elblogg

Det var på høy tid å pusse opp litt rundt her, og nå er det nesten i mål… litt lister mangler nok noen steder (noen bugs her og der), men jeg tenkte det var klart for en public beta

Ta en titt, og kom gjerne med tilbakemeldinger.

De observante der ute (og som ikke bare leser bloggen min fra rss-leseren sin) kan ha oppdaget at merkelappene på bloggpostene har fått et nytt utseende.

Det begynte egentlig med at jeg så på en post jeg hadde skrevet og tenkte “Hm, de taggene der ser ikke ut som om de egentlig hører hjemme der”. Videre tenkte jeg, hva skal jeg gjøre for å få dem mer inn i det visuelle uttrykket på bloggen. Det hadde vært fint med noen bilder, men da må jeg vedlikeholde en haug med bilder for alle taggene. Det har jeg forsøkt før, da bare for kategoriene, og det er nesten ti ganger så mange tagger som kategoriene.

Hva om jeg kunne lage en bakgrunn som fikk merkelappene til å se mer ut som merkelapper? Vel.. min assosiasjon til merkelapper i denne sammenhengen er slike brune lapper som brukes på postsekker. Jeg kunne alltids lage en bakgrunn som så slik ut, men jeg syntes det ville være rart om de bare gikk rett horisontalt.

Her kommer vi til en av de tingene som jeg har savnet i CSS. En mulighet til å rotere objekter.

Velvel. vi kan jo alltids generere bilder på serveren, og bruke det… Og det var akkurat det jeg endte opp med også. Ikke bare får jeg da generert merkelappene slik jeg vil ha dem, men jeg kan velge den fonten jeg vil ha også, selv om webfonts ikke er støttet i nettleserene enda.

Resultatet er merkelappene nedenfor, og php-koden som genererer dem finner du her
Og her er det jeg brukte for å putte det inn i wordpress-temaet

As a programmer and linux geek I often need, or at least want to write about code, scripts and commands on my blog, but as many of you know, displaying raw code in HTML is setting yourself up for failure. The simplest part of the problem is the fact that line breaks and whitespace might be significant, this is simply solved by putting the code inside a <pre> block. The more tricky part is that code often is full of characters like &, > and <. Characters that have a specific meaning in HTML and can’t be echoed directly. & needs to be typed as an HTML entity (&amp;), just as > (&gt;) and < (&lt;). Talking about HTML and XML code on your blog can be a really tedious task (as the above).

I have usually solved this by writing the code in a file first, and then running the file through this sed command

cat file.html|sed -e 's/&/&amp;/' -e 's/</&lt;/' -e 's/>/&gt;/'

But as I work on a Macintosh these days, I’ve been using TextMate a bit.. Not as much as i use OpenKomodo though. TextMate has some nice blogging capabilities. You can use it to post directly onto your blog, and it has shortcuts for converting sections of your post into HTML entities. Just select the text, and hit ⌘+&, 1

Edit: it seems like there is some compatibility problems with WordPress 2.7 and TextMate. The post was published two hours off, and as a private post.

WordPress 2.7 final was announced today.
I just upgraded to wordpress 2.7. It took me about 30 seconds , thanks to svn switch.

tar -czf backup.tar.gz blog.elzapp.com
mysqldump -u root -p -- elblogg > backup.sql
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7

There! that’s it.

Now, what’s my first impressions?

• It looks very nice
• It is VERY much slower than WordPress 2.6.5, that’s atleast my first impression.

I haven’t played much around with it yet. I basicly installed, and went right away writing this post.

This post should really have been published yesterday, but I thought two posts on the same day was enough.

So, the 5th of december was kind of a jubileeum for me, I then had blogged roughly one post each day for a month. Actually there have been 3 days without posts, one saturday and two sundays. But then again there have been 7 days with two posts.

So, what have this done for me?

Writing new posts has become a lot easier, since I started posting daily, and the number of visitors has been going through the roof. Which again makes it a lot more entertaining to blog.

with a

# svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.5
U    wp-includes/post.php
U    wp-includes/version.php
U    wp-includes/feed.php
U    xmlrpc.php
U    wp-admin/users.php

I just upgraded multiple blogs running WordPress 2.6.3 (hups… seems like i missed one release).
Here’s the release announcement

edit
Nope, the 2.6.5 release is the first release after 2.6.3…

Note that we are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.
from the release note…

… again

Christer Solskogen complained about my blog design this week. Or rather the fact that I hadn’t personalized it at all. So, I decided to create a new design. Here it is… There is still a lot to do on it, but I feel its a step in the right direction.

Wow. someone clicked my chatback badge! (the “chat with me”-bubble in the menu)

I’ve just had a pretty long conversation with some random person that had stumbled over my blog, while searching for Digitalo.

It was actually quite fun.

I’ve upgraded wordpress again (from 2.5 to 2.5.1). All that was required was

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1

I havent looked at the changes, I guess its security related, … so everyone… upgrade

The first thing I have to say about this is keep your worpress up to date at all times! Skipping a release will not only make you vulnerable to hackers, but also make it more difficult to upgrade later. But this, of course is something you already know, lets see what we could do to make it easier to manage this.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a distribution system for wordpress?
Actually, you have! You can use Subversion to install wordpress, and upgrading later is as easy as just switching repositories, if you follow static versions, or svn update if you install from trunk.

This makes upgrades a 4 step procedure (you can cut it down to 2 if you like to live risky, or if you don’t use custom plugins):

• Disable all plugins
• run svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/
• go to your wp-admin, and update database (one click operation)
• Enable your plugins again

As mentioned, you may skip the first and the last point.

See wordpress.org for more info, on how to switch from a tarball installed wordpress to a svn-installed wordpress, or performing a fresh install from svn.