0xDECAFBAD - Tag: wordpress

too much information running through my brain

2006-10-27T22:10:58+00:00

So, mostly for the hell of it, I've loaded my footer with the output of as much of my activity elsewhere on the interweb that I could think to include. Let's see if it's useful, or just information overview overkill.

Archived Comments

Geof F. Morris
2006-10-28T13:29:07

It's interesting. I route a lot of this on my end through del.icio.us, which then just spews it back in daily link-postings. But I guess that I also do the same thing with the URL I've linked here---a place where I don't blog but where I do aggregate everything that I do. Some of these places have closed ecosystems, so obviously I'm just providing links in there, but ... it's fair to say that it could be effectively used to stalk me, much as your footer could be effectively used to stalk you.

How's the leg?
jcwinnie
2006-10-28T15:52:02

Om-ma-nay-pahd-may-ohm
Dougal Campbell
2006-10-30T19:22:10

I'm liking it. One of these days (in my Copious Free Time), I'm going to do a real redesign of my blog. I'm still collecting ideas for how I want to organize things. I was thinking about a double sidebar, but when I actually play with it, it just looks too cluttered. I might experiment with a sidebar/footerbar combo...
JuandeSant
2006-11-02T13:14:47

You're sure that qualifies as a “footer”? First impression is articles form the header ;-)

sandbox with a hemingway-like rich footer

2006-10-27T16:39:45+00:00

So, instead of switching to Hemingway as a new theme, I just made some small tweaks to Sandbox and my accompanying CSS. I've been happy so far to be able to do my customizations to Sandbox entirely in an add-on CSS - but this time, I wanted an additional WordPress Widgets sidebar. Sandbox offers 2, but I wanted 3. A small hack, but one I'll have to remember to re-hack if ever I update Sandbox.

Anyway, I think I've got a start on what I really wanted from Hemingway: The sidebars are now footer columns, and the body of the blog itself is much simpler. Now I can dump even more of my aggregated net-activity into the footer, which will be there for people who've stayed with the page long enough to get to the bottom and possibly want to see more of my drivel.

hemingway theme blocks and widgets

2006-10-26T20:06:13+00:00

So, after reading a comment from Brian Cors and wandering by his site again, I've suddenly gotten more interested in the Hemingway theme for WordPress. One problem, though: Although the WordPress Widgets plugin (about which I've raved) was based on Hemingway's Blocks feature, it's not apparently compatible. So, anyone know how to make it compatible, or where I can get more Hemingway blocks?

Update: Actually, Hemingway blocks look pretty easy to make, and the inlineRSS plugin makes for easy external site integration so I can pull my output together here. Now, if I can just get around the bugs in word-count-limited front page excerpts with Markdown.

Archived Comments

brian cors
2006-10-27T11:35:14

You nailed it. I use inlineRSS to suck in feed info from other sites, and place the php code into a new "block" for each section.

It's pretty cool - once you add code into the "blocks" directory - then go back to your WordPress admin site, it will know that you added new code and ask you for the name of the new block.

Be warned - name the block as you want it the first time - from what I can tell [and confirmed by the theme author] - you can't rename it once you do so.

Have fun, and good luck! There are a few special xslt files that I use - one in particular for my del.icio.us links - that I can pass along, if desired...

we have an akismet piper down!

2006-08-27T18:04:39+00:00

I’ve grown so used to the awesome spam blocker that Wordpress.com includes for free (it comes from Akismet, which is owned by Automattic, the same folks who do Wordpress). But tonight a TON of spam got through. So, I wonder if Akismet is down or if something got horked?

Source: Is Akismet down? « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

I guess I've just been taking Akismet for granted, since I've only seen comment spam in the dozen-per-day range. Now I'm up to dozen-per-minute, some days. I've just tossed in a few bandaid solutions, so we'll see what happens. Things like this really make me wish I had magic powers to go find the spammers and apply Chinese water torture using bits of processed meat.

Archived Comments

Matt
2006-08-27T21:10:14

Hopefully you can go back to taking it for granted now, sorry for the problems this morning. I posted some more details about it to the Akismet blog.
l.m.orchard
2006-08-27T21:23:21

Matt: I think, if anything, this told me how effective the Akismet service has been at keeping me from realizing how bad comment spam has been getting! :) I don't envy the job you've taken on.
Bill Humphries
2006-08-27T21:39:15

Cyn and I didn't know that it was down until she read Scoble. We got back early this morning and (as nerd couples do) checked our email to find a whole mess of comment spam on our blogs. We've installed Bad Behavior to backstop Akismet.
Geof F. Morris
2006-08-27T23:27:30

If you want a belt to go with those suspenders, I'm a big fan of Spam Karma. [So much so that I don't even use Akismet.] Hope this helps, Les!

sandbox is nifty

2006-08-21T16:41:28+00:00

I'm really digging the Sandbox theme for WordPress so far. I've not really done much yet - but between Sandbox and the new WordPress Widgets, all my customizations for this blog have been done in CSS and drag-n-drop in the widget management screen. Sandbox has an enormously rich set of classes dropped into every major element of the page, even down to date/time information on posts and category-based classes. I could even drop in some seasonal themes to styles posts for holidays and whatnot. Pumpkins for October, and presents for December!

