WordPress › WordPress 3.8 “Parker”. It's been a while since an update that actually appeals to me visually - and I like the new default theme so much that I'm seriously considering switching from my current one (which is still based on 2010, with minor adjustments). I found the 2011/2012/2013 themes rather meh. Especially 2013 was just plain irritating with its color scheme. 2014 will need a few patches, but that mainly refers to the design of gallery posts and asides - although I could almost live with the asides, maybe just tuck them into a sidebar or something. Hmm, let's see if I'll go through with it - the advantage would be that I could get rid of a lot of my own tinkered code and thus have less work with potential new versions that would require adjustments (although my adjustments have proven surprisingly stable, so far I haven't had to touch anything). What I do find really strange, though: the "Press This" bookmarklet has been almost unchanged in design for ages. Could also use some sprucing up!
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If you want to use the Atom publishing protocol, you now need to install a plugin in WordPress 3.5 because it has been removed from the core. Of course, the WordPress developers didn't bother to include a corrected version of the Atom Publishing Protocol server in the plugin; it still contains the over 2-year-old bug with media uploads. Fortunately, my patch still works, but now it needs to be applied to a different file. Quite a mess, what they're doing there. And when I see how the bug in the WordPress core was ignored, my hope that someone will take the trouble to fix the plugin is pretty close to zero.
#21866 Remove AtomPub from core – WordPress Trac. Pappnasen. There have been bugs for years, yes. But they could have been fixed. Instead, AtomPub is being removed - but completely ignoring that the old WordPress XMLRPC stuff doesn't do the same thing - for example, it doesn't provide proper metadata updates for media uploads, which will result in only being able to use the AtomPub Plugin to sync images from Lightroom to WordPress with an export service in the future. There are still one or two things in this area that don't work properly, which is why I have always preferred to work with AtomPub from Lightroom. Now I can look forward to having to overhaul my entire image workflow after WordPress 3.5.
WordPress › WordPress 3.4 “Green”. Amazing - release update, two theme updates (one - twentyten - I use as a parent theme for my own RFC1437 theme) and a plugin update later and my blog still works. Well, and still dissatisfied: a bug in the Atom posting for Media has been open for ages and not fixed. And 3.4 changes the Atom posting infrastructure, but doesn't fix the bug again. And the old patch doesn't work anymore because the file structure has changed. And that's exactly where the deficit of the WordPress Dev team always shows up: to respond to bug reports and close the damn things. Let tickets with patches rot for 11 months until the file structure changes so that the patches no longer work? Ridiculous. And for me that means that my posting workflow for images into the blog is broken for now, because the XMLRPC upload cannot set metadata such as title and the Atom upload only uploads the image file, but does not create the different image sizes needed for posting.
ThinkUp: Social Media Insights Platform. I definitely want to check this out - a tool that collects your own social activities (well, they're not always that social) via various APIs and combines them. And in a self-hosted database. Supports Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and evaluates the data collection according to various criteria. And with Social Timeline there is then a tool for displaying as a timeline, which could be integrated into your own blog. This could even be a much more pleasant variant than importing all posts from social networks into your own blog.
Google+ Importer for WordPress » Sutherland Boswell. I'm currently considering whether I might want to integrate this - it automatically imports public Google+ posts. I would probably need to adjust something to turn the posts into asides, but that shouldn't be too complicated. Maybe the tool can already do that directly. The question is whether it makes sense to bring the posts from Google+ over - especially with the image posts, I already get them later and mirror them in my media data. But the text-only posts would also end up here, which might be quite useful. I'll have to think about it a few more times.
Commentpress. I should check this out, it's a comment system that doesn't happen under posts, but in the margins of texts related to paragraphs. Actually a funny idea if you have longer texts. Okay, I almost only post single paragraphs, but I find the integration of comments quite nice - so the rendering of these small speech bubbles in which the comments then expand (at the moment, comments on my site are rather neglected, as they only appear on the detail pages, which are not even linked from the front for my short paragraph posts).
WordPress Germany FAQ » Privacy notes on the use of Akismet in Germany. Found at Schockwellenreiter and also implemented - I already had the explanation in the imprint, now the checkbox when commenting has also been added. It might be a bit cumbersome for the three people who comment here from time to time, but I think it's bearable. Especially since there are other ways to comment - your own blog posts, or tweeting, facebooking or googleplussing (there's also a privacy-compliant user consent for that), so you can choose where you want to leave your data traces. (And of course, you can also simply send me an email to the email address listed in the imprint, which then works without consent - but be careful, my email provider is Google! They are evil!)
