Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I thought I had linked to Urban Giraffe’s great Redirection WordPress plug-in, but there was a glitch between Ubiquity and Delicious and the link didn’t get saved. Ah well. The point is that Redirection makes it dead simple to do two things: track 404s (dead links) that users hit on your site, and create redirects [...]

As one might gather from the week of linkblog posts, it’s been a little hard making the transition away from all-election, all the time blogging, though for different reasons than back in 2004. While then I couldn’t believe that half the country enjoyed George W. Bush’s regime enough to bring it back for four more [...]

A quick heads up for the publication of WordPress 2.6.3, which I missed yesterday thanks to my site’s slowness. This is a straightforward patch release with an update for one PHP class, snoopy, which has a now-patched command injection vulnerability. Mercifully, the patch files are available directly from the blog post, making this the easiest [...]

…are greatly exaggerated. However, I think I’ve fixed the inexplicable slowdowns that have plagued the site since sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. It looks like the issue was related to a plugin, Google XML Sitemaps. Although there had been a few posts since Tuesday, it hadn’t functioned correctly since Tuesday and I think it had [...]

A quick note to those who live and die by Akismet’s comment spam filtering: recent versions of Akismet appeared to have broken the ability to delete your spam comments, but version 2.1.8, released late yesterday, fixes the bug. Not a showstopping bug by any stretch of the imagination, since the plugin automatically flushes spam comments [...]

After the difficulty I had with the WordPress 2.6 upgrade, I was both hopeful that 2.6.1 would fix some of the bugs, and a little hesitant about the upgrade. Apparently both my anticipations were incorrect. WordPress 2.6.1 was released yesterday, and while there’s no explicit mention of the admin cookie bug that I hit on [...]

I may have been too hasty to condemn the WordPress for iPhone app. One of my criticisms was that it couldn’t upload a photo to my site. Well, I just discovered that I couldn’t either, even using the browser. This appears to be another issue with WordPress 2.6.
Fortunately the fix is simple: fill in the [...]

This blog is now running WordPress 2.6. This was the first WordPress update I had done since moving to the platform, and I thought I’d share a few pointers:

Follow the extended directions, particularly the ones about backing up your installation and deactivating plugins.
You may see references to a plugin for automatic updates. No offense to [...]

Sometimes I think I should title this after the first real post on the blog: Quarterly Update (XXVIII). I was so optimistic back then, June 11, 2001, that I never promised anything more than occasional updates. Fortunately, I kept writing, and somehow the habit stuck, through seven years.
Right now the seven years of this blog [...]

This is the second day in a row that autoposting from del.icio.us has failed. Must be the weather.
If you miss my trenchant wit, as expressed in 255 character or less soundbites, you can always see my posts directly on del.icio.us.

It should be theoretically possible with CSS to design a page where the type falls on a vertical grid. In reality, you rarely see this happen because multi-column sites make matching the grid values across the columns difficult, and browsers, particularly IE, have awkward ways of inserting inconsistent space around some block elements.
But the basic [...]

I’m putting enough energy into this particular theme that I think I might keep it around a while. Today I addressed a problem with my daily link posts, which come from del.icio.us with some embedded markup. The formatting of that markup was causing some bogus line breaks (on Firefox, the list bullet displayed on a [...]

I’ve been doing a bit of clean up on some of the early days of my site. Back then, I used Manila’s “story” feature (akin to WordPress pages), and a bit of code that allowed you to edit the front page of the site every day, flipping the old version back into the archives automatically [...]

I’m writing this working list so that I can keep a record of what I did to the Excel theme to get it the way I like it, as well as for anyone else who’s interested in learning how to hack up WordPress themes.
Issues:

The amount of vertical space consumed by the header region (seems to [...]

I switched on Monday to a new theme, Excel, that addresses a few of the issues I had with Cutline. The color balance is much better than with the version of Cutline I was using (which I must say, in all fairness, was a much older version of the theme). I also like the layout, [...]