I did need to add one line of PHP to a Sandbox template, and that was a CSS include to my own tack-on CSS full of tweaks to the Spartan skin. If anything, that's my only feature request so far: Allow skin selection, and then allow the user to specify an additional stylesheet to further tailor that skin. The less I need to edit in files installed from third parties, the less I need to maintain when versions get updated.

I'm also running into a few minor CSS oddities when I view my tweaks in MSIE on Windows. This annoys me, but I only half care to fix them.

Archived Comments

Seth
2006-08-21T18:17:39

Hey, Looks like your markup isn't getting processed in your feed. This post looked like this in bloglines:

I’m really digging the [Sandbox][] theme for WordPress so far. I’ve not really done much yet - but between [Sandbox][] and the new [WordPress Widgets][].....

Also,the link to your "All Entries" feed is busted in the left hand nav on the archive pages.
l.m.orchard
2006-08-21T20:20:26

If I'm lucky, I just fixed my Markdown problem by adding this line: add_filter('the_content_rss', 'Markdown', 6);

If I'm not lucky, I just broke everything.
Seth
2006-08-21T20:35:26

Yep, feed looks good now.

All the feed links are missing "http" though.

about me as a plugin

2006-08-19T19:18:42+00:00

We need both ends of this. We need the social networks to be able to import the data. But we also need the personal blog software to support an "About Me" page that maintains and publishes the master copy.

Source: Voidstar - Personal About Me Pages and account creation

This sounds like a perfect job for a decent WordPress plugin, which could double as a standalone PHP app.

Archived Comments

Niklas Gustavsson
2006-08-21T19:25:37

Sounds a lot like what the OpenID protocol with the Simple Registration extension aims at. Using, for example, the PHP implementation of the OpenID server, you could maintain your identity (as long as it supports Simple Registration). Then, at the site where you'r required to register, you simply fill in your OpenID identifier and the rest is magic.

There is also a Wordpress plugin (http://singpolyma-tech.blogspot.com/2006/04/openid-for-wordpress.html) available that will run a server within Wordpress, if that's what you would like.

Personally I use the myopenid.com server, but running your own should be just fine. That's the point of a distributed identity system :-) You can read a little bit more about my experience setting it up in Wordpress here: http://www.protocol7.com/archives/2006/08/21/openid-on-protocol7/

/niklas
l.m.orchard
2006-08-21T20:12:53

Having an OpenID endpoint here is one part of what I'd like to do. The other is a kind of NetVibes-ish public aggregation of all my output from other sites, and to point new services here as I join them to import my already-provided details. So, beyond the auth that OpenID provides, I want other sites to read my hCard and profile data etc.
Niklas Gustavsson
2006-08-21T22:00:10

Not sure if it will allow for all the information you would like to provide, but simple registration does allow for a site where you authenticate with OpenID to retrive the needed data. The subset of information (http://openid.net/specs/openid-simple-registration-extension-10.html#responseformat) might be limiting though. Of course, that won't include more rich data collected at other sites, like your del.icio.us links.

no amazon iframes for me

2006-08-18T05:22:56+00:00

So here's a problem that's cropped up for me lately. I think it came with the upgrade to WP 2.0. I'm trying to include some Amazon-provided iframes in the sidebar for continue book pimping, which worked fine with my WP 1.5 installation. But now, for some reason, the iframes are always forced into a display: none style and I can't figure out what's doing it.

Update: Now is the time on 0xDECAFBAD when the head meets desk. Adblock is the culprit. Oof.

Archived Comments

Aristotle Pagaltzis
2006-08-18T09:13:09

Works for me.

Maybe it’s not actually a problem with your site, but rather some adblocking thingie that’s running on your desktop?
Dougal Campbell
2006-08-18T13:32:29

I see it, too. Ad-blocker? User.js? 1337 h4x0rz?
l.m.orchard
2006-08-18T13:39:22

Ugh, now why didn't that occur to me? Yup, I'd installed a particularly zealous set of Adblock filters recently. Thanks for the clues. :)
Scott Allen
2006-08-31T00:35:27

Actually, I'd just like to know where you found that nice lean Amazon iframe. I haven't been able to find the place to generate a link like that. I can copy your links and swap my affiliate ID and the ASIN, but that's a PITA.

