So, I noticed WordPress 2.3 was out, and upgraded with no issues. Of course, then I switched all my categories into tags, and changed my permalinks to leave out my nickname (something I couldn’t do with the old WordPress I was running) and things started going missing.

Using some .htaccess rules I was able to redirect my category index pages to the new tag pages fairly successfully, so that people’s bookmarks and feedreaders (don’t forget people can subscribe to feeds for all of these weird index pages) in what I hope is a clean way:

Some interesting things to note:

• You have to redirect your categories to the tags page so that user agents (browsers and RSS readers) can update their links (if they bother, sigh).
• You have to take special care of the fact that people can reach the rss feeds as categoryname/feed/ or categoryname/feed/rss/ or categoryname/rss/ ...
• You need to be careful with the redirects because you can cause infinite loops.
• You can link to tags and their feeds as UNIONS or as INTERSECTIONS, but not both.

Did you know that people can navigate to pages for multiple tags? In fact, /tags/powershell+development/ will link to items tagged with both powershell and development, whereas /tags/powershell,scripting/atom is the Atom feed for items tagged with either PowerShell or Scripting (or both). I wrote my rules to target the intersection, since that’s sort-of how categories worked so it most nearly preserves my previously working feeds.

I also picked a random new theme, as you can see — I’ve been working on it for a couple of evenings, and there’s still more work to do. So far I’ve widget-enabled it, and partially tag-enabled it … I’m going through the process of modifying a couple of my plugins into widgets (how did I miss this so completely in the past?), and then I’ll hide that extra sidebar on the post pages, and make it variable width.

I suppose I need to modify the header too, it’s hard to read, and if anyone has any ideas about a better way to present code … I’m open to suggestions. Of course… I also need to make it all validate XHTML 1.1 Strict (‘cause I’m like that).

A while back I switched to GeSHi for source code highlighting in my posts, and recently I started writing PowerShell scripts in my posts, and calmly sticking it in <code lang=“posh”> tags, half expecting it to just work, like all the other languages … but of course it didn’t. So after a few searches on Google and Ask, I concluded that a PowerShell syntax file doesn’t yet exist. So, I made one, feel free to grab it (it’s GPL, and I’ve even left intact the “any later version” clause from GeSHi’s license).

EDIT: 6/10/2007
I should mention that the way I do highlighting doesn’t care about “Nouns” at all: it just uses a list of Verbs, and matches anything that starts with a “Verb-” ... that means that for the sake of the highlighting, you can’t just say “Content” for Get-Content or (even though that actually works in a script). Also, I changed the version I was using so that it uses regular expression patters for command parameters, instead of a list. Because you can abbreviate parameters to the shortest distinguishable form, a list doesn’t really work.

Let’s just see in action, shall we? (more…)

I’ve created a variation on the Plain Masses theme, based on the idea of having lots of extra columns on the front page. I got the basic idea from the International Herald Tribune site — they use tables to achieve the effect, and obviously have strict control over what shows up where.

I’ve been trying to decide if I want to make the “main” story a special one, like the latest article in a specific category, but since I don’t usually post even daily, never mind multiple times a day, it doesn’t seem useful to me to have that main article be the “lead story” ...

The next three most recent articles have their “excerpt” displayed in the second column (actually the number of stories in that column is easy to adjust, the variable is right at the top of the index.php file). The third column shows just headlines in a list for the remaining stories on your front page.

The catch to using this theme is that you have to think about things a little more. I had to turn my front page count up to 15 articles to make the third column look right, and I have to write my excerpts more carefully, and use the WordPress more feature carefully, making sure to put enough content on the front page to keep the layout straight. In case you’re not familiar with it, that’s the tag which breaks your post into front-page and full-article sections, and the point is that you need to have enough content on the front page for it to work

I also integrated LiveSearch into this theme, so if you grab the theme download, be aware of that. I was careful enough that it should work without any problems, but if it doesn’t, or you just don’t want it, you can disable it by simply removing all three of the livesearch files …

On my server, the livesearch seems to be a bit slow, I haven’t looked into why yet, the fact is, it works, and in the worst case it still works “the old way”.

