Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Wordpress

  • Soon there will be book reviews! (Thank you Tablepress!)

    I am embarrassed to admit this, but one of the reasons I haven’t posted book reviews in a while is in wordpress it is difficult to make tables well.

    A good 2 column table is the perfect format for displaying capsule book reviews. The left cell contains the cover art; the right cell contains the actual review. In my previous capsule book reviews, I did put everything in a table; it looks ok (but rather crappy). At the same time, it was tedious and confusing to make just a two column table. The rich text editor strips paragraph tags and puts br tags in strange places.  In the source html you can format things perfectly, but if you want to edit it in the rich text editor, you can only edit the table stripped of paragraph tags. You’re constantly trying to guess what the rich text editor will do to your original source.

    The other problem is proper styling. It’s not easy to make css for just that table, especially if your class declarations are rather complicated. Also, it is hard to add images in the rich text editor for a table you are editing on the desktop. It also provides a decent preview mode

    I’ve just spent the last hour testing Tablepress, a wordpress plugin which is designed to solve precisely these problems and more. It provides a better table wizard (and some cool javascript tricks for sorting rows and colunns). It also gives you option for importing tables (HTML or CSV)  and for inserting images or accessing the rich text editor from the table editor.  I think its primary use is to display tabular data, but it also is a time-saver for making simple tables whose function is simply to display text more efficiently.

    My method now is to create the table offline, import the file into the Tablepress plugin, and then within Tablepress table to manually insert the images. All this looks relatively easy to maintain, with the only down side being that the tables aren’t actually included in posts, but inserted as shortcodes into posts.  I suspect that will cause migration issues if you are migrating into another CMS, but then again, I’m almost feeling that wordpress will be here forever.

    Two weeks ago I was horrified to discover that creating the simple three row table in the middle of this blog post took hours to get right. Partly it had to do with the fact that the theme I was using had messed up CSS, but it was also cumbersome to test properly. I still need to update the shopping cart page, and preliminary efforts ended up breaking the original table.

    You wouldn’t think that HTML tables are very important any more, especially not ones you have to make manually. But having the ability to make boxes and two columns really makes layout easier, and wordpress just makes simple tables impossible to do right. One underlying problem is that WordPress expects bloggers to use the rich text editor inside the browser instead of a special desktop client.  Tiny MCE is good and powerful, but there are many times when I want to use neither the visual editor or even the text editor within the browser. Tablepress lets me import code directly, and that is good.

    Anyway, expect much more book reviews (and something very soon!)

    Update: I did produce the book review page, and it was very easy to do, but I noticed some oddities. First, Tablepress translated line breaks literally instead of ignoring them within a P tag.  So you need to make sure you eliminate all carriage returns. (My Oxygen XML Editor does a “pretty formatting” for XML which apparently enters carriage returns). Second, importing tables into Tablepress ignores the custom classes. Third, Tablepress has a button to open the Advanced Editor, and I ended up doing this a lot. Fourth, I didn’t bother to make code for images in my table before importing. I just added the graphics to Tablepress (which was pretty easy).

  • You’re not supposed to read this!

    To my astonishment and dismay, while looking at Google Reader I noticed on my  blog’s RSS feed an essay which I had not yet made live. Wow, how did that happen?

    Frankly,  when I’m still working on a draft, things can look awfully ugly. By the time I click PUBLISH, I’ve gotten rid of most of the ugly bits, but a few still slip by.

    So if you have already read the offending essay and told yourself – how dull! – please wipe that essay out of your mind and wait patiently. (Soon, I promise!).

    The odd thing is, I do a lot of writing and reading and yet no time to blog. But don’t worry; things end up here eventually.

  • testing 1,2,3 Ipad (Ignore this please!)

    Nothing going on here. I’m just testing the word press blogging app on word press. Wish me luck!

    Ok, that was painful. The publish button was nowhere. To correct that, you must confirm you are in edit mode, then hover your focus on Status and change it to publish.

    Also, cut and paste has not been implemented yet..hopefully soon.

    I have no idea how to add urls. ( not that such an action is important!)

    Finally if you switch applications, you lose all your work since the last save.

    Overerall: not too great, but at least it has minimal functionality.

  • What I’ve Been Doing

    Yesterday I upgraded 7 wordpress installs. It’s gotten both easier and more difficult.

    It’s easier because I’ve written out a series of necessary steps with UNIX commands about what to do. (It just occurred to me that I could put the mysql backups in a script. I’m sure there’s a way to run a mysql command without being prompted for password). Another trick was keeping two SSH windows open, one to run the backup scripts and the other to copy the updated wordpress files.

    It’s harder because as time goes by I end up dealing with more plugins and more customizations of themes. I keep waiting for the next upgrade to break my theme customizations (I’ve been lucky so far). When I upgrade wordpress on teleread, I find it a bear to remember all the plugins we are actively using. Apparently, you also have to reinsert the widget for the plugin after you reactivate them. So what was the order of that sidebar again? (A necessary step for more complicated sites is taking screenshots of the front page and of the plugin directory (and which ones are activated).

    Yesterday, things took about 2 hours, and that was unusual (because I had some special things to take care of). Now, by the way, I reactivated my Unsolved Heart weblog which I started a few years back when I was doing online dating. Another hard part was updating plugins, another scary thing. You never know if something is going to break something else. I probably could do my upgrade in an hour or an hour in a half next time.

    From Matt’s point of view, it makes sense to release security updates for WordPress when the issue becomes apparent. But from the blogger’s standpoint, it is time-consuming. I could deal with one security update a month, but not several! (I know, there’s a plugin for handling updates, but that sounds like a security risk waiting to happen).