2 Click Social Media Buttons « WordPress Plugins. Similar to the previous plugin, but this one is now based on the code from Heise. And it has a nice explanatory component with a link to the Heise article. I've integrated it, so you can like me, +1 me, and tweet!
The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework - Xavisys. Interesting if you want to build your own plugins for WordPress, as it takes care of some of the standard tasks and makes the code simpler.
BuddyPress.org. Just stumbled upon it again when it came to self-hosted social networks. BuddyPress somehow always flies under the radar, but it's quite an interesting development with all the features of WordPress - including, for example, all login integrations and similar. And there are also separate plugins for BuddyPress, such as the BuddyPress Media Plugin, with which you can create your own Flickr from a BuddyPress installation. And there are countless more things, up to commercial plugins for various purposes. And additionally, you can use all WordPress themes and build on them.
WordPress 3.2 now available. Update executed (and for the first time also via automatic update and ssh access for the update, since my web server does not have write permissions on the WP code) and everything seems to have worked smoothly, even though I use a number of plugins. Nice. The admin has been really streamlined, much faster responses.
LR/Blog – Export directly from Lightroom 2 to your Blog!. I didn't have this for some reason, but now I do. With this, you can export photos directly into the WordPress media library to use them in posts. Could help me in cases where I don't want to take the detour via Flickr.
Function Reference/site url. I need to go through this more carefully, because if a site is supposed to run in parallel under http and https, then there must no longer be any absolute references, everything must be routed via these functions. A few plugins (jQuery Lightbox and Infinite Scroll) also cause problems here, so bug reports will probably be necessary.
SSL and Cookies in WordPress 2.6 « Ryan Boren. Although originally written for WordPress 2.6, it is still valid. I had to do a bit of hacking, as my WordPress server is not directly connected to the network, but behind a firewall (iptables with DNAT helped), but now I have properly secured admin cookies and am better protected against WLAN sniffers at public hotspots. The WordPress idea is really nice - not 100% security, as with my login cookie comments can still be posted under my name, but at least the administration is protected. However, it conflicts with the Safer Cookies Plugin, which I previously used to at least pin my cookies to the IP. Additionally, there is a patch that has gone through 3.1 and enables securing the login cookie as well.
Infinite Scroll WordPress Plugin - nice effect, when the end of the page is reached, the next page is automatically loaded and mixed in via JavaScript - so pages are built endlessly until all blog content is there. Facebook and Flickr have been doing this for some time and I somehow find it better than these "older posts" and "newer posts" links. Without JavaScript, the links should still appear, search engines will continue to index everything (although a Google Sitemap helps a lot in this regard), so it shouldn't cause any harm.
Pressbox « WordPress Plugins. I wanted to build this myself all the time, but now it's already available. I could take a look at it - with this you can select images from Dropbox and insert them into posts. Since I'm using Dropbox a lot for images, this would be quite practical - but I first have to check if the image is then brought to the WordPress server, or if it remains on Dropbox - I want my media files to be on my own servers.
ZenphotoPress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to access images and galleries in ZenPhoto from WordPress. Since you can upload entire folders to ZenPhoto via FTP or other methods (e.g., by simply linking the Albums directory to Dropbox), and thus easily get images into galleries, you can also quickly and easily access these images in WordPress. Might be something as a tinkering project, as I'm still looking for simple ways to feed my photo blog from Lightroom.
WordPress › Really Static « WordPress Plugins. Well blogged, because it allows you to generate static pages directly from WordPress (this could also be done with WP Super Cache and its directly cached pages, but these are not automatically updated) and perhaps this could be an interesting way in the long run. Okay, I would probably have to forego some elements to make the whole thing work without "artefacts" - but many of them are actually dispensable. For example, a tag cloud would be frozen at the state of the last rendering if it is part of the page. Similarly, information such as "latest comments" or "latest posts". The same goes for calendars, which have more marked days on newer pages than on older ones. This is also the main reason why I have repeatedly abandoned baked sites - on the other hand, are these problem cases really important for a blog?
Toolbox, H5 and twentytenfive are Wordpress templates that are based on HTML5. I should take a look at them and see if I can't build my own theme on one of them, instead of deriving it from the standard theme. Since I am currently a subtheme of the standard Twentyten, Twentytenfive might be the easiest - but Toolbox could also be interesting because it is a really minimal theme that I could use as a real base.
WordPress JSON API. I don't know if I really need this, but it might come in handy someday - the XMLRPC or Atom APIs are quite cumbersome if you just want to quickly access data from the blog via JavaScript.
LR/Blog - Send images to your blog from Adobe Lightroom. I had already found another plugin for this, but this one is more flexible and supports other blog types as well (down to "naked" MetaWeblogAPI). However, I don't know if it works with Lightroom 3 and newer WordPress versions ...
