I’ll try to blog, twitter, photograph, perhaps audioblog? Videoblog? as much as possible. It seems like the right thing to do.

(If anybody wants to help me put a lot of boxes and some furniture in a truck today, email me at dbt at this domain. In exchange, pizza and beer will be provided.)

This was my first test of SVN vendor branches, and I managed to hork up the web directory pretty bad when I first did it, but a quick fresh checkout and everything was fine. Duly noted: When doing svn merges, don’t work on a live directory. Do a fresh checkout, merge, cleanup, checkin, and update your main tree.

Update: In case any of my three readers care, the underlying problem was that I forgot to make sure my vendor tags had a common ancestor, so stuff showed up as being replaced instead of being changed. Nothing a minute with the Subversion Book couldn’t fix.

Update: And now WordPress 2.0.7 is out. Hooray.

This is why good anti-spam software trumps SQL. I only spent 6 months deleting spam from MT and adding to the blacklist by hand before I went looking for a better way. That way is Spam Karma.

Here’s a tip: When using the “RSS widget” in WordPress, do not point it to any web-based feed. While moving files around, I managed to make the Gallery RSS feed completely nonexistant, which meant that WordPress showed its 404 page. WordPress then tried to fetch the un-fetched Gallery RSS feed to show it in the sidebar on the 404 page. The RSS feed wasn’t there, so WordPress returned the 404 page…

The Gallery RSS feed is fixed, and the WordPress 404 page no longer shows sidebars.

In case anybody’s wondering why my blog showed a generic holding page for the last 12 hours….

Adding in the fact that if the client actually sends an ETagged response (the HTTP 1.1 If-None-Match header), WordPress’s quoting mechanism screws it up. Some people have taken a stab at fixing it but it seems easier to just nuke the @header(“ETag: …) line in wp-include/classes.php (around line 1637 in wordpress 2.0.5) and let last-modified work just fine.

Update: WordPress has another bug that only now becomes evident. If you set a post timestamp in the future, the last-updated timestamp on your feed changes when you save the post, but the post isn’t in the feed. When the post finally appears, the feed comes back 304, even though there’s a new post in it. Ugh. This didn’t show up before because last-modified didn’t work when etag was also sent.

Update 2: I retract everything in update 1. I’m apparently crazy.

Two tips:

The first is that you can use CSS to do the header image without altering the base theme files.

The second is that when you do edit your custom skin, you should copy just the header/comment section, then @import the base layout, i.e. @import url(’3c-b.css’); in your skin. Makes it much easier to separate your color/style/font whatever hacks from the base structure, and you don’t have to worry about copy and paste problems later if you want to change structure.

The third, unrelated tip, is to install the wordpress atom plugin. (If you do this, you _should_ edit the base theme files to change the discovery links to be accurate.)

Dang ole feeds.

The problem was two-fold. One, you still have to modify the template a little bit, and two, FIR is actually worse for its stated purpose (exposing text to screen readers while showing the graphic to most users) than a simple image + alt tag.

The new solution, as outlined here, here, and here is to play text overflow games to make the text disappear, use CSS height and width to make the element otherwise match the image size, and use background-image to show the image. For some reason, I couldn’t get the image center without making the header 100% width which is fine for my site but might not work for you. Use the image height as the height: below.

Here’s the CSS code I’m using to make this work in a sandbox skin:

#blog-title a
{
        width: 100%;
        height: 84px;
        display: block;
        align: center;
        background: url("/header-image.png") top center no-repeat;
        border: none;
        text-indent: -5000%;
}

WordPress, however, only supports the sucky old deprecated Atom 0.3.

So, you should use this plugin to change your wordpress blog to serve up only Atom 1.0 (and no RSS whatsoever).

It’s cool! do it!