Category: WordPress

I use the Update Linkroll plugin and all the links on my portal page. The advantage to doing this is when one of the blogs I read updates and pings Weblogs.com; my portal page will show that the site has been updated. Having just finished staying up far too late watching videos on my computer; I was just briefly checking a few things on my site before heading off to sleep. That’s when I noticed something interesting. My portal page showed Greg Dean’s Real Life webcomic had been updated. This had never happened before, so I was curious to see what Greg had done. *shock & surprise* Greg changed his webcomic’s rant system to be using WordPress!

Unfortunately, I’m not able to get through to the WordPress site at the moment (or I’d toss something up on their forums), but I thought it was pretty damn cool and definitely worth mentioning. Oh and if Mr. Dean reads this; it’s wonderful that you’ve ditched Outlook. Now, you just need to ditch Pepsi for Coke. *runs and hides from the Shirt Ninja*

If you’ve been involved in the WP community at all for the past couple of months; you couldn’t have missed that Root and Michael Heilemann have been… bickering back and forth about Kubrick and designs and usability and whatnot. From what I saw in the various threads on the WP Support forums, on both’s blogs and elsewhere they both need a good smack to the head. I’m too tired of the whole deal to really care who started it or who’s currently at fault.

Why bring it up then? Michael’s got a thread up that’s continuing the spat. Normally that wouldn’t be enough for me to bother putting a note up here but one of the people commenting on Michael’s thread said:

Quoting Root:

IMHO that is going to make WP less accessible to the self design end user than it is now. Some of us are quite interested in these things.

That means they’ll have to pay a designer to do it for them, hopefully. To that I say, “Bravo!” (There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.)

Another person commenting replied:

There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.

Hear hear

And that just pisses me off. I’m not a designer and make no claims to be one. I do have a very rudimentary grasp of CSS and a slightly better one of HTML. I’ve borrowed a book from a friend of mine and am learning a bit about PHP/MySQL. I do all my coding either in Bluefish1 or Notepad2. I looked at the template WP shipped with in v1.02 and realized it was beyond my skills to really modify at the time. So I grabbed a couple of styles from the Alex King style competition but I saw that under some circumstances they’d break. I wasn’t happy about that and I didn’t like that my blog’s style wasn’t something I’d crafted. I kept looking around for something better to use and then Root came out with his Trident template. I was able to drop that in and make a few modifications so that I had a style that’s my own. It’s ugly as all get out but I could alter it as I need it without having to shell out more money to indulge in my blogging hobby. And the idea that just because I’m not a designer that I must be using a pirated copy of Frontpage3 in order to work on my site is insulting! I also think that if WP v1.3 does make it substantially more difficult to create new themes for my site then I will have to an alternative platform.

1 When working on my desktop and booted into Linux.
2 When working on my laptop, whose CD-ROM drive sucks so bad I can’t get windows off the machine.
3 Frontpage is a piece of crap! I’ve had to use it at work a few times and it writes the most horrific code! If you’re going to claim that people are pirating web design software; why not credit them with pirating something that’s actually useful.

I installed WP 1.2.1 tonight and am in the process of restoring some of the hacks/plugins that I use for CoffeeBear.net. If you notice any oddities or problems; please let me know.

Also, I’m sending a trackback on this entry to Craig Hartel‘s site to try double-checking on whether or not trackbacks are broken in WP 1.2.1.

Thanks to my readers. Apologies to Craig for picking on his blog.

There’s one thing about WP that has been annoying me a lot and it’s that the default category option doesn’t work (see bug # 0000182 for details). Since this is so annoying to me and the issue appears to be fairly low on the developers’ schedule; I decided to start investigating the issue myself. I found that check what you’ve set the default category to by running this SQL query against your WP database:

SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name='default_category'

For a bit there, I also thought I’d figured out which function should be calling this sort of query but after a bit more digging into my options; I realized that on my test install, I’d enabled the Advanced editing controls. Bah, back to the drawing board. Well, back to the drawing board tomorrow; I’m getting too tired tonight to continue digging through WP’s code to figure out the problem any further.

Oh and for the record, I’m not the only one that is annoyed by this.