Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Wordpress”
I can't believe this blog is 15 Years Old!
I missed the 15 year anniversary this February because I was busy with family visiting and then COVID-19 happened and next thing I knew it was the end of July and I was realizing just how long this site has been around. The crazy thing is that in my first blog post on this blog, I wasn’t even sure I’d stick with it. Yet here I am, with a blog that’s essentially been with me for my entire post-college life. While I started off with the generic Wordpress theme, 15 years ago in July I had the following theme:
If Audio Embeds Aren't Working For You...
If Audio Embeds Aren’t Working For You, check out this support thread in which I figured out what was going on.
What Wordpress 3.6 Developers Could have Done Better
I first blogged about Wordpress 3.6 in April. I was extremely excited about the new Post Formats UI and the new theme Twenty Thirteen. At the time there was a month left before the release. Then, things got pushed back a bit which messed with my image formatting. Then, at some point, they decided they would have to remove the Post Formats UI for this release. And then they went silent. Weeks passed; a month passed. When they mentioned Post Formats and the new Multimedia features - embedded video and audio - it sparked a creativity in my brain - a way to use the site that would make use of what was unique about the web rather than just being a public journal. And I haven’t known when I could schedule these posts or even write them because after the Post Formats UI decision, they stopped updating the releases section of the website. Look, I’ve been involved with FLOSS software for about a decade now. I know all about the Release when It’s Done method, aka The Debian Way. It tends to lead to better quality releases (keyword: tends). But it also causes a lot of frustration - hence the reason for the Ubuntu fork. Really, all I wanted (and based on a few comments I’ve seen on the web from people who use WP to make a living - designing or writing training materials) was some communication. I understand that you might not know exactly how long it would take to untangle the Post Formats UI from the code. But an estimate would have been better than nothing.At least we’d know you cared what we think. And that’s just human psychology. It’s the reason why all the theme parks have signs telling you how long the wait is going to be for any particular ride. If you know it’s going to be an hour you aren’t as pissed as if it takes an hour and you had no idea. So next time, keep us in the look, Wordpress.
Happy 10th Birthday Wordpress!
Happy 10 years of the software that allowed me to free myself of the shackles of other corporations and take blogging into my own hands. I started this blog almost around the same time as Wordpress (WP was only 1.5 years old) Here’s to another ten years! And, here’s my version of what Dougal suggested:
When I first started using Wordpress in 2005:
- I was in my 20s
- I was in college
- I was running the blog on Fedora Core
- I was engaged
- I was using Facebook heavily as it was still highly focused on college students
- I’d never been to any country outside the USA other than Canada
- President George W Bush was in his second term
- The USA was at war with Iraq and Afghanistan
Now, when Wordpress turns 10 in 2013:
Technology Roundup
[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.
Changing Themes After 4 Years
One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs. Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.
Wordpress 2.7 Released
So, Wordpress 2.7 is finally here. It’s their second visual refresh in a year and I have to say they have really outdone themselves. When they did the last change, I thought “wow, there’s no way they could improve on this.” and “I thought their old interface was good, but this makes it look like a pile of crap!”. But now I feel the same way all over. There are a few things that aren’t where I remember them, but overall, I am loving the new work they’ve done. There’s just one thing that annoys the heck out of me - the new threaded comments don’t work with my theme. I’m going to either have to figure out how to redesign it on my own or switch themes again. But I really like this theme and I’ve done so much customization already.
Tags are great!
Other than widgets, I think that tags are the best feature of Wordpress 2.3. Up until now I kept adding more and more categories and things were starting to get ridiculous. But now with tags I have a wonderful middle path. Categories are for broad swaths of posts and there shouldn’t be too many. (Or at least not any more than I currently have) But now, instead of making a new category to talk about Compiz or X11, I can just file it under Linux and add the corresponding tags. Plus, tag clouds are fun!
One year's worth left
I’m getting a bit bored and my wrist is starting to hurt a little from operating the mouse so much. I’m not done recategorizing my blog posts, but I only have one year’s range left - March 2006 - March 2007. Hopefully that was a twelve month period in which I didn’t write too much. Boy-oh-boy did I learn my lesson about not backing up. Also, I was jumping from 2.1 to 2.3 so perhaps I was bound to run into those problems. Once I’m done with that, there are some pretty neat developments which have recently happened on vimeo as well as some exciting news on “Sugar” and “Trick or Treat”.
Wordpress 2.1
Finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 - I was waiting to make sure there weren’t any show-stopper bugs as there were in the previous version. So far no one seems to have found any problems. They didn’t do too many cosmetic changes because I can’t really tell what’s changed. I’ll have to review the changelog again. So far the BEST change is that “General” is not automatically selected as a category. It was annoying to uncheck that EVERY time!
