Never Ending Baustelle

Long over due, the update to WordPress to 2.0.4 on this site. Until some moments ago I was still running 2.0.2.

Again, I did the update a bit different compared to the documentation on the WP site. First I compared the files from this site to the WP 2.0.2 distribution directory to find out about any local changes. In my case I modified wp-comments-post.php to support AuthImage. Then I compares to distributions 2.0.2 and 2.0.4 against one another to find out about new or changed files. This is the list of changed files. I zipped them after having included the changes for AuthImage in wp-comments-post.php, transferred them to this site and extracted them in the WordPress installation directory. Done.

This worked for me, it might even work for you.

It’s been quite a while, that WordPress 2.0.2 has been released. Until now I didn’t really had the nerve to update to this version, but due to my broken ankle joint, I currently have a little more time on my hands until I’m fit enough to start working again.

Anyway, I mirrored the data from the website to my local Linux box, first to have backup and second to do the actual update on the local system. Update went smoothly due to the very good instructions. After that I needed to update some plug-ins or reintroduce the changes, that one of the plug-ins required. Since I only use AuthImage, Markdown, IImage-Browser and Spam Karma 2 this wasn’t much work.

Finally I deactivated the plug-ins on the website, rsync’d the local WordPress directory to the website, ran the upgrade.php script and reactivated the plug-ins. Done.

Cudos to the WordPress developers. I guess, it’s now time to create some new theme and update the look of the site.

I had some trouble to get jblogeditor to work through a proxy. When I first tried it, I had it installed according to these instructions and then the appropriate settings were inherited from Eclipse. After a bit of fiddling, I figured it out:

./jblogeditor -vmargs -Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy.... \
    -Dhttp.proxyPort=81

Might have been obvious to someone with more Eclipse experience.

In my company I’m still running TWiki as the department collaboration tool. Although to be honest, except for 2 or 3 people in my group the usefulness of a Wiki has not yet really been understood.

Anyway, I’m still running the September, 2001 version of TWiki with some local design modifications. Since I have redesigned my departments website, I thought, it was time for an Twiki refresh as well. A release candidate for version 4.0 was announced recently on freshmeat, so I gave this version a try. And I must say, that I’m very probably going to switch to Drupal. I found TWiki’s customization layer not very user friendly and somewhat hard to understand. There are so many files with so many TMPL definition. In the end I might not have tried hard enough to understand it all, but it sure looks intimidating. Drupal on the other hand was very easy to understand, one template file styled with CSS. To have a little more flexibility, I installed the PHPtemplate engine and after about a hour I had a basic working design implementation even though I never have programmed one line in PHP. With the installed Markdown module, text input for any user will be just as easy as with a Wiki.

So, I guess, Drupal will be it in the end.

Since a couple of days I’m seeing advertisements within the RSS feeds from freshmeat. As much as I can understand, that they must see to it, that their services are sufficiently funded, I still find it pretty annoying. In particular when you are reading the freshmeat RSS feeds through bloglines. Due to the restrained design of the bloglines service, the ads are pretty distracting (which is probably good for the advertisement customers), but it always takes conscious effort to move the attention from the advertisement banner to the actual article. This is not so much an issue with a RSS reader like akregator or liferea, where you usually decide by the headline, which article you want to read. Anyway, I might decide, that I’m going to read freshmeat exclusively with a web browser again.

Since I’ve switch from Movable Type to WordPress and AuthImage, I ‘ve been pretty save from comment SPAM, but since the last 4 or 5 days I’m getting new comment SPAM.

Either the SPAMMERs found a way around AuthImage by examining the image or WordPress sports another security bug. Anyway, this SPAM is really annoying. I guess I have to have a new look at the available WordPress plugins.