969

2006-08-15T22:33:43+00:00

Huh. Generally, I scoff at the idea of hand-holding widgets for blogs. But, having peeked at the new WordPress Widgets, I actually get the sense that they will actually make tweaking things for this blog easier and more theme-agnostic. I can roll my own widgets, and not need to rejigger the main theme and associated templates every time I drop in an update. Swanky.

Archived Comments

Bob Aman
2006-08-18T23:48:52

Looks a lot like what Typo did. Even the UI is the same. That said, I'm sure Wordpress implemented it much better. (I can't wait to get myself off Typo and onto my own code.)

Re-introducing nightly link posts

2006-01-20T17:19:57+00:00

It feels all old-school like my first days of posting link blog entries, but I've added a "thingy" over at del.icio.us to schedule nightly posts from my day's bookmarking activity. I was feeling a bit of a lack here, since I completely detached my links from the site after the reboot this past fall. So, I hope you don't mind the new daily links—and if you do, tough. They're good for you. Like roughage.

Smarty is on my evil list

2006-01-08T01:33:47+00:00

Although I have my grousing about PHP in general, I have to say that it makes much better template language as-is before pulling something like Smarty into the mix.

At this point, I consider Smarty to be evil—though I'm willing to admit that I haven't grokked it fully yet. And this is coming from a templating addict who has been at times in love with Template Toolkit in Perl, Velocity in Java, and Cheetah and Woven and ZPT/TAL in Python.

WordPress seems to have put native-PHP-as-templating to good use, so I've already got a favorite for comparison. But the use of Smarty in reBlog rubs me the wrong way. Of course, reBlog has a lot of highly-abstracted MVC architecture going on. And this, itself, is something I haven't much in my PHP explorations thus far. (In fact, I almost hate to see PHP chopped up in this J2EE-esque fashion, but that's another story. Oh, and reBlog rocks, by the way.)

But either way, Smarty makes this right-handed hacker feel like he's writing with his left. It seems to have a lot of weird conventions and terminology for which neither knowledge of PHP nor knowledge of other templating systems in general seem much help. It could just be a learning curve, but to me it seems like an odd sideways curve at the moment.

In fact, you know what? Smarty reminds me a lot of DTML in Zope. I hate DTML—it, also, is most firmly on my evil list.

Yuck. Again, it could be just that I haven't known Smarty long enough to like it... but yuck.

Archived Comments

Luka Kladaric
2006-01-08T11:55:40

I agree with you... I used Smarty in one project and am now using it in another work-in-progress... and I have to say, the decision to use it with the second was a bad one... Smarty is pretty cool for simple templating, but when you need raw power, it leaves you shipwrecked... I had to turn to some really black magic to get things done... Anyway, a rewrite of the first project is in negotiations and I'm 100% sure I will NOT be using Smarty there, either.
kellan
2006-01-08T14:34:57

Agreed. Using a templating languages with PHP makes no sense. (though I'm not sure the fact that WP does or doesn't do something makes it good design)
l.m.orchard
2006-01-08T15:03:33

Kellan: Oh, no, WordPress isn't an automatic gold standard for me... There's plenty that could be better about WP. (Not having checked out 2.0 yet) But, I just had a much better time setting up the templates for this blog than I have had in hacking around with templates implemented in Smarty.
Bob Aman
2006-01-08T17:41:17

Me, I just wish there was a templating system for Ruby for me to fall in love with. With all due respect to the Rails people, ERb just doesn't really do it for me.
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2006-01-08T21:04:14

Bob: port Kid to Ruby. :-)
Keith Gaughan
2006-01-08T21:28:05

What's moronic is that people go to all this trouble building templating systems when all you really need is extract(). Sad, really.
Bryce
2006-01-12T13:33:10

PHP as a template engine is more evil than Smarty. The main issue is that template authors may not be trustworthy. Once you include or eval() a PHP template the app is no longer in control and I don't see any way of structuring a PHP app such that it cannot be subverted from within.

The only defense seems to be using the tokenizer functions to build a PHP parser that validates templates against a "whitelist" of allowed operations. Savant's Restricted Compiler is about the only implementation out there, but it's not quite complete and seems to be more of a proof-of-concept than battle-tested code.