    I finally included a new archive plugin that organizes my plugins. (View my new archive page–pretty sweet, eh?) I had looked into several alternatives, and none totally satisfied me. I’ve really kept my use of plugins to a minimum.

    (Sorry, here’s the link to the SRG Archive plugin)

  • Calibrating Your Monitor

    I’ve been learning an awful lot about video production this past week. Every day I learn I need some new gadget I never heard about (Today it’s filters and filter rings). Yesterday it was wide angle lenses.


    Calibrating your monitor     . Here’s another article

    WordPress Backup program

  • Don’t Cripple My Posts!

    Can I bitch about wordpress for a moment?

    I have no time to invest in customizing my weblog for a moment (although I have plans to spend a weekend doing precisely that in the near future).

    But I just want to bitch for a moment about the default upgrade for 1.5 (not the most recent).

    First, a new default style sheet, which isn’t awful. And some better navigation guides. But the new template just did 2 things which are absolutely stupid:

    1. Removed the blogroll from the archive page. WTF? It probably never occurred that the most frequent reader of weblogs is the weblogger himself trying to find an old link. I am frequently on archive or category pages and want to surf from there.
    2. On the archive page, the default install only includes an excerpt of the post and deactivates all hyperlinks. That, I have to say, is the most idiotic, ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of. The solution exists and is rather easy to implement, but a lot of busy people never get around to it.

    I’m guessing that as many as 50% of wordpress webloggers just use the default settings and templates. It’s ok to make the defaults safe and conservative. But there’s a difference between making the defaults conservative and abbreviating/crippling posts.

  • Trackback spam

    After successfully installing hashcash, a comment spam eliminator for WordPress, Matt reminds us about trackback spam. As Rosana Dana Dana says, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

    Interestingly, the mass edit feature for comments has been broken all the time for this release. That has turned out to be a major problem for me (when having to moderate hundreds of comments). Fortunately, a fix exists.

  • Go West, Matt Mullenweg

    Here’s a nice lengthy profile of Matt Mullenweg in the Houston Press by CATHERINE MATUSOW. Matt (aka Photomatt) is a bright young developer who has been leading the wordpress blogging software project. Note: I switched to WordPress in June 2003 and remember being shocked that a local boy was running the project. Now, it seems that many important people are using the software (if only because it is open source and GPL).

    Matt has done a great thing. Besides being a great developer, he spent his time reusing stuff from an older cms system and then organized a great discussion site to support the project. At the time, movable type was dominant (for reasons I could never fathom), while wordpress contained a more open license. WordPress used to be buggy, and it still has some kinks in the version I am using for this weblog (only because I haven’t had the time to upgrade to a more recent version). But it’s easy to install on a web host, and you can easily put each weblog into a separate database.

    Also, the php/mysql combination turned out to be easier to manage that the perl db Movable Type started with. However, even movable type moved over to mysql eventually (no surprise, because it came installed by default at most webhosting companies).

    For a while I entertained the notion of trying to put my literary project entirely under wordpress. It certainly had that capability, and Matt was ensuring that there was support for pingback, XFN and RSS (often, well before Movable Type). Nowadays, the new hot php-CMS seems to be mambo server, which looks pretty snazzy, better even than postnuke. I should mention that it’s easy to bump into these developers at South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin (which occurs every March).

    Finally, Matt told a hilarious story at Fray Day Houston 2003 event I organized. I am still looking for that red button, Matt.

  • Cheap Weblogging

    This was inevitable, but webhosting services are bundling wordpress in with their hosting deals. See wordpress-hosting.com and cyberwurx (and probably dozens of others). I bet Matt is laughing.

  • WordPress Plugins

    Wow, look at all those WordPress plugins! I need to upgrade sometime!

  • Inmates are Running the Asylum

    More on prison abuses by OSHA GRAY DAVIDSON:

    According to an internal Army investigation contained in the secret files, the civilian-run Coalition Provisional Authority had hired at least five members of Fedayeen Saddam — a paramilitary organization of fanatical Saddam loyalists — to work as guards at the prison. An Iraqi guard, probably one of “Saddam’s martyrs,” had smuggled the gun and two knives into the prison in an inner tube, placed them in a sheet and tossed them up to the second-story window of Cell 35. In May, when Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen.Wayne Allard asked him a direct question: “Did we have terrorists in the population at this prison?” Taguba answered, “Sir, none that we were made aware of.” His own files make clear, however, that a more accurate response would have been: “Yes, sir — but only among the guards.”

  • Conference: China’s Digital Future

    Dan Gillmore will be speaking at a conference on China’s Digital Future . They even will have archives of their conference.

  • Google and Blog Feeds

    Photomatt speculates about why Googlebot is searching for atom.xml files

  • Switching to Zope

    A kuro5hin post about a developer who switched from php to python. A reminder: I’ll be hosting my main literary ezine site on plone, although my weblogs will stay in the wordpress/php territory.

    Sidenote about wordpress: aside from having good open source licenses, the most recent version has the following additions/improvements:

  • You can choose multiple categories (a big improvement)
  • Better handling of drafts and more complex Workflows Draft/Private/Publish
  • Better handling of Links and Link Categories
  • the Ability to Require approval on posting comments (helpful for comment spammers)

    • and more I can’t think of right now.

  • Traceback v. pingback

    WordPress developer Matt M. talks about traceback vs. pingback vs. referrals. The critique and the responses are good, but I still don’t know what good it is unless the weblogging application does the pingback automatically.