Getting Vimeo to interface with Wordpress
I finally found out that all I need to do is to disable the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress (which I hated anyway!) and now I can get my Vimeo clips embedded. Sure, I could point you to www.dropthebombproductions.com, but people tend not to like to leave their page if they don’t have to. I’d love to be able to embed video. Now I can!
As a celebration, here is one of my earliest videos, “Anime Hurricane”. (Follow the vimeo link to get more information on it)
Wordpress is 2.0!
Well, about 14 hours ago WordPress went 2.0!! It is amazing! They have REALLY revamped things. I’ll have to relearn how to do some tasks, but it is genrally very amazing. For example, now I can create new categories from within the post instead of saving, going to the categories page, creating it, and then coming back. (using AJAX - like flickr.com) It allows me to be a LOT more flexible in my tagging and I love that. Also, the preview is not just the text and images anymore, they make it look EXACTLY like your page! It’s really awesome and I’m glad I upgraded. They have continued to create great blogging software that puts all other blogging software to shame!
WP hosting sites
Wordpress has listed some hosting sites which allow their users to use wordpress for blogging. Why didn’t they show my server? hehe….
Wordpress [almost] has 100k downloads!
WordPress is almost at 100,000 downloads. This is easily attributed to the fact that the program is awesome. I don’t know how I ever truly blogged before using this software. Blogging is ridiculously easy and the plugins add infinite possibilities for expanding the blog’s potential.
Another reason for the increase in downloads has to do with others promoting WordPress. A recent Linux Format Magazine cover DVD came with WordPress source files available on it. It was from the previous release, but as people work with it and find out about the upgrades they are sure to continue to use it. Once again I recommend that anyone with their own server (or access to one) use it for their blogging needs.
Two interesting bits of knowledge
First of all, congrats to the WordPress team! In just two weeks they were able to have 50 000 downloads of the blog software this site is running. I HIGHLY recommend them if you have your own server and want to run your own blog.
Second, for those who are used to the format of my old blog where the posts are never ending to the bottom and then you click back to go to the previous posts, this blog software handles things a little differently. You will onlly see on one page (plus clicking back) posts from that month. So, this blog doesn’t only have two posts, it also has a bunch of february posts which can be access by click on “february 2005” under archives.
Excellent
The upgrade went off without a hitch. The new features are pretty neat, although I’m trying to see how to get back my original template. Overall, the new features are a great improvement over the previous version of the software, but, as usual, there is some getting used to with the new features. Still, the folks at Word Press have really outdone themselves. Definitely check them out if you have the luxury of your own server and want to blog.
upgrading your blog?
Well, they have released a new version of my blogging software. For the first time ever I will be upgrading a blog. In a way, it’s a very good thing because I’ve been putting off learning how to backup my databases for a few weeks and part of the upgrade process is to backup the database files. It will be interesting to see how things change. I know they have built in some stronger spam filters, but I haven’t had any trouble with that, yet. Of course, this is a relatively new blog, so most search engines probably don’t know about it yet. I will probably be upgrading today, so if the blog is inaccessible, I may be in the middle of an upgrade process.
Singing the praises of Word Press
One of the things I love about word press over Tripod’s current mode is that I can make a post belong to several categories. This is extremely useful because on Tripod, for example, I have the categories of “Linux”, “Computers”, and “Technology”. Since the category I pick is sometimes a function of the one I first find, it may not always make be easy to see which is the best option when I’m trying to find a post I previously made. Since I have over 600 posts at Tripod, being able to find a post is a bit of a daunting task. Additionally, by being open source, plugins have been developed and I intend to try a few of them once I get a change. It looks to me that I am now about 90% sure that I will be converting over to Word Press full time once I get my server up again in Sept/Oct of this year. It seems pretty likely that we’ll be going wireless here within the next week.
A Brave New World
Today I begin what may be one of the most interesting projects I have yet to take on. This blog is hosted on my server. That means it is completely under my control. I don’t have to pay money for it and I can write whatever I want without any censorship. Additionally, it’s pretty freakin’ exciting to be running my own blog.
That said, I am not 100% sure if I will be completely migrating over to this blog. To begin with, I don’t want to lose my blog over on tripod. I have had so many insights on that blog and I would definitely need to find a way to archive it or transfer it over here somehow. At this point in time I’m not sure how that would work. Also, I don’t really have the time for that. Finally, from the time that my apartment complex demands to have my cable modem so that we can switch to wirelss access (thus effectively killing my server) until at least until I move into my townhouse some time around September, I will only be able to blog through Tripod. Once I get my server set up, however, I intend to permanently have it up.