If you want to try it out, I’m giving away the theme … as always, please feel free to modify it before you use it. It’s in 7-Zip format, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, you may want to get a better archiver

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away not just MediaWiki (the software which runs Wikipedia) but also the hosting you need to run it. And even further, if you run what they consider to be a popular website, you can even have the advertising revenue from your wiki.

The only catch is that they appear to be sort of forcing the GNU FDL on you, which could cause problems for people who would prefer some other license (like a Creative Commons license, perhaps?) and although Memory Alpha was able to get a different deal, one doubts that anyone else would — Memory Alpha is a 7-Million hits per month site which brings in some serious ad revenue.

At any rate, Wikia’s OpenServing service will be giving away hosting in a MediaWiki derivative in exchange for links back to Wikia. Not just that, but according to this article on eWeek they are hoping to become a sort of unified hosting based on open source website software such WordPress and Drupal. In fact, they’re open to suggestions, so if you are a web software developer and have some other open source software you’re willing to help them install and maintain on their servers … they want to hear from you.

EDIT I’m inserting an extra paragraph
Just to test if the textile stuff is misbehaving
Because I had an error report.

I’m releasing a new version of the WordPress Textile 2 plugin, as well as my own plugin for doing syntax highlighting with GeSHi. But I feel like I need to explain what’s going on, rather than just posting the downloads.

There are two big changes to the Textile 2 plugin. I’ve changed the way I’m distributing the plugin: instead of a single file, there are two, which must go together into a folder in your WordPress plugins directory. To simplify that I’ve packaged them as a .7z .tgz .zip which you can just unpack in the plugins folder. The reason for this change is that this allows me to distribute the unmodified classTextile.php from Dean Allen’s last textpattern release, and allows you the option of just replacing that file with the latest from the svn repository in the future.

I’ve changed the name to “TextileWrapper” to be more in line with what’s really going on. I want to make perfectly clear that I am not editing Textile at all this time. Any bugs with the way Textile work are Textile’s bugs, and should be filed via the Textile Homepage. Any bugs with the way it integrates into WordPress should be filed here. As far as the version number … Dean Allen has left Textile as “2.0 Beta” for a very long time, despite the fact that he’s on version 4.3 of Textpattern (which has been using Textile since the beggining). The internal revision number for the file has been divorced from actual revisions to Textile, because Subversion revision’s the whole project, so there’s nothing to go on there, either. At any rate, based on all that, I’ve decided to just call this version 2.8 as it’s really the next version of my “Textile 2” plugin, even though I’ve renamed it … and it really should work with any version of Textile since the first 2.0 Beta.

I finally came to my senses with this release and realized that the problem with code blocks is really not a Textile problem, but rather, a problem of the various syntax highlighters I’ve been using.

So, Microsoft release Windows Live Writer this weekend, and all I really need to say is: Wow, go get this, it could be a home run.

I’m typing up this post using Writer, and not only did it work automatically with my WordPress blog … it automatically downloaded my “style” so that I’m actually editing this in a WYSIWYG editor that shows what it will look like on my front page (right down to the ridiculously narrow column).  And the “preview” button made me think it had actually posted it to my blog, very impressive. Some people are already saying it may be better than BlogJet ;(which costs $40).

It works with Windows Live Spaces, of course, but also with RSD, metaWeblog API, and Movable Type API, which means it works on Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and WordPress … to name a few. It also generates very good looking XHTML!

On top of all that, it has a really good looking API which should result in Flickr (and YouTube) plugins, as well as Technorati tagging … faster than you can shake a stick.

They’ve already included image uploading and tweaking, including wrapping text around images, and a mapping feature which lets you embed maps (from local.live.com, of course) toggle details like roads, add pushpins with popup photos and more.

However, there’s still some significant missing features, and a few things that bother me as a user of WordPress, in particular.

