random threads

I bit the bullet last night and upgraded to Wordpress 2.6. I also upgraded a number of my plug-ins. No major causualties so far, but my Gallery2 photos are no longer showing where they were linked to older posts (back in 2006). I don’t use Gallery2 any more for managing my photo albums, I converted mostly to Flickr, but I host some photos on my own server. Gallery2 seems to be working fine as a standalone, it just is not ‘playing nice’ with Wordpress on posts. I still am not totally happy with how much effort is involved in adding Flickr photos to a post, but I am getting used to it. The only plug that advertises that it will do what I want, Flckr Photo Album by Joe Tan, requires permalinks in a different format than I use, and when I tried to update my permalink format, all my links went ‘ka-blooey’. That was backed out in a hurry, I tell ya. That was an older version, so when I’m feeling adventuresome, I may try it again.

So I have been manually moving photos to Flickr and updating the older posts. I still have over 20 old posts to correct, so bear with me if you are rooting around in the archives and find a bunch of gobblegook errors about G2…give me time and I’ll get them fixed and pretty peektures back in place.

The only ‘new’ WIP I have to report is the socks I started when teaching class on Saturday. The students oohed and ahhhed over my bright yarn, Regia Crazy Colors in pink/red/orange and a touch of grey!? called ‘Crazy Chris’ (colorway 5439). The stitch pattern is one from the new Harmony Guide: Knit & Purl: 250 Stitches to Knit and is called Chain Stitch Rib. It is stretchy and cushy.

(update: the WIP photo today was taken with my 10-year-old Epson digital camera dinosaur, since the Canon S400 truly will not work any more, not even using the viewfinder. It just powers off whenever you turn it on. Thank goodness, the new Canon SD1100IS camera should be delivered tomorrow!)

Woot! While my pretty Ravelry progress bars have been working well for some months, over there in the right-hand sidebar, you perhaps have noticed that whenever I finished a project it disappeared into the ‘black hole’ that was titled ‘off the needles!’

Well, no more! I have them working at last, despite my utter lack of Javascript knowledge, I muddled around, copying the progress bars but making changes to eliminate the percent bars, setting the results to only show the last 6 finished items sorted by completion date, and adding a date finished. I’m still trying to get the CSS right, to match the UFOs. Another thing I know little about is CSS…sigh.

Also, I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and implemented the Easy Gravatar plugin from Dougal Campbell for commenters. If you want a cool photo next to your comment, register on Gravatar.com and upload a photo. And then make a comment here!

A bit of a facelift has been going on here at ‘ye olde randomthreads blog.’ First, the ever-present fight against spam has brought forth a few promising new tools:

Contact form–I was getting lots of spam daily via my contact form. Nothing (yay!) since I installed SCF2 Contact Form from Andrew Ozz over a week ago. In addition to using the existing spam filtering used for comments, it works with Akismet, which I have and also allows you to add a verification question.

Copyright for RSS feed– I experienced my first instance of content stealing last week when I found a pingback from www.facilecrafts.com. They lifted my entire post on Christmas knitting and posted it as their own. Hrmph. I guess this is becoming all too common. Not sure this plug-in, Angnsuman’s Feed Copyrighter really accomplishes much to prevent such theft, but it does warn people by including a statement (customizable but not required) in your RSS feed. The statement warns the reader that if they aren’t reading it in a news consolidator, that this is a violation of copyright and please report it back to you.

Other niceties:

Translation courtesy of the Translation Widget 2.0 from Trevor Creech. This uses the Google translation services and adds little flags the user can click on to translate to 10 different languages. I do have some international visitors and perhaps this will be helpful.

Random Quotes–Using the plugin, WP-Quotes from Zombie Robot, I have found quotes I enjoy, loaded them via the admin panel and then the plugin serves them up randomly in a PHP widget.

Better viewing on mobile browsers–I have a Treo, and looking at my blog from the Blazer browser has been a challenge–sidebars and large pictures mean lots of scrolling left and right and up and down. The plug-in WP-PDA from Imthiaz Rafiq seems to address those issues quite nicely. It detects the use of a mobile browser and applies a new theme that shows post snippets that you can click on to see the original post with photos. You can comment on posts, and the security word for posting is nicely visable. Searching and other pages can be accessed from the main screen. Nice!!

I’m still looking for the perfect photo gallery plugin. Since I’m now using Flickr quite extensively (thanks to Ravelry), I had hopes for the Flickr Photo Album plugin from Joe Tan, but it required you to change your permalinks to a non-default value and that broke most everything on my site (archives, single post display) except the home page, so I uninstalled it and reset permanlinks back to their default. So the search for the perfect photo gallery plugin continues…anyone have any suggestions?

OK, with a minimal amount of Googling, (thanks to Polymath Programmer here) I found out that WordPress 2.3.1 has a automatic update for migrating the Ultimate Tag Warrior tags to WP tags, under the WP Dashboard’s Manage Tab, Import option. Then my Cloud Widget in the sidebar caused fatal errors stopping display of the entire blog–GASP!

But some additional searching provided answers from Otto of Nothing to See Here here. Basically I needed to enable a PHP executable widget that I could drop the native Wordpress php code into to generate the WP version of the tag cloud.

Also my search now seems to be finding older posts (back to 2004 at least) that it wasn’t doing before. Yay! There is still some improvements I would like to make to how the tags are assigned (UTW provided a list to pick from of tags already used, which I really liked–I’ll search for a plug in to do that). But this takes care of the externally visible upgrade issues.

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.1 over the weekend, and I see my search and tag clouds are not finding anything now. So please bear with me while I try to figure out how to fix this. I do really like the tag cloud, so hope I can keep it. Any advice from WP gurus? I know this version of WP includes tags and I was using Ultimate Tag Warrior, so I’m hoping just need to run some update script to move the data to the new right place.

I’ve done some updating here at Random Threads, and most notably, installed a new Wordpress plug in to manage commenting, called Pete’s Custom Anti-Spam Image plugin. It has settings to permit registered commentors to bypass the word-check or not, and commentors are presented with words you can customize (you’ll see knitting-related words here). You can customize the fonts used as well. I hope it encourages more of you readers to comment since you will no longer have to register to Wordpress to be able to leave a comment.

Also you will see the tag cloud widget added to the left sidebar, generated by Tag Cloud Widget for UTW which depends on the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin as well.

I also installed Comment Email Responder plugin, which allows me to click on a comment on the webpage, have my reply added as a comment to the post, as well as delivered to the writer via email.

Behind the scenes, there are some more updates:

• Wordpress.com stats (does not require you host with Wordpress.com, just that you get a api code from there)
• Wordpress database backup–this allows you to save the backups of certain tables to your server, your hard-drive or have it emailed to an address you specifiy.

As often happens when I re-start blogging, I tinker with the site. I might be revamping the theme, but for today, I’ve added tags, using the WordPress plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior. Pretty easy to install, and easy to get started, but it looks like it has quite a bit of flexiblity. It even has a neat function to suggest tags for your post! I think I’ll be using tags for specific project names (a la Pagode), and avoid growing the categories beyond reasonable size. I do have to go back and re-tag old posts.

I’m also still not real happy with my photo gallery, currently using the WPG2 Wordpress plugin for Gallery2. I’ve gotten an account on Flickr and am checking that out for easy integration into posting photos. So here’s a test of that:

Miss Cleo demonstrating how all the little white hairs have come to appear on Pagode. A long stretch after a short catnap, showing her signature ‘tar toe.’