"Press Kit" « Lucs Journal. A plugin for Lightroom that can export directly to the Wordpress Media Library or a NextGEN Gallery. However, of course again via xmlrpc.php, which I only reluctantly enable due to the more frequent security issues with it.
Home of the WordPress Wiki Plugin. Not sure if I really want something like this, but it could potentially be interesting in the long run, should I ever be struck by another bout of documentation mania. First blogged, you never know. It looked the most interesting of the WordPress-integrated wikis, though.
Embedder Plugin Home | moztools. Bookmarked for later - I once had a simple snippet/glossary/macro/embed plugin for WordPress, but this one looks like I should use it instead of making my own. It seems very practical for quickly entering frequently recurring snippets.
Jquery Snowfall Plugin 1.4 | Somethinghitme. I think a snowman is kissing me. And those who don't want to hack themselves can also use the Wordpress Snow Storm plugin.
WordPress 3.0.2 is out and since it contains security fixes, an update is recommended. The German WordPress version is also already available and the update went smoothly for me. I only had to replace all occurrences of Gallerie with Galerie in the language file to make the special handling of gallery posts work (and because Gallerie just looks stupid and is wrong - I don't understand why it's still in the language file. I reported this and it was allegedly fixed a long time ago. Well ...)
Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress is a very nice plugin that adds Captcha to comment forms. The special feature: it only does this if Akismet thinks a comment is spam. Captcha failure is then punished with the deletion of the comment - this keeps the spam queue manageable.
Performance hog ...
... one should not necessarily operate. The Tumblr widget needs about 300ms due to its synchronous access to Tumblr, and the typography plugin needs another 300ms. Ouch. Ok, my text just looks typographically crappy, I don't care.
With the cache, I'm currently at xcache - let's see if it produces strange messages like apc. I suspect conflicts between apc and WP Super Cache for my problems, because every time the problem occurred, I also had these strange GC messages from apc in the log. And no messages from PHP, which indicates that nothing was executed by PHP (which also explains the empty output).
There is support for the object cache of xcache in WordPress. Great, you can activate it with a small plugin. I'll save the link, because without this module the blog is faster (and 27 vs 29 DB queries is not exactly a wildly successful operation of the object cache). With the object cache activated, the blog was immediately back in the 700ms+ zone - quite without time-consuming plugins.
For Tumblr, I will now build a JavaScript-Ajax solution that uses the Tumblr API to find my images and push them into the HTML of the page. It's only for the look and then a Tumblr-Connect problem won't be accidentally cached.
But it's a shame about the quite remarkably well-functioning hyphenation from the typography plugin. You can't have everything. Render times in the range of above half a second I find silly. Maybe I'll change my mind again when I've stared at my blog for a while longer.
WordPress › Support » WP Super Cache sometimes ignites a blank Home Page! Need to restart Apache - sounds exactly like my problem, but it's already a year old. Seems to be some combination of many parts. For now, I've turned off APC, as it also produces strange messages in the error log, for which there are no really satisfying comments on the net to find. Somehow, the whole PHP stuff is really shitty. Too many parts coming from too many different places and all somehow but not quite working together. Basically, everything runs, but as soon as you want to get a grip on the performance problems, there are all sorts of strange and inexplicable effects. All just wild hacks.
[WordPress › Support » [[Plugin: WP Super Cache]] Blank Pages - 500 Error - in Dashboard (sometimes the site too)](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-super-cache-blank-pages-500-errror-in-dashboard-sometimes-the-site-too). Describes my current problem since I have SuperCache - maybe this is also my solution. Otherwise, SuperCache will just be removed, because before that it actually ran well, just slowly. If it's dark (uh, white) in between, it might be due to my problem and I'm still analyzing.
WP Super Cache is highly recommended if you use several plugins like I do (and possibly access external services like the Tumblr plugin). Okay, there is a risk that a broken status from Tumblr might be cached in the sidebar, but this will resolve itself after a while. However, the runtime of a fully loaded WordPress is indeed a bit sluggish.
I've now activated the wp-Typography plugin on my blog for testing. While I haven't seen many good hyphenation algorithms for German before, this one might work reasonably well. It certainly makes sense to prevent widows and orphans. And in the first test, the text already looks very pleasant.
The Front-end Editor is a very useful plugin for Wordpress. You can directly edit many elements in the front end with a double click. Since I usually only notice typos and formatting errors when I look at my blog from the front end, I can edit directly there without going through the admin. It's much faster for me.
jQuery lightBox plugin is very nice. It doesn't use Prototype or Scriptaculous, but simply jQuery - which is very helpful if a site already uses jQuery. And with the jQuery LightBox Plugin for Wordpress you can easily use it for displaying images in your own blog.
