Dolavim.us » Blogging

My little AJAX summer project…a CWOP plugin for WordPress

tpepper — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:38:42 +0000

It’s still fairly lame in that it has no gui yet, but I’ve deemed my summer project for learning some AJAX to be ready for its first release!

My weather station sends its data to the internet. Currently the data goes to

CWOP (and from there it goes on to NOAA)
The WeatherUnderground

I wanted a way to do things with the data myself though. So I set about making a plugin for WordPress that will pull a weather station’s raw data from CWOP and dynamically update the current weather in a WordPress sidebar widget.

The project lives here, is open source, and hopefully will continue to get some periodic tweeking over the coming weeks to the point where it has the ability to do minimal GUI display of the change in temperature, wind, &tc.

If you’re reading this on my blog (as opposed to in a feed reader or some other aggregator like Facebook Notes), you should see the current weather in the blog sidebar…straight from my roof.

It’s fun being a nerd!

OK whatever…moving to WordPress

tpepper — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:19:07 +0000

At the moment I’m mostly just annoyed by having to remember the very minimal CSS that I’d once figured out as well as trying to comprehend yet another theming system.

But I achieved the two basic things I wanted: post speed is higher by default and I can post from my phone easily. So I figure I may as well just go for it.

I think I’ve managed to keep old links working thanks to all the static html MovableType left around for me.

WP test blog working fairly well now

tpepper — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:56:13 +0000

It was pretty quick and simple to import from my MT blog export.

I really need to do some theme/css tweeking. And set up a little photoblog roll in the front page.

I think my MT archives/links are going to actually move over more or less intact also which is a plus.

The iPhone WordPress app is working.

Managing the site is sooo much faster now.

WP permalinks broken

tpepper — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:17:36 +0000

No big surprise that I’ve hit this given it seems to be one of the most common problems WP users encounter. I’ve been trying to connect with the iPhone WordPress app and have not been succeeding. I still haven’t gotten around that, but I did notice that besides the main page, links were not working on the blog.
I’d changed to a non-default permalink option. And that was causing 404′s. It seems to be that when I do this WP was supposed to automagically update an .htaccess file for me, but this isn’t happening. Changing back to the default permalink style and sub-pages on the blog are working now.
Still no forward progress on the iPhone app connection hanging.
Between looking at the .htaccess and the Fedora wordpress-mu.conf for apache, it’s also clear to me that I’m not currently understanding how the site is supposed to work in general. I need a server work flow diagram or something that shows when a request comes in how it hits apache, what rules do/might apply, how it then hits which WordPress scripts, how those then pull up different content from the filesystem and database and direct to other URLs and any subsequent apache involvement around redirecting. There’s multiple pieces here, their interaction’s design isn’t clearly spelled out and involves a bit of magic, and I’m not a standard install. Plenty of places for subtle configuration breakage.
And configuration breakage is where I am.

Testing testing 1..2..3

tpepper — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:28:06 +0000

Some first impressions of WordPress:

WordPress seems very much influenced by MovableType, coming from the latter. Who knows…maybe it was the other way around with MT4. Either way the UI is all very similar.
I run a server with multiple IPs and which hosts multiple domains. Some of those have a blog. It is unlikely I’d ever do anything other than have multiple domains on the machine, each with a single blog. With MT I have to do multiple MT installs as best I can tell and admin them all. Same for WordPress. Although WordPress-MU potentially offers a way around that. WordPress and WordPress-MU also are integrated into my OS’s package system. If the blogging software is packaged with the OS and I only have that single instance installed, administration is easier. I’ve got a fair amount of digging here to see if I can actually do what I want, but it sounds possible (Multi-Site Manager plugin?). In MT I probably also could move to a single install of MT, but it’d still be a tarball I plunked down in the fs somewhere and managed manually.
Security: I really like that it is very simple to tell WordPress that all user logins and administration should happen over SSL. With MT this isn’t horribly hard, but involves a bit configuring in apache.
Plugins: At first it looked like I needed a special plugin just to send mail which seemed crazy. Again, as with MT, I’m apparently not the normal WordPress user. Most seem to admin their own WP instance in a virtual host that somebody else provides. So they’d not be allowed to run a mail server and have to do mail via POP. But I did end up getting a mail from WP so this did “just work”, but the config made it look like it wouldn’t. I’m generally not crazy about having to run lots of plugins.
Themes: I used to comprehend MT themes a bit, simple CSS and simple MT specific mark-up. WP seems similar, but my first attempt at minimally making a mod’d theme doesn’t appear to have worked. More poking to do I guess.

All things considered things look very similar between the two. MT’s a bit more polished.

Next step is to try importing all my old content, checking if links were correctly preserved or if there’s apache url rewrite magic I can do to make them be, do some performance comparisons and try posting from my phone.

Comparing MovableType and WordPress

tpepper — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:47:46 +0000

I’ve been contemplating moving off MovableType in favor of WordPress. There are two main reasons:

Performance: MovableType’s rebuilding is very annoying. My blog is fairly small, but post times are getting intolerably high. I think for my usage I’d sacrifice (or at least consider/compare) having the fast load time static pages for not having to build static pages frequently and being able to manipulate my blog/site quickly.
iPhone access: MovableType’s fine here if your blog is hosted by them. If you’re in their “power user” class of self-hoster, you’re just out of luck. You can browse to your blog, log in and painstakingly create simple text posts. But WordPress has a very clean simple app for phones which allows easy photoblogging.