The purpose of ubernyms is to allow you configure a set of frequently used abbreviations that will be automatically encoded nicely whenever you use them. The goal is to make them visible in a way that is literate for both humans and computers. In other words: we tag them appropriately for your computer, and expand them as necessary for humans.

The main use for ubernyms is still going to be abbreviations, including acronyms. But you can also use it for other things like:

• Words that you always want linked. For instance, the links to ubernyms are being added by the plugin.
• Short forms of words or phrases or even entire paragraphs that you frequently have to type. The whole text can be placed to replace a single word.
• Pictures or emoticons you use frequently. I have photos show up in my DomTT tool-tips for my kid’s names: Katrina and Mikayla.

Edit: May 6, 2006

I’ve included a full configuration panel this time. No more hacking the plugin source to add abbreviations! Each time you go to the configuration panel there’s 5 empty slots for new definitions, and when you submit those, you get space for 5 more. You can remove definitions by simply deleting their Text or Definition. You can see a partial screenshot of the ubernyms configuration if you’re interested, but there’s not much to see besides long lists of definitions.

There’s a setting for each ubernym that lets you define if it is an acronym, an initialism, just a plain old abbreviation, or simply a replacement or link. And if you’re using the DomTT tool-tips, you can specify additional text (including HTML) to be placed below the main definition.

You can download the zip here, which includes the DomTT script which you can also get here with more details about how to use it and the many features, in case you want to play with the tool-tips. The installation is pretty simple, just unzip, and upload the whole ubernyms folder into your plugins folder.

Edit: May 7, 2006

Note that there’s now an option in the plugin configuration for including the default ubernym CSS, but you can feel free to copy that into your CSS and/or edit it as you see fit.

Edit: May 9, 2006

Incidentally, putting the photos in (as I did with my daughters) is extremely simple a?? without getting into the details of how I actually do it, all you have to do is put the img tag into the Description field, and make sure that you’ve checked the option for using the DomTT tooltips. You can use pretty much any HTML in the descriptions for DomTT, within reason . Of course, the images have to be somewhere. You can just upload them to your webhost and link to them there, or just specify an image you already uploaded to flickr. Remember, just put the HTML in, like: &lt;img src="http://static.flickr.com/48/136555658_f0eaa892a9_m.jpg" alt="Sitting in a field of flowers" /&gt;

Edit: May 11, 2006

I’ve just released an update of this, no major changes, but it’s now in sync with my HuddledParser plugin so that if you’re using them both, you don’t accidentally get two copies of the DomTT scripts loaded. Aren’t I clever?

Edit: May 13, 2006

I finally fixed a few annoying bugs related to having quotes, single-quotes, and apostrophes in your abbreviations and released ubernym 2.4

Edit: May 14, 2006

I tweaked the javascript and css so that it all validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict, or even XHTML 1.1, but the DomTT javascript still uses a CSS file with those neat rounded-corners and alpha-blending opacity, so it’s CSS won’t validate … which doesn’t really bother me.

Edit July 24, 2006

Here’s a list of things that I still want to do:

1. I have in mind to provide a check-box-like way of configuring where the replacements happen. That is: to create a sub-tab in the configuration with a list of most/all the “filter“able portions of WordPress, so people can easily choose NOT to have Ubernyms run on comments (usually that’s not helpful, imho, even though that’s the way I run it on my site right now), or choose to run it on the category list, or whatever … I haven’t looked, but there ought to be a way to get a list from WordPress of all the registered filterable things (since it’s trivial, for instance, to add a filter to my RSS plugin … what if I wanted to run Ubernyms on my RSS output?)
2. I still need to investigate the language problems. There seems to be something wrong with the way WordPress is handling foreign-language characters through the option settings table?
3. To make this more generic, it would be cool to be able to “create” new “types” of replacements. E.g. Shanta Rohse wants to use it to create links to a glossary, but still use it for other things too, so would like a “glossary term” category. Maybe there could also be an additional setting like the “english” one that allows auto-linking only the first occurrence as per these requests
4. It might be interesting to add another feature (as a seperate tab?) specifically to create photo popups. I’m not 100% sure how this would best work … (would there be a way to upload photos, or an AJAX interface to let you select photos from Flickr or Zooomr, or a simple ‘preview’ feature and just a text box where you type the URL to an image). The idea is basically to have the tool create the sort of tooltips I have on my kids names, but without needing to type html into that teeny edit box.