Whatever Smarty's faults, it solves the untrusted templates problem nicely.
l.m.orchard
2006-01-12T14:27:42

Bryce: Oh, I totally understand the implications of offering too much capability to template authors. That's just how much I dislike Smarty—I'm willing to risk it, rather than put up with that particular implementation. On the other hand, in my situation, I'm on the same team with the template developers, so we're all on the same team to sink or swim. I know it's not that simple, in principle, but it covers the 80% of the 80/20 equation.
Dougal Campbell
2006-01-12T15:25:25

Yeah, I was never able to get into Smarty either, and I've never been able to put my finger on why. Philosophically, I like the idea of using template engines, particularly if you're collaborating with a non-programming designer. I even wrote one (albeit a very simple one) myself, once. But I've never used any of the PHP template packages that I've looked at.
Bob Aman
2006-01-13T01:10:16

Aristotle: When TurboGears first came out, I almost did, believe it or not. But then I remembered that FeedTools eats all of the time I have available for open-source projects, and I figured someone else would probably do it for me anyways...
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2006-01-13T09:02:38

Hehe. Well, I plan to port it to Perl, in any case. :-)
Brian Grayless
2006-01-19T16:00:24

Smarty is really a waste of time. Some food for thought....

Smarty for Dummies?

Just write better code!!!
Tali Banana
2006-02-01T07:33:41
Well, quite opinionated I see.

Smarty solves some fantastic problems and the cacheing system is beyond fabulous at this level.

I've used Smarty on several projects and have been using it now exclusively for 4 years. Of course, I used others but it was getting sick coming to a new phase in a project and finding out the template system had become RIP....abandoned before their time.

Smarty has done two great things for me, and I'll speak about them until the day that PHP is abolished:
1. Smarty has reduced my code to a reasonably sized, scan-able, masterpiece. Having the logic and presentation seperate is so nice. I recently rewrote one of my old projects using smarty and all of a sudden it made sense! No more php in the html and no more html in the php. And that's something you can't solve without templates for you juniors out there.
2. Smarty's caching has turned monster db queries into non issues. Consider this. A top 10 list from all-time sales. I'm talking about searching a db with sales spanning 6 years for all items purchased and creating a top sales page. Easy! Smarty does it once and caches the results until I decide they need to be refreshed. Took a 4 second execution time down to less than 0.4 seconds. And all without having to implement a CMS or otherwise. Even if you have limitless resources to buy new hardware, caching like this still makes sense. And the intermediate php/html cache is brilliant. Everything is so much faster with smarty.
I can't deny, I love Smarty.
l.m.orchard
2006-02-01T11:43:36

Tali: I'm usually opinionated, but I try to listen & learn :)

The benefits you describe with Smarty would seem to come with any decent web development system. Separating logic and presentation are the general idea behind templating, and some sort of caching is a must no matter what you're using as a presentation-side tool. My beef is that, out of all the templating systems I've used, Smarty is one of the ugliest.
Tali Banana
2006-02-01T17:30:03

Smarty does need some standards redesign on the interface, as does php itself which has been well documented but slow going.

Coming from the PERL background and previous php template systems I've been very happy with Smarty in general, even if there are a few things that could be done to speed up the learning curve.

May be worthwhile jumping on the dev team and making some suggestions.
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2006-02-02T01:30:31

But why would you need a template system when you’re already working with PHP, which is itself a template system? Why do You don’t have to have different languages to be able to put the business logic in one file and the display logic in another.

Perl (not PERL), btw, has the Template Toolkit on the CPAN, which is the spiritual father of Smarty. (And it’s vaguely more defensible in Perl’s case becase Perl is not a template system; though constrated with Perl the deficiencies of TT’s mini language are just all the more painfully obvious.)

By all of which I mean to say that whether people use languages in stupid ways does not mean the language is the problem; not in either PHP’s or Perl’s case.

I also don’t see why you need a templating system to implement caching; in fact, having caching coupled with the template engine sounds like a bad distribution of responsibilities. (Indeed, Template Toolkit has no such facilities.) But there’s the Cache::Cache family of modules on the CPAN, which you can use to cache things completely independently of what is being cached – whether it be the output of a template, or the query results themselves, or anything else, which might not even have anything to do without any output you generate.
M.
2006-02-16T14:13:18

I've good experiences with the Expose PHP template engine (www.kwasd.nl/expose). It doesn't require you to learn a new language, because it uses plain PHP and still offers security, because it contains a tokenizer and, in fact, a small compiler. I used it for some projects and it really offered all I needed.

