The Flow of Consciousness

This is hot off the presses, folks.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced today that their search engines will honor a new value for the rel attribute of link elements commonly found in the head element of a web page. This new specification aims to reduce content duplication via redundant URLs.

For instance, WordPress posts can be accessed always through the URL example.com/index.php?p=3 and often through a URL such as example.com/2009/02/12/search-engines-to-honor-canonical-urls or the like. Search engines see these separate URLs and usually think that they are duplicate content at different URLs, thus reducing the site’s ranking because of the duplicate content.

The new functionality acts not unlike a soft 301 redirect.

Check out the very informational post at Search Engine Land on the new canonical URLs. A big thanks to @badmacktuck for bringing it to my attention!

Joost de Valk wrote a WordPress plugin called wp-canonical which adds such a link element to any WordPress blog. I’m using it now. He’s also written a Drupal plugin and an informative blog about about canonical URLs, too. That was quick!

I recently noticed that Wordpress added support for Gears, as have a few other sites, including ZohoOffice and MySpace.

Gears is essentially offline storage for rich Internet application data. GoogleOS has a list of Gears-enabled sites/applications. Read more on Gears at Wikipedia.

Much to my dismay, the only officially-available Firefox extension supports only 32-bit operating systems. I’m a 64-bit Linux user. Specifically, I use Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with my ASUS M3A32-MVP motherboard and 8 GB of DDR2 RAM (4GB of Geil and 4 GB of OCZ).

Fortunately, Gears is an open source project and one intrepid developer made a Gears Firefox extension package which supports 64-bit Linux.

I downloaded and installed the package by dragging and dropping it onto the Firefox Addons dialog, then restarting Firefox when prompted. I archived the Gears extension package on my own site in the event the package is suddenly no longer available. Be sure to check for new versions though, since this package may be out of date if you’re reading this post more than a few days after publication (though unlikely).

Huzzah for open source.

WordPress 2.5.1 has been released. It fixes a serious security vulnerability and more than 70 fixes and enhancements.

There’s also something highlighted in the release which I did not know had been added in 2.5. From the release:

Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. It’s unique and random on every page load. Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.

For my readers who, like me, are managing WordPress using subversion, the upgrade is a simple svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1 away. If you’re not managing WordPress using subversion—and you really should if you have come kind of shell access to your server—then go to WordPress.org to get the newest release.

WordPress 2.5 was released yesterday. The upgrade path is very, very easy for existing 2.3.3 installations–it’s a simple copy-and-upgrade.php procedure.

For those who use Subversion to manage their installations of WordPress, such as myself, the upgrade was even easier:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5

I then ran /wp-admin/upgrade.php and was in business. I had a few plugins to update, but my theme is 2.5-ready and so are the remainder of my plugins.

The new administration panel, of which there are screenshots all over the web, is quite different but much easier to use. It took me a moment to reorient myself and find that the Options tab is now the Settings tab and that the Categories selector for writing posts is now below the entry box instead of beside it.

For the first time since I started this blog, I’ve devised a new theme: Fluid Colinese. It’s based on Fluid Blue by Srini G. and uses a primarily brown and dark orange theme. Sean Potter said it reminded him of Ubuntu’s color leanings. I agree. Honestly, the blog looks as intended with the fonts FreeSerif and FreeSans installed. Both are available on most Linux distributions, and font files for Windows are linked (however, the fonts looks terrible on Windows, at least to me). It looks acceptable for Windows Vista users or XP users who have acquired the font Segoe UI. Otherwise, the body text looks alright and the headlines default to Arial, which is alright.

Also, this theme is made for WordPress 2.3, so it can use all of the widgets and whatnot. I know WordPress 2.5 is coming out soon, but the only real changes to the theme side of things is the inclusion of avatars. I haven’t decided if I want to enable them, but I’ll decide when I see how annoying they are when WordPress 2.5 is actually released.

I’m working on enabling OpenID for commenting. I’d wanted to use it for my previous theme, but I couldn’t ever get it to play nicely. My old theme was made for WordPress 1.5, I think. Anyway, I’m running into a few issues because of conflicting versions of OpenID and Yadis in the plugin source and in /usr/share/php, which is used by my own OpenID server.

You’ll also notice the addition of some widgets. I’ve added the tag cloud and some RSS feeds from sites for which I write.

I’m going to take a little time here and there and reorganize the categories, too. I’ve got some categories which have one or two posts, such as the battlefield and g15 categories. I’m also going to get rid of the Uncategorized tag left over from Ultimate Tag Warrior’s shenanigans.

If you read my blog regularly and know me, either in person or through some organization, drop me a line and we can do a link exchange of sorts. Please, though, I prefer people whom I’ve met in person and who update their blog regularly. I tend to remove links to blogs which haven’t updated in months. Really, I should just import the OPML file from Liferea, my preferred Linux feed reader.

The URL for my blog won’t change, but the RSS URL will. I’m planning to rename the blog, as it’s no longer the Flow of Consciousness it was in the past. I’m almost out of that phase of my life, so it’s time to move on to more professional and responsible blogging.

Tell me your thoughts, folks. ¿Te gusta? ¿No te gusta?

The latest patch version of WordPress is available. Be sure to download and upgrade!

If you’re awesome like I am, then you’re using Subversion to manage releases. There aren’t any major changes to the structure, but you should always backup your wordpress directory just-in-case. Then, issue svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2 and you’re running the latest version.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 last night.

Know what I did to do so?

1. Backed up the database using wp-db-backup.
2. Backed up the WordPress directory at a terminal with a simple tar czvf blogbackup.tar.gz.
3. Upgraded a few plugins and removed others according to the official plugin compatibility list.
4. Executed svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3/

Done.

Took me about ten minutes, and most of that 10 minutes was spent reading the compatibility list.

By the way, I love tags.

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.