Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Out of Order

Friday, 23 May 2008

Last night or this morning, I installed the the pending up-dates for various WordPress plugins that I was using. I've discovered that various things have consequently been broken. Please bear with me as I try to put things back into working order.

(And please comment to this entry if you note something specifically amiss.)

Nesting Syndrome

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

Best practice in HTML is to put quotations into Q[uotation] elements, so that the mark-up looks like this:

Sam growled <q>I asked him, and he said <q>I swear on me mother's grave!</q></q>

rather than like this:

Sam growled “I asked him, and he said ‘I swear on me mother's grave!’”

Note that it is possible to have one Q[uotation] element inside of another — a good style-sheet will handle that.

Unfortunately, the WordPress editor seems to have been written by a programmer who believes that Q[uotation] elements must not nest, and the editor tries to fix things when it encounters nesting, by closing the outer element when it comes to the inner element. In the case of my previous entry, it then discarded the original closing </q> tag of the outer element, but (who knows why?) added an extra </div> at the end of the entry. The appearance of the whole page went to H_ll.

I fixed things by by-passing the WordPress software, and editing the 'blog's underlying dB with phpMyAdmin.

I've filed a bug report.

(I still need to arrive at a good specification of the list-bug that plagues my entry on installing Open Office.)

Really Bugged

Friday, 11 April 2008

I was looking at the version of Installing OpenOffice 2.4 under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x that is delivered for the LiveJournal feed of this 'blog, and saw that it has a bunch of unmatched closing p[aragraph] tags that simply aren't in the entry as I marked it up. Indeed, I don't think that I used p[aragraph] elements at all in that entry.

Looking at the entry that is delivered to visitors to my site, I see <p> and </p> appearing various places that I haven't put them. But they don't appear when I attempt to use the WordPress editor to remove them, nor are they in the entry as it appears in the raw dB. The problem, then, is in the preprocessing by WordPress.

I s'pose that I need to explore the problem and then file a bug report with WordPress.org.

A Window of Hope

Monday, 31 March 2008

It is now possible for you to correct or otherwise to edit your comments to this 'blog, so long as three conditions are met:

  • Not more than 30 minutes have passed since the comment were made.
  • You must have been logged-in when commenting and be logged-in (with the same ID).
  • You must be using a machine with the same IP number as that with which the comment were made (which would typically hold if your connection to the 'Net weren't broken in the interim).
(Basically, I got YATCP to play nicely with Edit Comments XT, by editing yatcp_comments.php and yatcp_single-comment.php.)

When one saves an edit with Edit Comments XT, one none-the-less is returned by it to the comment-editing form, with no real indication that the change has been made; so confirmation is not ideal. One can go back to the main page and from there again click on the Comments link to double-check that the edit was effected.

Recently Starved Syndication

Tuesday, 4 March 2008

It seems that the LJ RSS feed for this 'blog is or was broken beginning with my entry Another 'Bot-'Blog (posted 26 Feb 2008 at 17:24:32). I'm not sure what the problem is-or-was, but I do note that it uses brackets as text and WordPress makes peculiar use of brackets. I have attempted a work-around by replacing the raw brackets with HTML ampersand escape sequences, though I am doubtful that this response will fix the problem, because WordPress has otherwise demonstrated an obnoxious propensity to replace escape sequences with raw characters.

Addendum (05 March): Using escape sequences for the brackets seems to have fixed the problem.

The Domain and 'Blog per Sese

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

The string oeconomist (or œconomist) is an old-fashioned spelling of economist. I am an economist; whether I would be seen as an old-fashioned economist would be a function of what one saw of my premises, methods, and conclusions.

I am not the first person to have registered this site-name. The last previous registration expired on 4 September 2007. A check of the Wayback Machine turned-up no archived pages, so perhaps the name were never actually assigned to a site.

Various people have previously used oeconomist as a regular identifier. I am not amongst them. (In particular, I am not (and never have been) the oeconomist at LiveJournal and at Infotrope.)

The site name is registered with GoDaddy. They're not wonderful as a registration service, but they're acceptable.

Hosting is provided by FourBucks.net, so named because, if one orders their package of lowest price and one pays for their services a year at a time, the charge comes to about US$4 per month. I first went to FourBucks.net to get hosting for a different site a few years ago, at the recommendation of Ronnie Ashlock, who used and uses it to host Surlybird.com.

A while back, FourBucks.net was purchased by IDAGroup LLC. When last I knew, they'd not seemlessly integrated support. And AT&T has a proclivity to treat e.mail from FourBucks.net as spam.

The 'blogging software that I'm presently using is WordPress. At the suggestion of Gaal, I added support for OpenID. I did this by installing a plug-in, WP-OpenID. Another plug-in, Post Levels, allows me to assign levels to posts and to registered users, such that when users are logged into the site they are able to read any posts at or below the level of their registration. And YATCP modifies the interface to support a tree structure of comments (so that comments meant in reply to other comments are nested under then and so forth). I also added WP-Polls, mostly just for minor fun. And I will look into Edit Comments XT, to give commenters an opportunity to fix typos and to withdraw things written in haste.