Skip to content

Tag Archives: hacking

Mostly smooth WP 2.2 upgrade

Upgrading this site to WordPress 2.2 went rather smoothly, a lot quicker than the WP 2.1 upgrade. Not too surprising, as the differences between 2.0 and 2.1 were much greater than the ones between 2.1 and 2.2. The change that might make a difference to you, dear readers, is that this site now has an […]

Upgrading to WordPress 2.2

WordPress 2.2 came out this week. I did a local test, and at first glance it looks like it’d go quickly. So far the only tweaks needed will be updating vars.php (or the appropriate file in WP 2.2) for my smiley customizations (oh so critical, tee hee), and a weird theme thingie in the entry-meta […]

Comment policy & preview

When I started using WordPress last year, one aspect took me a while to understand and refine: blog comments. What’s more, commenting is the most obvious form of interaction on this site. But I wanted to avoid spam. How badly I wanted to avoid any kind of junk ad, specious link, mindless troll, content leech, […]

New site feature: random image in the sidebar

Already a new feature! I added a random thumbnail image from my gallery to the sidebar in this site. This might seem odd, considering my preference for design that emphasizes text. But I’m aiming for a little bit of imagery, to occasionally but not disruptively vary the appearance. You would see the image if you […]

Upgraded veryplaintxt theme for WordPress

After over three weeks of tweaking and testing, I’ve upgraded the WordPress theme for this site. As mentioned earlier, the theme is a customized variant of Scott Wallick’s excellent veryplaintxt v3.0. The theme hacking took up much of my time for the past few weeks, hence the infrequent posts. (Fortunately faster than the several months […]

Upgrading to WordPress 2.1, etc.

WordPress has recently been upgraded to 2.1. I’ve been testing it on my local setup (thanks to MAMP) for the past few weeks, and found that upgrading from 2.0.x is rather easy. I found hitches with only a couple of my plugins, Antileech and Link Library. Even the theme used, a somewhat modified version of […]

Downtime so soon?

I recently discovered that this site is running PHP 4, rather than PHP 5. It’s also running an older version of Apache (1.3) than I expected. I might not be able to control the web server version, but my hosting service does allow me to change the PHP version. This means you might experience downtime […]

The joys of syndication and spam control

The Bad Behavior plugin seems to block my friends who try to syndicate this site on LiveJournal. I might need to fiddle with whitelisting. Speaking of whitelists, why oh why are comments made by registered WordPress users being held for moderation (including myself)? This is by both Akismet spam moderation and within the built-in (I […]

MAMP: Macintosh, Apache, MySQL & PHP

Through Michael Doig’s excellent tutorial, I recently discovered MAMP, a free package which provides recent builds of Apache, MySQL and PHP as a standalone installation on Mac. It’s geared towards local server development on a machine, as opposed to live sites, so it’s great for testing out stuff like WordPress locally. Unfortunately, MAMP has issues. […]