And for people who wonder why one would need a template engine: I work with designers and I don't want them to mingle application code. By setting up a shared folder which contains the templates, they can safely work on design and never need to touch my controller or module files. Especially since this template engine has a tokenizer/compiler, they can't call unsafe PHP functions (only those that you, the programmer, register).
Michal Migurski
2006-03-05T23:16:25

Smarty appealed to us because it offered a (relatively) clean way to separate the code from the HTML output. It's definitely got its problems. A large part of the choice was based on my perception of Smarty as having much thought & effort behind it, plus I like the idea of templates caching down to plain PHP. I've done a few PHP projects where I used PHP as the templating language, and frequently succumbed to the temptation to stash app logic into the templates where it didn't really belong. Smarty has a pretty extensive vocabulary, but has (so far) resisted the pull to incorporate more real-language features, like PHP did. It's worth remembering that PHP was originally supposed to be a template language for "real" code to be written in C. shudder

When we forked Reblog from Feed On Feeds, we were starting with raw-PHP display code mixed in with database calls, and it was a freaking disaster. One of my first design goals was to make it hacker-friendly, clarifying and documenting as many seams as possible so people could make localized changes more easily. I'd like to be using Python under the hood with Smarty on top, though there's a lot to be said for using commonly-known tools like Smarty in apps where you want to encourage modifications.

And Wordpress.... oh, Wordpress. My eyes roll back in my head when I'm forced to touch its convoluted innards. I pushed hard for a Reblog plug-in API specifically so I could cheerfully deprecate the old-style Wordpress plug-in. =)

Redesign in progress (or, no need to adjust your set)

2005-09-13T03:51:56+00:00

Hi there. If things around here are looking or acting a bit wonky, it's because I'm in the middle of my belated site overhaul I meant to do back in May. It was preempted by the book, something about which I want to gush in detail very shortly.

In between bouts of actually being busy, I've been yak shaving around the idea of executing this overhaul--making lists, researching sites I like, installing WordPress on my laptop. Finally, after a bit of a weekend sprint during which I mangled the default theme a bit to my liking and installed a few plugins, I figured that I'd just throw the switch tonight and deal with the fallout as it arrives.

For now, it's bedtime. But, just for The Girl, here's me with the new book!

Archived Comments

Ryan Tomayko
2005-09-13T07:59:13

Looks great!
Pete Prodoehl
2005-09-13T11:23:34

Awesome, now get back to posting on a regular basis! ;)
skippy
2005-09-13T13:14:17

Welcome to WordPress! I've been reading your feed for ages, so I'm eager to see what you think of / do with WordPress.
Matt
2005-09-13T18:39:02

Welcome to the family. :)
Matt Brubeck
2005-09-16T15:46:57

Where's are the links? I see that the archives are back online at http://www.decafbad.com/links/ but there are no new links there. Are they on del.icio.us somewhere?
l.m.orchard
2005-09-16T15:50:56

Matt: Good question! I'm taking baby steps around here, so for now the links section is stale. My live links can be seen on del.icio.us here: http://del.icio.us/deusx Before the weekend's out, though, I'm hoping to use an importer to pull my links into a category on this blog and try to reconstruct something of some semblance to the old links section.
Benjamin Reitzammer
2005-09-21T10:41:12

Thought I point it out ... your permalinks have changed slightly, for example from http://decafbad.com/blog/2005/07/18/ajax_testing_and_logging to http://www.decafbad.com/blog/2005/07/18/ajax-testing-and-logging This is especially "challenging" because you simply shout "Go away" on decafbad.com instead of redirecting to decafbad.com/blog which seems like a natural alternative.
Benjamin Reitzammer
2005-09-21T10:42:51

Worpress messed up my previous comment ... the URLs differ in that the new URLs have dashes in the "post titles" while the old URLs had underscores ... sorry for double posting.
l.m.orchard
2005-09-22T14:30:44

Benjamin: Ack! Thanks for catching that - it's certainly not intentional and is a bug I need to fix.
l.m.orchard
2005-09-22T14:34:43

Yup, turns out it was a ServerName with a www where I didn't want one to be. I *had* actually gone through the trouble to hack WordPress to replace underscores with dashes when looking up posts from permalinks until I'd whipped up a better mod_rewrite solution...

0xDECAFBAD - Tag: wordpress

too much information running through my brain

Archived Comments

sandbox with a hemingway-like rich footer

hemingway theme blocks and widgets

Archived Comments

we have an akismet piper down!

Archived Comments

sandbox is nifty

Archived Comments

about me as a plugin

Archived Comments

see also

no amazon iframes for me

Archived Comments

969

Archived Comments

Re-introducing nightly link posts

Smarty is on my evil list

Archived Comments

Redesign in progress (or, no need to adjust your set)

Archived Comments