So, I was just checking out a few new webhosting deals, aside from the one I usually recommend.

BlueHost

Normally I suggest BlueHost, which offers 10GB 15GB of disk space and 250GB 400GB of transfer in addition to a free for life domain, self-generated SSL certificates and all the usual stuff like PHP, Ruby on Rails and Fantastico and shell access … for only $6.95 a month (if you sign up for two years). Honestly that’s still the cheapest hosting around, long-term.

DreamHost

However, DreamHost has to be the most interesting deal I’ve seen, and actually may have more bang for the buck than BlueHost! Their $7.95 a month (for two years) is only a dollar more than BlueHost, and you can save $30 off that by using GEOSHELL as your coupon code, which actually makes it cheaper than BlueHost for the first 2 years … and they offer 20GB of disk space, and a full Terabyte of transfer, both of which increase weekly (by 160 MB and 8 GB, respectively). They also give you unlimited domains and MySQL databases, PHP4 and PHP5, Ruby on Rails, and your own Jabber and CVS servers! Excellent for collaborative development projects, and I gotta say, I really like the idea of having my own Jabber server… oh, and they have a 3 month money-back guarantee.

NetFirms

But in the purely cheap hosting arena, I found a new contender in NetFirms, where one of my friends works. Their $9.95 a month hosting offers 20GB of disk space, and 750 GB transfer … and now they include shell access, as well as ruby and python (they also offer to pre-install and configure WordPress as your default web page). Now at $10 a month, I’ve never been that impressed, but I just found out they have a coupon code: 998, which gives you the first year for only $9.98 (yeah, for the whole year, that’s 92% off). Pretty cool, eh? If you think about it, that makes two years less than $120, so it’s like $5 a month, way cheaper than anything else out there!

Note: A newer version is available. Please see the category page for the latest.

Another release of Textile by Dean Allen in his blogging tool TextPattern 4.0 has prompted me to make another release of my pluing based on his work. This release is so much better than the last couple, that I really want to just call it Textile 3. I won’t though, because that would confuse everyone, including me.

At any rate, this release improves block handling, and the ‘notextile’ tag (or double equals) actually works as advertised ( *check out* this "textile":1 code that was _not_ converted! ). Actually, that example brings us to another new feature: You can move the URLs out of your code, (even for images) and refer to them by number.

This release is also a lot better about not screwing up when you insert html into your posts, so this, for instance was done with a pair of <b> tags instead of textile markup. That means that comments don’t get messed up, and there should be any problem, for instance, with the adwords plugin.

There are two versions: Textile 2.6 and Textile 2.6 for beautifiers ... the “for beautifiers” version is what I’m using, it removes Textile’s clean-up of <code> sections, so that I can use GeshiSyntaxColorer …

Just for a cool example of the neat stuff: (more…)

Google has just gone above and beyond in the quest for ways to make blogging easier for non-techies. Forget dealing with weird web forms, or figuring out how to create links, or learning “textile” or “markdown” ... now you can publish to Blogger from Microsoft Word, it exports the HTML, cleans it up, and puts it on your ‘blog.

According to their description, “Blogger for Word is a free add-in for Microsoft Word that lets you save a Word document as a post to your Blogger ‘blog with just a few clicks, and without even opening up a browser.”

Of course, not only is it fully capable of making the round trip from Word to Blogger to Word, you can easily retrieve and edit your last 15 posts, and repost them (or save them locally) ... you could use the “draft” mode to let co-‘bloggers review the document, or even just to move a simple Word document to another computer (ok, that would be silly). More importantly, for some, you can write your ‘blog posts off line and publish them later, and presumably you’ll never loose a post at the last second to web glitches — since you’ll have your local copy still in Word.

No more excuses for typos and misspellings guys