Posts Tagged Wordpress

8 results.
Jan05

WordPress 2.7 breaks the Redirection plug-in?

by tdaxp on January 5, 2009 at 6:46 am
Posted In: Software

Since I mvoed this blog to WordPress, I have used the Redirection plugin by John Godley of Urban Gieraffe to patch over some inconsistencies between WordPress and my old host, blogspirit. For instance, blogspirit and wordpress have different locations for the RSS feed, the atom feed, some special pages, etc.

Redirection has always had a very convenient settings page, that allows me to make blog readers and other software think pages are still in their old locations. So far things had gone smoothly.

Unfortunately, the latest version of WordPress appears to break Redirection! The settings page is gone, and the forwarding now works inconsistently. So, for example, this link to a blog series I wrote years ago still works, but this link to my atom feed no longer works.

WordPress 2.7 has broken other sites as well — “probably not a good idea” as Lynne Pope says. The creator of Redirect knows at least some of the problems WordPress 2.7 has caused him, but not all. Some intrepid bloggers are trying to figure out the problem on their own,

WordPress is annoying enough people wiht 2.7 that some are advocating to stop using criticla plug-ins, which would remove one of the big benefits of WordPress for many people.

Eventually, I fixed the problem (I think) by going into the redirection database through phpMyAdmin, and changing both the action_type and match_type fields to ‘url.’ I am not sure if this is a valid approach, but it seems to work for now!

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1 Comment
May03

Updated Theme

by tdaxp on May 3, 2008 at 6:58 am
Posted In: Software, Vanity

I’ve updated the tdaxp theme to Ad Clerum 3, which I like a lot. Thanks RFDN!

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Mar05

WordPress Redirection Plugin Disappears WordPress VisualEditor?

by tdaxp on March 5, 2008 at 7:39 am and modified on March 5, 2008. at 7:40 am
Posted In: Software

Suffer from VWVES? ‘Vanishing WordPress Visual Editor Syndrome’ | ImJustCreative

Since scouring the WordPress forum’s about this I almost gave up with finding a cure. Simply, for ‘apparently’ no reason (and I use apparently loosely here) the Visual Editor would vanish. Now it seems there are several manifestation’s of this.
One is the actual Visual Editor would actually vanish completely, leaving you with just the Code tab.The other one, which I suffer from, would be that the actual Visual Editor menu options would disapear. So you still had the Visual Editor and Code tabs visible, but any way of actually selecting any of the (I will now use the abbreviation VE) VE options would be impossible, as there were not any to choose from.

Leaving for a very frustrating time.

For me, the solution was quickly deactivating and reactivating the WordPress Redirection plugin. The solution took about five minutes of research and experimentation, but very strange.

Oh well. Guess it’s karma for all the disappeared comments over at the old blogspirit site…

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1 Comment
Mar01

WordPress’s import functionality is horrid

by tdaxp on March 1, 2008 at 11:55 am
Posted In: Software

While I’m pretty sure that WordPress is a nifty place to start-off a blog, and considering all of our awful experiences with blogspirit certainly better than that, there is so much wrong with the way it imports content from existing blogs.  If the guys who make wordpress are as clever as they seem, it is unethical to release software with “features” that fail so often and so silently.  It would be better if the manual just said “Content can be imported directly into the database by advanced users using SQL,” rather than pretend there is a functioning point-and-click interface.  Current status:

  •  I wasted 6 hours today attempting to make the categories/tag thing work right. The transition is smoother for users who enter the blog (less supposedly valid URLs give  404s), but
  • I had to disable both the category list and tag cloud because they both generate links that 404.
  • Further, I discovered that many of the comments were imported correctly — to the wrong post!

At present, the transition to WordPress is exactly the nightmare I expected it to be.  I do not have time to waste babysitting PHP that, because it runs without generating errors, some halfwit associated with the WordPress project figures is error-free.

Now, the reason for my jump to WordPress remains; Blogspirit has been eating obviously valid comments for a year, and denying that fact.  WordPress is “free software,” so it’s reasonable to expect Microsoft-level lack-of-concern-for-users from them.  Additionally, because WordPress (unlike blogspirit) exposes its implmentation to administrators, I at least have a chance of figuring out what’s going on.  Blogspirit, meanwhile, charged for subpar service, denied problems existed, and prevented access to any method that would allow bloggers to fix those programs.

At least from the perspective of someone moving over to WordPress, it is not a good service.  WordPress has given me one of the worst user experiences imaginable.

Then again, so did blogspirit.

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4 Comments
Mar01

Making myself at home

by tdaxp on March 1, 2008 at 5:35 am
Posted In: Software

Bobbyzero’s been a big help in this process, and I can’t thank him enough.

One of the differences in blogspirit and wordpress is how categories and tags are stored.  Blogspirit keeps categories and tags seperate, displaying categories as /category and tags as /tag/tag.  WordPress often confuses the two, and has problems if you try to display one at root.  So visitors who were trying to get to www.tdaxp.com/israel, which was a valid address on the blogspirit blog, were getting a 404 page.

Additionally, many categories and posts didn’t fully transfer.

Therefore, I’m back to programming, going through the old blog to manually add the categories, tags, and linking schemata to the database that tdaxp runs on.   I want the transition to be as seemless as possible.  I’ve learned my lesson about trusting wordpress’s import functionality (don’t).  Still, I think I can get rid of the errors that wordpress needless made soon, minimizing hassles for readers.

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Feb28

Getting there…

by tdaxp on February 28, 2008 at 1:20 pm and modified on February 28, 2008. at 4:27 pm
Posted In: Software

With the Case of the Disappearing Comments shunted off until the weekend, I’m now focusing on other incompatibilities with wordpress. These fall into two broad categories:

1. While WordPress recognizes both categories and tags, the default wordpress plugins view these terms as synonymous, so that it will apply either the tag or the category based permalink system to both, leading to about 50% dead links.

2. I’d like a way to make www.tdaxp.com/atom.xml work, so that people who set up their blog reader on the blogspirit site won’t have to adjust anything to get new posts.

Any thoughts?

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9 Comments
Feb28

WordPress Annoyances

by tdaxp on February 28, 2008 at 8:13 am
Posted In: Software

So far the transition from Blogspirit to WordPress has been a bit better than I feared, though I think the difficulties I’ve experienced validated my hesitation.  WordPress is definitely software “by geeks for geeks,” meaning it comes broken in numerous ways and requires manual programming on the user’s part in order to get it working write.  So far, this blog is still “broken” because of errors on WordPress’s part.

0. Importing has to be done through the web front-end.  There is no FTP or CLI method to batch-upload to the blog.  This is incredibly wasteful, as tdaxp is a large site that requires a long time to enter a file, click, submit, wait, submit, repeat, over and over.
1. It comes broken, and WordPress knows it.  WordPress imports tags as numbers.  The only solution is to delete what you’ve imported, manually change the code in a file, and import again
2. It comes broken, and WordPress doesn’t know it.  WordPress is importing only about half of the comments that exist in wordpress data file.  It doesn’t generate an error or leave any trace of the eaten comments — just, they’re gone.

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2 Comments
Feb27

This blog is moving to wordpress

by tdaxp on February 27, 2008 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Software

My blogspirit days are almost over. Thank Heavens.

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3 Comments