Another Opinion Among Many

I’m just writing to advise anyone on a WordPress blog to check out your Plugins page in your Dashboard and review the ones that you have to see if they’re up to date.  If you’re running version 2.3 of WordPress, you will be told which ones are update, as long as the plugin author  uses the WordPress Plugins site to host and track their work.

As I did today (which I do about once every two or three weeks), why don’t you take a moment to ensure that your plugins are up to date.  This will ensure that you are running the least buggy and most secure version of your favorite plugins.

I will now!

Has anyone who has upgraded to WP 2.3 noticed what the default blogroll is? It seems that the whiners on the forums have won and got the authors’ addresses removed from the default. Now, there are helpful links to wordpress sites, like the codex. This is a good move, I think, but I wish that it wasn’t forced to become in the manner that it did. I honestly don’t think that the originals had ever thought of all the SE “juice” they’d get from being linked to all the blogs out there running WP being run by people who are too lazy to uncheck the links in the blogroll (I left a few in because I read those blogs - don’t worry, folks, you’ll be back in, likely this weekend, when I add that table back to my database).

On the other hand, would you still read my stuff if I wrote daily a one line post which linked to somebody else?

I see that the whole world but me has wrote (not muc) about Wordpress 2.3.  I haven’t.  I have been running it since the beginning, as soon as the 2.2 code was declared stable (really, before that).  Perhaps I’ll write about it.  You’ll notice that my site is reasonably responsive and that’s because of the new version of WP.

I’ve also installed Debian 4.0 on my machine.  I’ll likely review it soon.

I also have a few movies that I should review.  Maybe I’ll get to that after all.

Who knows.

Four days ago, the Wordpress team announced the release of the first beta of the new 2.3 release. I’ve made no secret of the fact that this blog runs on a nightly development build, which I update about once a week (its noted in the footer of every page - linked too!).

The new tagging structure is in place and, seemingly, it performs reasonably well so far. I’ve been keeping up with the releases of Ultimate Tag Warrior and haven’t felt like trying to use the built in tags yet (although I have been using both to record the tags). With all of the topsy-turvy behavior with this site in this month, I’m surprised that anything actually works (and, if you’d seen what I’d done to cobble it back together, you’d be amazed too - enough to buy me a Keiths,especially since 8-pacs of cans are on sale).

The only speed bump that I’ve come across is a few compatibility issues with plugins, which are minor. With the new fallback to disable misbehaving plugins, I’ve not been worrying about that type of problem. The only thing that I’ve had an issue with is when activating or deactivating one, I don’t return to the plugin page. All I get is a blank page. I can get back by “erasing” the trailing end of the URL in the address bar to get back to just the plugin page. Whatever I’ve asked for has been done, so the function is there. Its just the “redirect” afterwards, which is a minor semantic fix. I may contact the various plugin authors for the ones that I use so that they can update their work this weekend.

As you can see, my site’s still here, despite a major hard drive failure. So, why not get more than your toes wet. The water’s nice!

Maybe comments are broken, as I don’t see any….LOL

Its been quite topsy-turvy here at cooreythompson.com. I believe that everything should settle back to normal shortly. I’ve restored the site’s structure and permissions as they were about a month ago and have tried to upload the most recent database (including a few posts from the other host).

If you’re warped enough to want to read my writing on a regular basis and you’re still here, then thanks. I appreciate that you stuck around. A week of down time is a long time on the internet and I know that I wasn’t too fond of it, either.

I’ve still got a few things to fix up, but I think that I can get things back to normal. The photo gallery is not working at the moment and I may just scrap it and try again, maybe with a newer script. Who knows.

By the way, I’m still mucking with the latest Wordpress here, which at the moment, is still considered alpha software, although its been quite solid and the new features (mostly nice little “behind the scenes” and “under the hood” stuff) are quite nice.

I don’t know how many people who have an idea that they want to write about but just don’t want to put it in print until they’ve revised it a bit.  I do.  Right now, I have 8 drafts of articles waiting to be written (some are just titles and one line saying, “write about this with this emphasis, etc” or whatever.  They way drafts have been listed before is to have the title of the post/page sitting above the post to be written in the write panel of the admin.  There could be a whole list there cluttering things up if you had a lot of unfinished business.  I don’t know where this will go with further revisions or whether it will even stay in until 2.3 is out, but, for now, I’ve noticed in the current alpha of 2.3, that the list now stops after 3 on my write page with a reference link to 5 more.  If I click that link, it brings me to a “Drafts” page, which is a feature that’s been asked for a few times on the wp-testers and other lists and forums.  So now, if you have drafts to be published later, they get a seperate page like pages and posts do.  This makes it a bit easier to find these drafts in a nice list, layed out the same way as the rest of the editable data on one’s site.

I think that a lot of people will like this feature when its polished well enough to go into the final release.  Heads up!

Since I uploaded all the files before writing this post, you should now be looking at a new theme on this site. I really liked the concept of the last theme, but I really missed some of the things that can go in the sidebar. Three columns were too much, though. So, as a compromise, I’ve selected an excellent victim to hack apart - Evanescence by Srini G. I also snagged the nav menu code from the Fluid Blue theme by the same author. Obviously, I’ve made changes to the color scheme and replaced the header images. There’s a tweak or two elsewhere, as well (like the comment #s) and there will be a few more as I get things organized. I sure hope that you like it. I do. And, if anyone out there has IE7 to test it on, could you let me know if anything breaks. So far, I’ve tested this theme in Firefox 2.0.0.4 for Linux and Windows, Opera 9.20 and 9.22 for Windows, and 9.22 for Linux, Konqueror, IE 6 on Windows, IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0 on Linux under Wine (few images work on those, as they’re all .pngs but who’d browse the net on IE under Linux???). A big plus to this theme is that it works with widgets, so if there’s a block that I like sometime down the road, I can install it and shove it in the sidebar. We’ll see how it goes (yes, it IS 3:19am and I should get to sleep…).

Turns out that Alexa finally got around to updating the thumbnail image on its profile page for my site to the previous theme. That was a long 48 hours!