Is there food? » Tech

Feed Problem and New Front Page

Dan — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:14:53 +0000

Apologies if you’re reading this using a feed reader. It seems that adding a WordPress excerpt for the two Frightfest reviews caused them to not show up in my RSS feed for the site. I’ve deleted the excerpts and hopefully the problem won’t appear again. If anyone knows how to use excerpts on posts with WordPress and not have the feed affected, I’d love to know. Otherwise I’ll figure out a workaround.

In other news, the front page of Is There Food has ditched the magazine look, and gone with straight blog again. There wasn’t enough variety of posts to make the magazine view work, and a few people actually said they found it harder to find latest posts. So back to the blog look we go.

More Frightfest reviews coming over the next couple of days. There’s some zombie news coming too!

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Organize Series and WordPress 2.6

Dan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:18:39 +0000

I noticed that Wordpress 2.6 broke one of my favourite plugins - Organize Series. I don’t use it on Is There Food, but it’s handy at Eurocritics. Thanks to the post revision functionality in 2.6, Organize Series goes a bit bonkers (it doesn’t know any better, bless it) and you end up with “part 8 of a 3 part series” after a few revisions.

But I’m happy to report I found a satisfactory work around: turn off those pesky post revisions. They’re great in the right environment, but for single user blogs they might not a great deal of help. And for now, I’d rather have working series functionality on Eurocritics than post revisions.

First off, follow the mighty Lester Chan’s advice to turn off post revisions. You can also use the SQL he’s posted to delete revisions from your database (although you might want to keep them around for the next part).

Then, fix the damage that’s been done. You’ll need to check through the wp_postmeta table and get rid of any references to posts with ids that relate to revisions. Then, set the series_part value for each of your existing posts to be the correct value.

Once you’ve done that, harmony and equilibrium should be restored.

Link!

Organize Series and WordPress 2.6 « Unfolding Neurons.

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Post tags: organize series, plugins, post revisions, WordPress

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Dell’s Studio Hybrid

Dan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:02:30 +0000

I spotted these on Dell’s site earlier today. I think they look great: they’re just the right size to snuggle on one corner of your desk, are aesthetically pleasing (except for the bamboo one), and apparently don’t use a great deal of energy.

I bet they’d make a nice Hackintosh alternative to the Mac Mini, or a decent home server. I’d like to suggest they’d make a good Media Center machine too, but I’ve had trouble getting the integrated Intel 3100 graphics to play nicely before (largely overscan related, tbh, so YMMV).

So, anyone at Dell want to send me one to review? No? Curses.

Anyway, link!

Dell Studio Hybrid Desktop Details.

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Massive Twitter Data Loss

Dan — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:04:28 +0000

It looks like Twitter have screwed up big style. I added several people to my Twitter account (feed? roll? What’s the correct technical term here?) at Wordcamp UK on Saturday, and now they’ve all vanished.

After adding them all back in again, I’m now thinking: is there any point? I’m sure some people can’t quite see the point of Twitter anyway, but it’s a handy way to keep up to speed with distant contacts. I’ve got a few folks from Blogcritics on there, and the previously mentioned Wordcamp crew.

Clearly Twitter have rolled back some sort of database, and have had to restore a version that’s lost shedloads of data. Check this link and you’ll see lots of people talking about lost followers.

If I managed to lose that much data, I’d be fired. My users would have no faith in the service I offered. Not to mention the cost of losing that much data.

And to make matters worse, there’s no mention at all on Twitter’s blog. There is, however, a notice on their status page. But how many users know about that? You’d think a service like Twitter could send a ping to all of its users to notify them of the problem.

I could move to Pownce or Plurk, but I can’t be bothered. There’s nobody I have any interest in following on those services, which really does defeat the object in my eyes.

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll carry on with Twitter. I’d like to hear from anyone that’s completely put off by the recent cock-up.

Fail Whale indeed.

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Post tags: data loss, followers, shambles, twitter

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WordPress for iPhone

Dan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:16:02 +0000

I’ve been looking forward to this one: the WordPress client for Apple’s iPhone has been released, and is available on the App Store.
As seems to be the trend, I’m writing my thoughts on the app, using the app. And it’s pretty good.
It lacks a certain amount of advanced functionality; there’s no capacity for advanced formatting, no way of inserting links in posts, and no capacity for blog management outside of writing posts. But this is a version 1. A first attempt. And as such, it’s a good one.
The interface is slick and easy to use, you can manage and post to multiple blogs, and there’s full support for tags and categories. Tags aren’t pulled from your blog, so best remember what you’ve used before.
It could do with a spellcheck, but that might be out of the question. It could also do with a way of posting links - maybe use the embedded Safari functionality employed by the post preview tool, but have a button to add a link to the currently viewed page?
I take my hat off to the development team though - this is easily the most impressive blogging experience I’ve had on any phone (including n95, and windows mobile platforms).
I look forward to the future of iPhone WordPress. Now, how do I get in on the beta and some ad-hoc distribution?

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WordPress 2.6 Has Arrived

Dan — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:42:17 +0000

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6
WordPress 2.6 is now available. Hit the link above for lots of info on what’s new.

I’ve updated my hosted blogs, so if you’re reading this and I host a blog for you, you’re good to go. If you’re reading this, you know me, and I don’t host a blog for you (but you’d like one) let me know…I’m sure we can sort something out…

As for my favourite new features, there are a few. The Press This bookmarklet is extremely nifty, and auto senses whether you’re posting about a link, quote, picture, or video. Hopefully it’ll ramp up my blogging habits a bit on ITF. I might even create an asides type category for short and sweet posts. What say you, reader?

To use it, drag the Press This link out of the Write Post page onto your toolbar, or make it a bookmark, then just click it to include a link to the page you’re currently viewing. Or, select some text, and click it to include text and link. Or try it on YouTube…or…you get the idea.

Also there’s nifty theme previewing if you fancy trying new themes out, post revisioning (which will be handy for CMS and magazine style sites, like Eurocritics), and Google Gears support (hit the turbo button in the top right of your admin). Gears support looks nice, and does provide a nice speed boost. If I’d had it before moving away from my former hosts I might not have moved. But then I lurve WebFaction, so I’m glad I did.

Last couple: image captions (coming soon to ITF), and better image editing support in the editor are very welcome, as are the usual bug fixes and performance tweaks.

Another very solid release from the team. 2008 is certainly WordPress development’s most successful year to date.

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