I’m on vacation for a few days which gives me a chance to play with WordPress and learn a bit about how to admin it in my environment which isn’t the standard type of install for either WP or MT.
Some first impressions of WordPress:

WordPress seems very much influenced by MovableType, coming from the latter. Who knows…maybe it was the other way around with MT4. Either way the UI is all very similar.
I run a server with multiple IPs and which hosts multiple domains. Some of those have a blog. It is unlikely I’d ever do anything other than have multiple domains on the machine, each with a single blog. With MT I have to do multiple MT installs as best I can tell and admin them all. Same for WordPress. Although WordPress-MU potentially offers a way around that. WordPress and WordPress-MU also are integrated into my OS’s package system. If the blogging software is packaged with the OS and I only have that single instance installed, administration is easier. I’ve got a fair amount of digging here to see if I can actually do what I want, but it sounds possible (Multi-Site Manager plugin?). In MT I probably also could move to a single install of MT, but it’d still be a tarball I plunked down in the fs somewhere and managed manually.
Security: I really like that it is very simple to tell WordPress that all user logins and administration should happen over SSL. With MT this isn’t horribly hard, but involves a bit configuring in apache.
Plugins: At first it looked like I needed a special plugin just to send mail which seemed crazy. Again, as with MT, I’m apparently not the normal WordPress user. Most seem to admin their own WP instance in a virtual host that somebody else provides. So they’d not be allowed to run a mail server and have to do mail via POP. But I did end up getting a mail from WP so this did “just work”, but the config made it look like it wouldn’t. I’m generally not crazy about having to run lots of plugins.
Themes: I used to comprehend MT themes a bit, simple CSS and simple MT specific mark-up. WP seems similar, but my first attempt at minimally making a mod’d theme

doesn’t appear to have worked. More poking to do I guess.
All things considered things look very similar between the two. MT’s a bit more polished.
Next step is to try importing all my old content, checking if links were correctly preserved or if there’s apache url rewrite magic I can do to make them be, do some performance comparisons and try posting from my phone.

Gender bender

tpepper — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:39:06 +0000

I’m not sure why anybody would be that interested, but apparently somebody sees a market in determining authors’ sex. Their AI isn’t so smart though. Their site has a poll which shows them only doing slightly better than 50% accuracy.
As for my blog, they think it’s authored by a woman. And Jenn’s blog appears to them to be authored by a man.

Attack of the corporate blog police

tpepper — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:26:18 +0000

A long time ago my employer started to try to wrap its corporate brain around blogging and I posted a disclaimer in response to their suggestion that us bloggers be open about who we are, not hide our identity, misrepresent our personal opinions as the company’s and so on. But apparently that’s not necessarily enough and it’s been suggested I add a proper disclaimer, so I plopped one one level up to make it more clear that the entire domain is mine and basically is personal ramblings about whatever I ramble about. The link from http://dolavim.us points to my http://vato.org stuff where there’s a resume that tells you who I am on the professional side of things and neither the contact info in the resume nor the whois records for either site point at anything other than me personally. So there you have it.
I suppose I do need to add something to the blog template to shoot over to a static page of “who am I” type info. One more thing to add to the todo list when I have some time to fiddle more with blog templates.

Added Google Analytics

tpepper — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:21:56 +0000

More evidence of my lack of grokking MovableType:
This week Gerrit was talking about Google Analytics and it looked interesting. I pay very little attention to who accesses my blog or when, but it seemed like it’d be interesting to find out. So I did some googling for movabletype and googleanalytics.
I didn’t find much useful, especially in a MT4 context. But it’s easy right…just past the magic script includer at the end of your pages? Except I don’t quite comprehend how/when/why MT makes my pages. So I start putting it at the end of a bunch of templates and it’s not showing up when I view page source in various pages. After a fair amount of trial and error with the templates there was a moment of dawning comprehension. I think I now understand what the different index templates are for and they’re apparently just made up of widgets.
And there’s a Footer widget! So: to use MovableType4 with Google Analytics the easiest way is to just paste the magic script includer code that Google give you into your Footer widget just before the tag. Quite obvious in hindsight, but I guess I’m a little surprised that googling didn’t find a simple statement like that.

More MovableType upgrade fixes

tpepper — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:05:07 +0000

Poking further I’ve found I didn’t have archive mappings post MT upgrade and have created them.
And I re-undid their silly default file permissions.
I see they’ve changed from using underscores to dashes for multiword files/directories. So there’s a bunch of old underscore named content that’s been regenerated with dash named content. Seems like yet another pointlessly annoying change. I supposed if I delete my old ones I possibly break old links and need to tell apache to do some url rewriting.
On the bright side I figured out that the missing photo thumbnailing was my part…somehow I lost something I needed and it wasn’t MT being brain damaged as I assumed.
And I am starting to find the info I need in the MT documentation as I stumble through problems and am starting to understand how MT is meant to work. I still think they need a better set of initial user documentation that describes the big picture and how different pieces parts of the system are meant to work together.
I still have template and archive and asset tinkering to do, but am making progress.