It never rains but it pours! Last night and much of this evening I spent chasing down problems of various sorts. (To any rss feed readers, I do apologize; it seems that any changes made to the content of a post results in a few feed being prepared for that post; one of the items on my todo list is to figure out how to turn that off when I’m tinkering under the hood.)

Seems that I had/have a couple of problems. First of all I had a poor permalink customization that didn’t end with a / which caused several problems such as not being able to navigate to paginated posts (which feature I tried for the first time in “flickr slideshow”). At about the same time I noticed that I couldn’t get comments working, either. Then when I checked error logs, I found that the codesnippets and smileys plugins were generating fairly generic (ie impossible to figure out what’s going on) error messages.

Aiee.

So in the process of tracking down the problems, I nuked the plugins, nuked the theme modifications and finally went back down to the default kubric theme. Nothing solved the problem so I put in a support request to find out what’s going on.

Of course, I couldn’t stop just tinkering around and googling around to see if I could find any solutions. That’s when I discovered that Wordpress actually recommends that permalinks end in /. Oh. OH. Right, right, the rewrite rules.

OK, so I went in and fixed that and lo and behold, pagination and comments started to work! Yay!

But there’s still a few oddities, such as the error messages in the log file which do not go away. There are certain plugins that just Do Not Work. Finally I found a bit of news rummaging through DreamHost’s Wiki that allow.url.fopen is disabled over here. I’m wondering if that’s the problem showing up in the log files, but grepping thru the directories for instances of include or fopen didn’t get me any results. DreamHost recommends curl wrappers instead, which I’ll be happy to do if this is the problem and if I can locate which are the problematic calls. So that part’s on hold for now.

Of course I couldn’t quite leave well enough alone, and I decided to go ahead (since I’d been munging my permalink structure all day anyway) and reorganize the WordPress setup in my account to put everything tidily away in a subdirectory while leaving the blog as the “main” item regardless. To that end, I followed the instructions here quite faithfully — putting all but index.php into a subdirectory called wordpress. It actually went pretty smoothly for the most part, so after finishing I went back and reloaded the blog. Oooh, pretty! Except my title gif is missing. So I went back and hunted thru and changed the bloginfo call from url to a more appropriate template_directory.

Only now none of the links on the page work: the about page, the pagination pages, the permalink, nothing. So it’s clearly some sort of rewrite rule and something with generating the permalinks. All of the bad links have an extra index.php in the middle of them. I went through a half dozen google articles moderately relevant to the issue, but didn’t really find anything. Then on a hunch I went back to the article and decided that step 4 seemed wrong, given everything I’d done. So I changed the blog address to just digitalramble.com instead of digitalramble.com/index.php as it says & redid the permalinks. *cough* As I was saying about buggy documentation the other day *cough*…

Voila. Everything looks like it works, aside from the error.log generation messages, and at this point I think I have to wait for DreamHost support to get back to me. Unless I can google up more info for allow_url_fopen and find anything else that it might be tripping that’s present in the affected plugins…

One of the problems with the SCLRR’s main page is that “slideshow” on it. It’s really an animated gif. Now there’s tons of (mostly Windows based) software out there for creating gif type slideshows as any google search will show you. But remember that I try to make this site pretty easily usable by the average volunteer. So for example that Dog of the Month you see is pulled out of the database with a bio that’s all done in the volunteer only section of the website. They don’t have to do anything more than check off the dog they want displayed and voila!

So I wanted something similar for the slideshow. I also wanted some way of uploading the pictures pretty easily. So I got the bright idea of using flickr. They’ve got an API. So the idea went something like this: I create a perl script that uses flickr’s API to pull out a list of pictures with a certain tag and then I rotate through those pictures in the file. So from the volunteer’s point of view. all they have to do is manage a set of pictures on flickr — which has a nice easy to use interface, and to which access can be given without compromising the shell account. Hey I love these people dearly, but I cringe at the thought of a non-technical person stomping all over the files in the account by accident. (I mean I have everything regularly backed up but still.)

Well I’ve been playing around with plugins, which are one of the most fun things about WordPress. I’d've started this up a long time ago if I’d realized how fun it was. Anyway I’m using a number of plugins now, a quick list:

Akismet

Default spam thingie. Because, you know, of all the comments and spam I get.

Code Snippet 2.0

This one’s handy — you can use inline tags, along with the language listed to create nicely formatted code snippets. The only thing to watch out for is that it also converts html’s code marker. I went in and disabled that (just search on the pattern in the file and comment it out). I sent a note to the developer suggesting that making that an option would be a good thing. Especially since I make extensive use of the html code markup for inline words which made the conversion to a blockquote based presentation rather deleterious to my posts (not to mention re-generating a slew of feed revisions).

Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter 1.0

Inserts copyright message into your feeds. You don’t see the message in your posts on the webpage, but when you check the feeds, you’ll see it there.

del.icio.us - Bookmark this! 1.1

This plugin will allow you to add an “Bookmark this page on del.icio.us” link on your sidebar / posts / wherever. Nice and simple. I still want to figure out some way of automatically uploading bookmarks to my posts into delicious, but that will be another day.

WP-DBManager 2.04

Now this was a nice find. The default save on demand is all well and good (and actually ok for me, cos I know mysql just fine). But this dandy thing gives you all kinds of options for managing your database backup, restoration and other goodies, whether or not you know anything about mysql.

WP-EMail 2.04

Thinking about this one. Adds a “mail this to a friend” thing. Do I want this?

Yahoo/MSN Style Smileys 4.4

I confess! I’m a long time Yahoo IM user, and their emoticons are “the” emoticons. Turn up your nose and pooh-pooh all you like. These are teh r00lz!

Live Comment Preview 1.7

Thinking about this one, too. It adds a live preview of your comment as you’re writing it up. This could be very useful for my vast hordes of commentators. Hm.

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.1

Allows you to more extensively manage tags and links to social tagging utilities (technorati, etc). This plugin may be overkill for what I want. I haven’t decided whether it’s worth the trouble or if I should look for a smaller subset of more focused tag handlers… I do like the cloud that it provides, though.

However, by far the best plugin has been Now Reading 3.3. This is a very well done, very useful plugin that tracks the books you’ve read, are currently reading, and have finished. The books are summarized on your sidebar, plus you can look at individual books (along with any reviews and ratings you care to put in). The graphics are filched from amazon.com, where it does the lookups. I’m having so much fun with this, I’m slightly breaking my rule about keeping this blog work/technical related only. I’ll be putting in most of the books I’m reading and not just technical ones either. Althought I’ll probably refrain from keying in the more, ah, mind-candy type novels …

Looks like whenever I play around with the main content format, it generates a new feed copy of the message! Yipes. So to all of my hundreds of feed subscribers: sorry! *ahem* Well now I understand why sometimes there seems to be a lot of duplication in my own feed subscriptions. Once I have all the tweaks I want done, it should be better. I’ve gone quite a ways from the Ocadia theme, so I’ve now declared the theme derived from and highly indebted to Ocadia, but of course no longer Ocadia. Any eye-jarring theme induced wincing is strictly my fault: I’ve just been following my own whims as to what I like in layout and decorative elements…

Anyhow, for those of you remotely interested, I’ve used www.dreamhost.com as my web hosting, and I must say I’m extremely impressed with what’s available and how well set up and usable it all is. I’m going to test out a few more things, and then probably recommend to SCLRR that they use this site. Cos I’ve about had it with their current site admins not responding to any of my queries — some of which include pricing lists for properly hosting the domain instead of forwarding to a shell account! (NB to web hosting admins…never, ever delay on actual requests for pricing info from one of your users interested in upgrading…)

Anyway, today is a day for backups: on my computer, and on my various websites (DR for the first time!) so I’ll leave you, dear readers, for another day…

It’s interesting just how useful a really good favicon is. I wound up putting one in for this one, because I was going crazy locating it among all the other plain-folded-page default favicons in my tabs. I typically have dozens of tabs going in a Firefox session. I started out first with that little curlique thing that comes with the original default template (I’m going to modify it to a point where I’ll probably have to rename the theme to avoid confusion ) but I decided it wasn’t really that identifiable or memorable. If I scan my tabs there are several that I can see at a glance. Delicious is readily identifiable as is Gmail, LiveJournal, Bloglines, Blogger (it’s ugly but it totally jumps out), Google (but Google calendar isn’t that great), Technorati and so on. So when I switched to the more floral style header above, I tried using one of the flowers…but it renders down into a rather indistinguishable blob. So I gave up and just used the DR initials, using the same font as in the name above, and I think that works out pretty well.

For the SCLRR website, I tried miniaturizing the little dog in their logo but again blobbiness was the general result. My coworker thought it was a fellow smoking his pipe. Sigh. So I just found a small cartoon bone on the ‘net and shrunk that down, and I think that works pretty well. I may transparent the green out, but for the moment I’m letting it be.

But wait! Why stop now?! I’ve resurrected another old site of mine, that I took down because back in the day several gigs of bandwidth were too expensive to pay for (I now get ten times the bandwidth for a fraction of the price; go figure). Now this site is a throwback to 1995 era websites (so no giggling), but I’ve at least started it off with a new favicon, and will be cleaning this site up as well.