Reilly2040's Blog

That’s another blog update done. Hopefully everything survived as it was a more major upgrade. I’ve already noticed some admin plugins that will need updated or replaced, but nothing major.

Right. Last one for tonight I think.

I’ve managed to fix the Facebook badge. I ‘m assuming it was WordPress blocking aspects of the javascript. By using one of Facebook’s image badges instead of the javascript one everything seems ok now.

And I’ve also added a new plugin which allows image enlargement on the fly. Instead of my usual method of using an HTML tag to point to the fullsize image, I can use an AJAX plugin instead. That way clicking on the image will re-render the blog post on the fly to show a larger version. Its quite neat, although won’t work properly on images larger than my basic page size. Give it a shot on the Green Lantern images a few posts down.

Fortunately I kept the old version of the blog kicking about, so I quickly moved it back to being the active version, restored the title (sans backslash), and then returned the blog to the latest version.

Sorted.   I imagine when WordPress 2.2.4 comes out, it’ll fix it.

Heh, apparently I spoke too soon regarding the upgrade.  There seems to be a bug in the newest version of WordPress, and saving the Options page when you’ve got an apostrophy in your title adds an escape character to the title.   A minor issue, but an annoying one.

Well, got home tonight and spent sometime getting everything in the blog current again. All seems well, so fingers crossed. Although there’s always that moment of “God, I hope I don’t break everything”. So far, it seems fine though. Although for some reason my permalink structure always breaks, and has to be changed, then reset before it all kicks in again. Weird.

Now to see if I can fix that Facebook redirect problem…

Hmmm. I noticed a week or so ago that my Facebook badge (as seen in the sidebar) seems to be broken. The javascript in the textbox widget is definitely correct, but for some reason, instead of linking to my Facebook profile, the links are being changed to point at whatever your current URL in my blog is. I’ve been Googling to try and find a fix, but so far no luck.

For my benefit, I’ve just installed the My Dashboard plugin. Which means the admin dashboard is now themed like iGoogle, and has various widgets that can be freely added, removed or re-ordered through the power of AJAX. Granted I don’t use that page an awful lot, but being able to pull in various other WordPress RSS news feeds is quite handy for keeping up-to-date with anything cool I might want to pick up (or just the latest security fixes).

Check it out here.

As I’ve mentioned before, I could easily use Blogger or somesuch for hosting my blog, but instead I decided it’d be fun to host and maintain my own blog. However, part and parcel of that, is handling the upgrade process myself to ensure I get all the latest security fixes.

Its always a bit nerve-wracking. I of course back everything up first, but there’s still the chance of ending up with a knackered blog and having to spend ages trying to fix it.

I’m starting to get the hang of it now though. As I’m on the latest point releases, I don’t need to worry about database upgrades thank goodness. The only problem I had this time, was that my permalink structure was broken, rendering site-navigation stuffed. A minor issue I’m sure you’ll agree

Fortunately, I’ve got it fixed now. I switched from using the default link structure (post/page ids passed via querystring) a month or so ago, and am now using a more human-reading link structure (hover over a post title to see what I’m talking about). As a side effect to this, it seems that when I’m upgrading, it helps to switch back to the default, and then re-enable the re-writing again. Not sure why it works, it just does.

I’ve been thinking about the comments on this blog (and indeed blogs in general), and what I’ve noticed is that, when you leave a comment, you never get updated via email when the comment is replied to. Instead you have to check back at the blog to see if there are any new comments.

I’m thinking of tracking down a plugin which would add this email functionality, so my question is this:

Would getting emailed when new comments are added to a post that you’ve commented on, be a good idea, or just a pain-in-the-neck?

Well, I see Euggs is talking about Blogger now having polls. Well, not to be outdone, I’ve added them to my blog as well. Check out the sidebar

Ok, its a pointless one this, but its something that’s been bugging me for a bit.

As some of the images I use in the blog posts can be a bit wide, I tend to switch of text wrapping around them (an option in the Mandiva theme), as it can cause layout problems. Instead I usually just stack images and text ontop of one-another.

However, this doesn’t look as good when its a small image in the post. I’ve always wanted to be able to selectively use the text-wrapping based on the individual post.

Well, I actually got off my backside and figured it out today. So in the previous post, I altered the img tag to include style=”float:left” and that got it the way I wanted it.

So, it turned out to be nice and easy afterall. That’s what I was hoping for