The Flow of Consciousness

I hate with a passion WordPress updates. It’s a great blogging platform, yes, but like many pieces of software, manual updates are needlessly long and painful. Backups are essential even with automated updates, but human error is much more devastating sometimes.

So, I decided to switch how I update WordPress. Instead of logging into my shell, wgeting http://www.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz, and doing the update manually, I’m now using Subversion to track updates.

The WordPress Code has a fantastic write-up on updating WordPress with Subversion. I migrated using the instructions and had a full upgrade in less than three minutes. When WordPress 2.3 comes out later this month, a simple svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3/ migrates my entire blog with very little effort. I’ll still need to check for upgrades now and then with svn up.

So, if you’ve got shell access and can use svn, give it a try!

I’m having some issues with WWL and mightyadsense javascript showing up in feeds. I’m gonna troubleshoot it this weekend when I’ve got a spare hour or two.

Worse case scenario: I disable both and find a replacement for mightyadsense. I’d re-enable WWL when the problem is fixed in the new version.

Update: I’ve fixed at least the WWL problem. The mightyadsense problem occurs far more infrequently, so it might take a while.

Since I fancy myself a linguist of sorts, I’ve added the Worldwide Lexicon plugin to my WordPress installation. It adds a small, dynamically-loaded bar to the beginning of every post allowing people to translate it or see a version of the post in their own language. I’d like to see this plugin become more customizable, as I don’t particularly care for the placement or look of it. Substance >> style.

WWL needs to add Esperanto, too.

Esperante:

Ĉar mi imagas min esti lingvisto iom, mi aldonis la «Tutmonda Leksikono» kromsoftvaron al mia Vortpresilo instalaĵo. Ĝi aldonas malgrandan, rultempan trajton antaŭ afiŝoj permesi uzantoj traduki ĝin aŭ legi version de afiŝo en ilia lingvo. Mi ŝatus vidi uzantojn povas agordi ĉi tiun kromsoftvaron ĉar mi ne zorgas por loko aŭ apero de ĝin. Substanco >> stilo.

TL (WWL) bezonas aldoni Esperantan lingvon, ankaŭ.

I’ve finally jumped on the Feedburner bandwagon now that Google has acquired it. The once-paid features are now free—yay!

In addition to the FeedCount (the stats icon on the left column), I use BrowserFriendly (displays HTML page instead of just the feed so users can quickly add the feed to other readers), SmartFeed (ensures maximum compatibility with readers by reformatting the feed to strict standards), FeedFlare (adds links to the bottom of each RSS item), Amazon ID Burner (adds my Amazon Associate ID to every Amazon URL), PingShot (notifies blog services of new posts), and FeedMedic (another feed that posts items when your own feed isn’t working).

Just about everyone uses these features.

However, there is one that is of particular use to me: MyBrand. MyBrand allows FeedBurner users who have access to their own DNS records to insert a CNAME record which directs browsers to feeds.feedburner.com from your own domain. For instance, by adding feeds.cad.cx. IN CNAME feeds.feedburner.com to my DNS configuration, subscribers go to my domain to get the feed rather than FeedBurner. In the event that FeedBurner disappears (unlikely) I can quickly setup a feed that works at my feed URL.

It’s a very, very neat service and I’m glad it’s now free

Add The Flow of Consciousness feed to your reader now!

If you haven’t heard already, WordPress’s production server got hacked a couple days ago, and they discovered it today. The cracker put a backdoor into some of the administrative files.

Anyway, it’s been fixed in the newest release, so you should go get it now.

Oh, and thanks to John Chow for pointing it out.

I signed up for this affiliate service called Boo-Box. When clicked, a link shows a lightbox with a selection of products inside. When the user clicks on a product, he or she is taken to the Amazon.com product page.

It basically works like Amazon’s referral program, but you only have to add ‘boo-box-link’ to the class attribute of a <span> or <img> tag with some text describing the contents of the span or image.

We’ll see how it goes. It kinda clashes with my background, so I’m going to suggest that Boo-box let the user decide its look in some way.

Aaron Brazell of Technosailor posted a brief overview of the new features in and other things to merit upgrading to WordPress 2.1, which is to be released tomorrow.

• Auto-save of drafts (something I need badly—I’ve lost several posts to accidental clicks)
• Better image upload handling
• Deprecation of $tableposts, $tablecomments, etc.
• Native WordPress migration functionality
• MySQL version requirement now 4.0+
• New visual editor interface
• Merging of links and categories
• Privacy features
• Nonces