dis.content » Blog

Out for Lunch – Be Back Later

ping — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 07:45:14 +0000

I’ve made the leap and taken the other fork in the path. I’ll be blogging from here until October 2008. See you there!

Non-event Announcement: Upgrade to WP 2.2

ping — Wed, 16 May 2007 06:53:46 +0000

2.32pm – Login to shell account.
2.33pm – Login to WP admin.
2.33pm – Deactivate all plugins.
2.34pm – Follow instructions to upgrade via shell.
2.40pm – Tried to activate WP Enhanced Plugin Manager for mass plugin activation. Plugin doesn’t work. Okay, Plan B; activate 20+ plugins manually.
2.44pm – Done
2.46pm – Blog about non-event upgrade.
2.50pm – Resume life.

Big is Beautiful

ping — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 05:25:59 +0000

I was surfing for some WordPress plugins when I chanced upon Mike Smullin’s blog and had a sudden epiphany — you don’t have need tiny fonts to look “cool”. The typography on the site on Mike’s site was, for a change, big, readable, and very comfortable on the eyes. It must be a sign of my age, but I decided that itsy bitsy fonts are OUT. I want my site to be clear and easily readable without a magnifying glass, and hence a quick dive in the stylesheet was in order. There is a problem with the layout if I upped the base font size too much, so this is a temporary hack until I get a chance to re-work the theme properly.

Before

After

So here’s how it is; not as big as I would like it, but it will have to suffice for now. And no offence to the original theme author but for this blogger, BIG IS BEAUTIFUL.

PS: If the screenshots look better than what you see in your browser, that’s because I’ve ClearType enabled on my XP install. Try it sometime, you will be surprised at how much better your screen fonts can look.

Inline Google Maps

ping — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:46:31 +0000

Stumbled upon a pretty simple way to embed Google Maps in your WordPress blog, thanks to the Inline Google Maps 2 plugin. The instructions are relatively straightforward and plugin works as described. My only gripe is that the Google Maps javascript files are loaded on every page even if there are no maps embedded.

[Update] Seems like there is a better and more updated branch of the plugin by another author,Â Avi Alkalay, that is more RSS friendly. I find that the display customisation also works better with this version. The plugin can be found here.

Orchard MRT

The map above was generated using the Google Maps plugin for WordPress.

Ka-ching!

ping — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 04:38:13 +0000

I’ve decided to experiment with Google Adsense on the blog. I first signed up for Adsense in 2005 but I never got around to incorporating the ads in the blog. It’s a bit of struggle really because I personally dislike personal blogs that are filled to the brim with ads (no offence to the folks who are big on this sort of thing; like I said, it’s personal).

I’ve decided to get my toes wet with the help of the Adsense-Deluxe plugin which allows you to embed Google ads in selected entries (like this one). This level of control is very appealing. I like the fact that because the ad space is not defined in the templates, they do not appear in every single archived page. Hopefully, I’ve gotten it at a level that is not too obtrusive.

Now all I have to do is to wait for the dollars to roll in… Ka-ching!

Thank goodness for day job.

IMified

ping — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:16:44 +0000

Trying this novel little service called IMified.
Will the html tags show up?
I guess it’s worth a try.

[Update from the Web]:
Seems like the a href tags were stripped but the p tags worked okay. No support for Categories though. Ideal for quick twitter-like blog posts, but probably not too suitable for full-blown blogging. IMified supports a bunch of other useful services like Google Notes, ToDo, Calendar, etc. Pretty useful if IM takes up a big part of your online life. Works with AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk/Jabber.

Making the Switch: JK to UTW

ping — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 08:01:06 +0000

So. I decided to give a Ultimate Tag Warrior a spin when I started having some strange problems with the Jerome’s Keywords Plugin after the 2.1 WordPress upgrade. I poked around and couldn’t figure out what was wrong and decided to switch over to UTW.

There wasn’t much advice on Google for people contemplating the switch so I decide to give it a shot myself. It was pretty easy really; simply a matter of moving tag data from the JK table (wp_jkeywords) to the UTW ones (wp_tags, wp_post2tag).

You will have to execute the SQL code below through phpMyAdmin or the MySql client of your choice. The code is provided as-is, with absolutely no warranties, so please don’t blame me if you wipe out your database. Backup backup backup.

– Step 1. Create tags in UTW from JK
INSERT INTO wp_tags (tag)
SELECT DISTINCT tag_name FROM wp_jkeywords
– Step 2. Link tags to posts in UTW
INSERT INTO wp_post2tag (tag_id, post_id)
SELECT t.tag_id, j.post_id
FROM wp_tags t, wp_jkeywords j
WHERE j.tag_name = t.tag
— Done!

After running the sql, you may need to do a “Tidy Tags” in UTW (WP Admin > Manage > Tags > Manage Tags) before things start showing up properly.

Remember, backup!

Hello Ella!

ping — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 08:02:41 +0000

Upgraded WordPress to the latest and the greatest 2.1 version “Ella”. Relative painless upgrade but the Category Exclusion plugin I was using is broken. It was causing query_posts to return duplicate records for posts which have multiple categories. No biggie to fix; just remove the plugin and use the exclude parameter when calling the list categories function. Incidentally, while patching the theme, I found out that wp_list_cats is deprecated and is replaced by wp_list_categories in WP2.1.

What’s harder to fix is the problem WP Tiger Admin has with the tabbed Tiny MCE interface. Toggling between the Visual and Code modes causes the UI to go a little crazy. I regularly switch between both modes when editing a post, so this a bummer.

Other than, “Ella” seems to be working well. What I like most:

Ability to toggle between WYSIWYG and code mode in the editor
Auto-save!
Improved upload manager – it’s a whole lot more intuitive now

I still prefer the Tiger Admin interface though, and I hope it gets fixed soon…

Upgrade to WordPress 2.0.7

ping — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 10:32:56 +0000

WordPress announced a security update and it’s recommended that everyone with 2.0.6 and below to get the update.

I decided to go for it since the upgrade patches a potential security vulnerability. The upgrade itself took about 15 minutes and most of the time was spent backing up and loading the new files up the server. I do wish that the Plugin Admin screen had “Deactivate All” and “Activate All” functions so that I didn’t have to manually deactivate/activate each plugin during the upgrade.

I took the chance to also upgrade the WP Tiger Administration plugin to v3.0. This was a design overhaul and also fixed a couple of minor UI hiccups that the older version had on WordPress 2. Nice.

I Get No Spam

ping — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 09:32:25 +0000

For some unknown reason, the number of spam comments rocketed overnight (nothing close to the 1,000,000 on Techcrunch.com of course) but thanks to the loveliness that is Akismet, my blog stays spam-free and lemony-fresh.

I know I’m just asking for it.