Year: 2008

Minor WordPress Plugin Problems

I real­ized while installing the latest Word­Press upgrade, that I had­n’t yet blogged some solu­tions to issues I had some time ago. These are all issues related to plugins. 

Prob­lem 1: I installed the Organ­izer plu­gin to help organ­ise my pic­tures. It would­n’t show them, which some­what defeats the pur­pose of an organ­izer. Look­ing at the errors with Fire­bug (one of the most use­ful Fire­fox exten­sions I’ve found) revealed that the organizer_jump_directory func­tion was­n’t defined. One of the com­ments on the plu­gin solved the prob­lem: copy the con­tents of the general.js file to the index.php and view.php files.

Prob­lem 2: flex­ible upload seemed to be activ­ated, but I could­n’t see any sign of it in the “Write” page. The “add field” box was miss­ing from the upload part of the page, as well as the oth­er use­ful items. The solu­tion: I needed to turn off the mod_security Apache mod­ule for the admin dir­ect­ory in the .htac­cess file. There are more details in Word­Press sup­port for­um. I also needed to chmod the plu­gins dir­ect­ory to 755.

Prob­lem 3: I have anoth­er blog, and wanted to show the post­ings from this blog via the Atom feed. I set it up, and it seemed to work, but it nev­er updated the list to show the latest post­ings. After try­ing out a lot of dif­fer­ent ideas, I dis­covered in the serv­er logs that I had a 403: Forbidden error, which gave me a new and dif­fer­ent set of things to try out. In the end I dis­covered the source was that the Bad­Be­ha­vi­or plu­gin was block­ing the requests. So I added the IP address of my blog into the bad-behavior/whitelist.inc.php file, and all now works as it should.

Middle East Complexities

Tim poin­ted at a piece list­ing immor­al solu­tions for Gaza, a piece which nicely proves that find­ing a good solu­tion is impossible, and find­ing the best of the bad solu­tions often seems equally impossible.

I’m sure I’m not the only per­son flab­ber­gas­ted by the whole Israel/Lebanon/Palestine mess, and I’ve read a few books try­ing to make some sense of it. The only one I whole­heartedly recom­mend is Thomas Fried­man’s From Beirut to Jer­u­s­alem. The book is old; it was first pub­lished in 1989, but it is (unfor­tu­nately) still rel­ev­ant in that none of the prob­lems it describes have been solved. Many of the people are no longer in power, or no longer on this earth, but the prob­lems they did­n’t man­age to solve are still here, still affect­ing the lives of those who live in that part of this world.

I’m not going to try to sum­mar­ize the book; there are lots of reviews out there. Suf­fice to say that if you don’t know much about the Middle East, but do want to know some­thing about why people dis­agree so viol­ently and why a solu­tion still seems so heart­break­ingly out of reach, get this book and read it. You may dis­agree with lots of it, you may find char­ac­ters described with­in it worthy of respect or you may find them despic­able. I learned a lot about some of the fault-lines with­in Leban­on, Israel, and Palestine soci­et­ies, and the hor­rible con­sequences that have come of well-mean­ing actions.

Mastering the Digital World

Yes­ter­day I went to the stu­dent show­case at the mas­ters of digit­al media pro­gram, a gradu­ate degree in digit­al media put on by Van­couver­’s major post-sec­ond­ary insti­tu­tions. Unfor­tu­nately I had to leave early, but I was impressed at what I saw. The centre is run by Dr. Gerri Sin­clair, whom I’ve known for some time, and she’s obvi­ously had a lot of fun put­ting togeth­er a pro­gram that not only teaches about digit­al media, but teaches worth­while pro­ject tech­niques such as per­so­nas and agile development.

I’m curi­ous as to what sorts of jobs the stu­dents will end up in, par­tic­u­larly for those who go to what one could call less cut­ting-edge com­pan­ies, and how they will fare. The pro­gram is still new, but I think it has the poten­tial to do a lot of good in com­pan­ies, giv­en the focus that I saw on mak­ing the tech­no­lo­gies appeal to the ulti­mate users. They are run­ning an Open House in a couple of weeks; if you’re inter­ested in what these stu­dents are doing with digit­al media, that would be the place to go to check it out.

Ebbs and Blogs

One of the inter­est­ing ses­sions I went to at North­ern­Voice was the Blogs are Dead; Long Live the Blog­ger ses­sion facil­it­ated ably by Chris Lott. There’s a write-up on this wiki; as usu­al a lot of thought-pro­vok­ing stuff was said, only some of which I’ve found recor­ded. I’ve noticed changes myself over the last few years of observing part of the blog­ging world (by neces­sity, only a small part). 

I’ve noticed that lots of people aren’t blog­ging as much, or indeed any more, for var­ied reas­ons. Some spend more time on twit­ter, which scratches their com­mu­nic­a­tion itch, and effect­ively let their blog lapse. Some post no longer need to tell friends and fam­ily what they’re up to via a blog. A fair num­ber of crafters are on Ravelry and post their pro­jects there and don’t need a blog any more.

I’ve noticed changes in the blogs, too; maybe because many people whose blogs I read are using twit­ter et al for the more “trivi­al” dis­cus­sions and thoughts, the blog post­ings tend to be about weight­i­er sub­jects, or work-related. In many cases the tone is more form­al and (dare I say it) bor­ing; I’ve giv­en up on quite a few blogs that used to be fun to read, even if the sub­ject mat­ter was incon­sequen­tial, because they now are more weighty and ser­i­ous and not as enter­tain­ing. Or they’ve turned into col­lec­tions of links. The occa­sion­al link posts, with com­ments as to why those links are worth click­ing on, is fine, but I quickly tire of blogs that con­sist solely of links to oth­er blogs and art­icles. I really can­’t be bothered hanging on in the hope that the author will even­tu­ally come up with some­thing original.

One big excep­tion that I’ve noticed is the craft­ing blogs, which (not­with­stand­ing the people who’ve quit now that they’re on Ravelry) have much the same type of con­tent. I star­ted a craft­ing blog after join­ing Ravelry, and I know oth­ers who’ve done the same. Many crafters see their blogs as a refresh­ing change from work, delib­er­ately not talk­ing about top­ics out­side the bound­ar­ies, keep­ing the dis­cus­sion focussed (more or less) on the ser­i­ous craft­ing issues of types of yarn, wheth­er the knit­ted object will fit once it’s fin­ished, and the best way to cre­ate a par­tic­u­lar design or concept. Or just post­ing “I did this this way and this is how it turned out.” 

I don’t think the blog is dead; it’s just chan­ging as the concept dif­fuses out­side the circle of early adop­ters who are busy twit­ter­ing at each other. 

Bravery

You can see bravery in places you don’t expect it to be needed. In the safe con­fines of a blog­ging con­fer­ence, for example. Read Meg’s post­ing, and Nancy’s response.

I was in that ses­sion, and where Meg was brave enough to tape her pic­ture on the wall, I was not. I threw it in the bin on the way out, cast down by my own inad­equa­cies. Strange how a ses­sion that seems easy and fun on the sur­face can trig­ger so much intens­ity inside.