Internet Explorer 7 Update: Dean Edwards has released another update for his “Internet Explorer 7”

After a spirited and extremely helpful discussion on the #wordpress channel on irc.freenode.net, I decided to write something up about Atom and RSS 2.0 and why the world is coming to an end because IE does not support application/xhtml+xml. I am no-one but a simple blogger and coder trying to understand the nuances of stupid tech wars between entrenched gurus and this is a feeble attempt at helping others like me understand the concepts better. Thanks to Michel and Anne for their help in getting me started. I will directly quote them both. To begin with, in 10 words or less, why is Atom better than RSS? Well, because it is the same as semantic HTML (Atom) versus tag-soup (RSS). Now “tag soup” is a term that is used often and without remorse. Basicallty tag soup is markup that will not validate or synctactically incorrect usage of markup. So how […]

WhatTheFont : No more guessing whether that ad you saw uses Desdemona or Funky Fresh.

I’ve created a trial script to import b2evo blogs to WP. The script seemed to work fine on my test installation on b2evo but since I don’t have a live installation of b2evo, the test was just that – a test 🙂 While the script does seem to allow importing a specific blog, don’t be fooled by appearances – that is just in case the feature is needed in the future :p Currently, all entries and all categories are imported to WP since I was too lazy to figure out the logic for importing just one blog since b2evo has a category based individual blog system. Anybody interested in the script can get it from here.

I suppose this may be a known fact, but I didn’t figure it out until I looked at the code and realized something. For the Livejournal autoupdate script, you are given two different functions. One makes all posts public, and the other posts them all friends-only. Well if you just rename the function and change the name into the calls in post.php, you can have three different functions with checkboxes deciding whether you want to post it public, private (when you click save instead of publish and set it as private in wordpress), or friends only. Just copy the two functions given and rename one of them to something similar in my-hacks.php. And for private entries, change the friends script security tag to “private” Sorry if everyone knew this, but I just found it out 🙂 And for a shameless plug, feel free to checkout my wordpress sites, both syndicated […]

This is a little known feature that I believe should be documented well. If you are using IIS or do not have the mod_rewrite ability, it is possible to still have serach engine friendly URIs in WordPress. If someone was dissuaded from using WP because of this, be dissed no more! Here are the instruction from the admin page of WordPress 1.2 Mingus: In general for this you must use mod_rewrite, however if you put a filename at the beginning WordPress will attempt to use that to pass the arguments, for example: /index.php/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ If you use this option you can ignore the mod_rewrite rules.

Here’s a proof of concept that I put together to illustrate my idea of using text+logic+PHP to make a simple but effective non-graphical captcha-style verification mechanism. Visit the example page, and leave your feedback. Based on feedback so far, I’m going to persue this idea and build a plugin based on it.

In WP 1.2 there’s a bug in the built-in blacklist function. If you haven’t tried this out as a way of protecting your blog from comment spam, you should look into this. The default list is empty, and you can enter words, author names, email addresses, IP address, and URI/URLs. If any word in the list matches anything in the comment text, comment author’s name, comment author’s email address, comment author’s URL, or comment author’s IP address, the comment will be held for moderation. The bug is that if there’s a blank line in or at the end of the list, it’s treated as a wildcard, and it matches anything in the comment body. So all comments will be moderated regardless of comments. This is fixed in the CVS, but I thought I’d publish the fix for those that don’t want to run a diff against the CVS version. (Also, […]