor, News, Sex.

I have a Google Alerts search going for “fibromyal­gia,” because if there’s some­thing out there that will make this crap bet­ter, I want to know it yes­ter­day. The alert brings in all sorts of non­sense from quack reme­dies to naysay­ers, in addi­tion to the actual content.

Today’s alert takes the cake, though. Some­body wrote to Dan Savage’s Sav­age Love col­umn ask­ing, “Can I Sue Some­body for Fisting-​​Induced Fibromyal­gia?“1

Savage’s med­ical expert is out of touch regard­ing the lat­est FMS research, but I have to agree with his reply to the letter-​​writer.

Sam and I tried to game a lit­tle tonight, but he was sleepy and I’m fad­ing, too. I did some writ­ing today, and more web­i­fy­ing, and worked on a cou­ple of school assign­ments. Then I got all-​​too-​​obsessed with try­ing to fig­ure out how to make the out­put of a cou­ple of Word­Press plu­g­ins work nicely with my template.

I hope y’all had a lovely weekend!

1 http://​www​.vil​lagevoice​.com/​p​e​o​p​l​e​/​0​8​0​6​,​s​a​v​a​g​e​,​7​9​0​4​4​,​2​4​.​h​tml

 

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