Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

Update time

Thursday, September 5th, 2019

WordPress has been nagging me for some time that I needed to update the version of PHP this blog is running on and, in particular, Jetpack had finally given up on me. The sticking point has been that the Digital Ocean droplet it’s running on has been stuck back on Trusty Tahr and a previous attempt to upgrade it had gone awry.

I finally took the plunge and set up a new droplet running Bionic Beaver and eventually found the right combination of PHP modules to get everything running again. Whilst I was at it, I ticked another item off my todo list and enabled TLS (trivial with the aid of Certbot and Let’s Encrypt). A late evening but nothing too painful.

On the downside, when I first set the blog up (back in 2005) I used Gallery to manage images. The WordPress plugin died a while back but the Gallery install itself failed to play nicely with the new PHP version. As a consequence, the item to write a script to locate all those <wpg2id> tags and replace them with the appropriate images still remains very much on my todo list. Oh, and then there’s all those GPX files that were being displayed with Google Maps…

WordPress upgrade

Friday, January 9th, 2009

I’ve finally had a chance to upgrade to WordPress 2.7. It’s relatively painless since I’ve switched to updating via Subversion. The only problem I hit was with text widgets. I was seeing an error along the lines of “Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 1044” which, if you Google it, currently appears at the top of a whole host of other people’s blogs. Deleting all (three) of my text widgets and recreating them seemed to fix the problem. It’s good to see that threaded comments have finally made it in to the base product. I’ve previously experimented with a couple of plugins but never turned them live for users as I’ve never been entirely happy with the way they’ve been implemented. (As a consequence though you’ll see that some historical posts already have threaded responses from me.) I have to say that, right now I’m not a big fan of the revamped admin pages but that may be just lack of familiarity…

OpenID support

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

The observant visitor to this site may already have noticed the addition of OpenID support for logon and commenting on this site. This is easy to achieve with the WP-OpenID plugin. For now I have enabled the option to auto-approve comments submitted with an OpenID. I know having an OpenID doesn’t necessarily make you a good person but, at least for now, its more effort than your average spammer is prepared to go to.
(more…)

Upgrade weekend

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Finally had a chance to put in place a whole upgrades on this site. First up was WordPress 2.3.2. I then needed to upgrade Gallery2 for the latest version of the WPG2 so that’s now at 2.2.3. The WPG2 plugin now acts a lot more like I’d expect a plugin should. Two minor niggles. Firstly, it adds its own page which appears with all the others on the right. You can rename it but I’d rather like to get rid of it completely! Secondly, it doesn’t work with Gallery URL rewrites. Need to investigate that further but it is mitigated to a certain extent by enabling Lightbox support so you won’t usually get to the image page from a blog post anyway.
(more…)

Changing servers

Friday, July 13th, 2007

So, it’s been a little bit quiet on this blog for the past few days. The main reason is that it’s been on the move from the hosting provided by our ISP (PlusNet) to my SliceHost slice. Things would have been much quicker had I not decided to switch Apache for the increasingly popular (due to its low memory usage) nginx.
(more…)

WordPress 2.2

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

Having missed the previous security update I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.2. I’m glad to say everything seems to have gone smoothly (although PlusNet managed to take the site down again at one point which had me a little worried). Nothing really different for you, the reader, to see. Widget support is now there out of the box but then I had the plugin installed previously anyway.

Welcome back blogroll

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Apologies to those whose sites have recently been absent from the links in my sidebar. The modifications in WordPress 2.1 to use the same categories for posts and links managed to break my pages. Having just moved up to WordPress 2.1.2 this is now fixed so the blogroll returns.

Another WordPress upgrade complete

Friday, January 26th, 2007

I’ve now moved this blog and Christine’s up to WordPress 2.1. I’m still waiting for the WPG2 patch which resolves an issue with g2image and TinyMCE but as I rarely post via the web then this isn’t too much of a problem. More problematic was that WordPress now appears to add an extra paragraph tag in around the images which broke the style applied to the Gallery one-image class. Having moved that to the ImageFrame_none class everything appears to be functioning again.

One slightly annoying side-effect of the fact that categories are now shared between links and posts, when combined with my earlier fix, is that the empty Blogroll category now appears in my sidebar. Maybe one day I’ll implement the fix properly and hide entries that don’t have any posts in themselves or their sub-categories! In the meantime I just have to sit back and enjoy the new 2.1 features.

Update 28/01/07: Looks like wp_list_cats has now been fixed so that the hierarchical view does show empty categories with posts in sub-categories (indeed, the post count includes these) so I can remove my earlier fix.