JonCellini.com

I upgraded to the latest WordPress nightly earlier today. So far the new features are impressive and the upgrade was a breeze. Drop me a note if anything appears broken.

Blogging

Heather (my wife) has decided to start keeping track of her impressions of Portland’s culinary scene. You can check it out here.

Blogging

Tonight I came across WP Hashcash which is an improvement (evolution ?) of Matt’s stopgap spam solution that I had been using previously. Hopefully it will help reduce the occasional annoyance of comment spam.

Blogging

If they were Sun it would probably be called version 5.0 instead of 1.5

Blogging

WordPress 1.2.1 was released today in response to a pair of security issues. I was pleasantly surprised to find it took more time to download the tarball than it did to upgrade my three hosted installations

Blogging

Ever since I converted my blog over to WordPress I have been at a loss for a good moblogging solution. In the past I had been using a script found at Tokyo Tidbits which worked well and could be called easily from procmail. Unfortunately once I had converted to WordPress I found it would no longer work as it uses the metaweblog API to create blog posts. WordPress supports this API, however, the current implementation is lacking support for media objects making posting pictures problematic.

I spent a while looking for WordPress compatible solutions but the ones I found either didn’t work or were simply too cumbersome requiring a script to run periodically to check to see if mail was waiting to be processed. Personally I think the procmail method is a better way to tackle this problem as it doesn’t require the overhead of firing off a script that will 99% of the time find nothing to do and also avoids the added complexity of handing the mail interfacing.

A few weeks ago I came across Dr Dave’s WP-keitai-mail Plugin (a script actually) that can be used just like the Tokyo Tidbits script. I had some time to kill Saturday afternoon so I configured it and it works great. Since it is fired up from procmail it was trivial to change over to using it. It works great with my Nokia 3650 phone making posting as easy as sending an email message. I need to do a bit more experimenting with Heather’s phone as it is crippled to only be able to use the T-Mobile MMS relays which have the annoying habit of tacking on a bunch of extra crap to messages which causes the script to behave erratically.

We are off to the North American Specialty Coffee and Beverage Retailers’ Expo in the morning so if I see anything cool I’ll post some pics.

Blogging, moblogging

Here is an updated mini-HOWTO on configuring Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme to work with WordPress when installed in a nested (non root) directory structure. My prior HOWTO seemed to help some people so I thought I’d take the time to update it to reflect the current release (1.2.4a) of Kubrick. Fortunately, Michael has made a number of improvements since I wrote the original HOWTO so configuring it is much simpler.

Read more…

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It is always amusing to browse through my web logs and look at the various queries that people enter into search engines that ultimately lead them to my site. Often I stop and wonder both about the individual who is in search of them and also by what bizarre circumstance did my site happen to end up in the search results.

You can sample some of the more amusing queries here.

Blogging

Here is my first stab at a mini-HOWTO on configuring Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme to work with WordPress when installed in a nested (non root) directory structure. As Michael mentions in the readme included with Kubrick it is pretty easy; however, a few people had emailed me asking that I document how I was able to get it to work on my own site.

The detailed instructions follow below. Please note that they reflect the 1.2.2d release of Kubrick and to the best of my knowledge they are correct / accurate. Your experience may vary so back up your original files before starting and good luck! Thanks again Michael for making such a cool theme available.
Read more…

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Last night I went ahead and applied Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme for WordPress. I have desired a more polished and professional look for my site, however, I lack the artistic flair and CSS-fu to make a change. Thank you Michael for sharing your design!

I am still working out some minor kinks with it as it was originally designed to run from the root of a site and not from a nested directory. Feel free to drop me an email if you notice anything that is still terribly broken.

Blogging