Twenty Ten Weaver is a more flexible child theme for Twenty Ten. However, it overloads some of the PHP files from Twenty Ten, so you depend on whether the developer continues to maintain it. But it can customize a lot of things on its own, which I have currently done with my own theme.
Dynamic Widgets | Qurl is a very practical WordPress plugin that enables dynamic rules for widgets. With this, for example, the "latest articles" can be suppressed on the homepage (since they are all there anyway and that would be redundant) and, for example, my Tumblr photos can also be suppressed on gallery pages (so they don't distract from the actual image content - and, for example, black and white photos don't suddenly become colorful just because of Tumblr).
Word This - Google Chrome Extension Gallery is very helpful, as Chrome is so stupidly designed that bookmarklets run in the same security context as the current website. This means you have to allow a website to run JavaScript if you want to use a bookmarklet like Wordpress's "Press This". With this extension, blogging moves to its own icon and out of the bookmarks bar.
WordPress › WPtouch « WordPress Plugins - no idea if I want something like that. Could be quite interesting though, after all I have such a touch device myself. On the other hand, Mobile Safari also displays normal websites well. Moreover, there is still a problem: the nginx cache knows nothing about it and would potentially cache the wrong pages. In any case, I'm not sure that these mobile extensions get along well with caches.
Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme | aaron.jorb.inaaron.jorb.in. I need to take a closer look at this to customize my site a bit more without having to do everything myself. Update: it works. My current layout is set up as a child theme for Twenty Ten.
WordPress › WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator « WordPress Plugins. I use it on my box to speed up my WordPress. WordPress itself runs in a KVM with a standard stack and an Nginx in front as a cache. Does it hold up?
Bitrot reloaded
It's time to start over and rebuild. This is an attempt to work with WordPress again. After my own software was rendered obsolete by years of not updating the requirements under the blog, this time there's standard off-the-shelf software. Let's see how it goes.
Why I Don't Like PHP Software
Wordpress is indeed one of the better systems written in PHP. And what happens? There are several sloppy programming practices found within it. Yes, I know, this happens in other languages too. The point is: the Wordpress programmers are relatively well qualified and relatively careful in their work - and yet such problems occur. Among other things, because in PHP the sources lie within the server root, meaning files that are actually only used internally are accessible via HTTP. And because PHP solutions do not inherently perform input validation and proper text quoting. No, sorry, but I simply do not like such a mess.
What’s New in WordPress 2.0? · Asymptomatic - even though I will soon be leaving WordPress, it's always interesting to see what's going on there. Besides, at least the Metaeule will certainly continue to run with WordPress.
A Few More Pictures ...
... there is in my CMS Testbed(yes, I'm knitting on my own content management software again). And when I look at how little trouble my own software gives me and how much trouble Wordpress always causes (for example, today I couldn't upload any pictures without being able to find any reason - nothing in the log files, no error message, just the refusal to upload), then the switch could be getting closer and closer ...
Matt Mullenweg and the Money
Well, as Ralf reports in the Netzbuch under the nice title Wordpress, the Weblog Prostitute, Matt Mullenweg - the main developer of WordPress - has once again come up with a grand idea for making money. Naturally, once again at the expense of the PageRank he has built up through the many backlinks from WordPress blogs. And of course, once again without any major discussion or at least open communication within the community. This time it's about advertising placements through some ad space marketer at absurdly high prices.
Lazy Posts in WordPress
The new Wordpress 1.5.2 should finally fix the slow posting - caused by pinging - by moving the pinging to the shutdown, i.e. after the actual request-response chain. In German: with 1.5.2, pinging should no longer cause an eternal wait on the browser. It would be very nice if that actually works.
Since there are also security fixes included, an upgrade is generally sensible. Although WordPress, for a PHP application, functions surprisingly stably - but still, there are undoubtedly one or two skeletons in the closet.
Update: well, it hasn't really gotten faster when posting ...
WordPress 1.5.1.3
WordPress 1.5.1.3 includes an important security fix. So at least take the xmlrpc.php from the release.
Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress
Who wants to participate in Google's latest toy, there is a WordPress plugin for it. I myself have not yet quite decided who actually benefits more from the sitemaps - the site admins or Google. I guess it's - similar to rel="nofollow" - rather in Google's favor.
Software description from metaowl.de
Who cares what plugins I used to put together the Metaeule? Here is a first description. Basically, all parts are normally available, I just had to write a few small plugins and a bit of glue code and a few small patches myself. Already a pretty good sign for WordPress and the available plugins when you can get so far without having to do too much work yourself.