anderswallin.net

WordPress 2.5 is out, and I’ve upgraded. Most of the shiny new stuff is on the admin side only, and so the outward look of the site remains.

The upgrade went smoothly, with the usual tweaks to style.css for the ever changing header image and to put the blog title in the left upper corner.

I’ve started tagging my posts, and there’s a new tag-cloud at the top of the sidebar. I’ll use it as a way of sub-categorizing posts without actually creating new categories. Once it’s been in use for a while it will be useful for searching too.

Another recent update to the site is the list of WWW-links in the sidebar (”Anders’ Web tips”). It’s an RSS feed of the links I mark as ’shared’ in google reader. Hope you like them!

To make the site a bit faster I’ve downloaded and installed wp-cache. It’s supposed to cache frequently accessed pages (like the front page) and potentially speed up the site a lot. Hope it works, you can comment below if you think the site is slower or faster than before.

This seems like something so central to wordpress that it should come with the default install?

There’s a new version of WordPress available, so I’ve upgraded. Unlike brand new buggy closed-source commercial software, I’ve found no problems with 2.3 “Dexter”.

I’ve been browsing through a lot of scientific papers lately, and was struck by just how bad Nature’s doi resolving sometime is. Try this for example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature04268
You get to a page with the article title, the authors, and the reference. But no sign of a link to the abstract, the HTML article, or the pdf article!?

I’ve also found a discussion on various pdf/paper archiving services. I’d like something that integrates well with EndNote, any ideas?

I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress, which now includes drag and drop customization of the sidebar using widgets. A nice new addition to the default install is the ‘Recent Comments’ widget.

I had to switch to the new default theme that comes with 2.2, but after the usual mods the look of the site is back to normal.

I’m also experimenting with MiniPosts to create a side-blog, or Asides, for short comments/links.

In the future I’d like to include a tag-cloud and maybe some stats-listing in the sidebar.

I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress, release 2.1

Hopefully everything works as before.

Funnily, the biggest new thing (besides ‘boring’ security fixes) advertized with 2.1 is a new visual editor for posts. But to my surprise I found it was not enabled by default! In the admin panel you need to go Users/Your Profile and check the “Use the visual editor when writing” tickbox to get the new and improved editor.

There’s also a new spell-checker, but for me it errors out with a cryptic message “Could not execute AJAX call, server didn’t return valid a XML.”

For some reason I also needed to replace my <code>.htaccess</code> file for everything to work.

Update: I’m still finding it quite annoying that WordPress creates posts with no ALT tag when I insert images and don’t bother to include some text in the ALT field. This results in errors when doing XHTML validation. So I’ve filed a WordPress bug report. Let’s see what happens!

Some notes, mostly for myself, about how I chaged the header image and the way the title is displayed. I bet this will be usefull after the next WordPress update when the theme most likely gets reset back to default.

To get a header image that ‘rotates’ i.e. is updated with a new random picture each time the page is loaded, I used Matt Mullenweg’s simple rotate script. I named it rotate.php and placed it in wp-content/header-images/

I then placed the images I want as headers into wp-content/header-images/ and modified the CSS stylesheet for my theme:

#header {

background: #73a0c5 url('http://www.anderswallin.net/wp-content/header-images/rotate.php') no-repeat  center;

}

Note that some browsers (Firefox!) are smart enough to cache the header image, so if you want to see a new header pic simply pressing the ‘reload’ button won’t do - you need to do a full reload of the page by pressing Ctrl-F5. This is not necessary using Internet Explorer

Also, from the default layout of 4em size and centered alignment, my blog title is now a bit smaller and positioned in the top left corner (so as not to obstruct the nice header pic!):

h1 {

font-size: 3em;

position: absolute;

text-align: left;

bottom: 150px;

text-indent: 0.8em

}

Update: I’ve made a Photo page with all the banner images and short descriptions.

I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress, and like I feared, that has broken my theme (the look and feel of the site). So the site will look a bit strange for a few days until I find time and energy to fix it. Why can’t the theme and look of a wordpress site just stay the same between updates ??

I’ve started using Akismet to block spam comments sent to the blog.

Akismet requires an API key, and getting that key requires an account on wordpress.com. So I’ve setup a dummy acount: awallin.wordpress.com

I have upgraded the site to WordPress 2.0, mainly because of the much improved ‘Write Post’ interface, now a WYSIWYG editor called tinymce.

The upgrade has broken my theme and some of my plugins so it will take a few days before everything is working again…

Update: The theme is now somehow working again and I have installed a cool flash plugin (flashfader) that cycles banner images at the top.

For a while now I have had the stattraq and mostwanted plugins installed. The idea is that stattraq logs statistics of how many users are visiting, which pages are popular etc. into a database. Then mostwanted picks out the most popular posts and lists them in the sidebar on the left.

Up until now I have only got the text “no results available” from mostwanted due to a problem with handling permalinks in stattraq. But today with some help from nice people on the #wordpress IRC channel I got it fixed. There are two things that need to be done.
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