wordpress category archive

Toil: Ethernet, Comment Previews, Trackbacks, and WordPress Updates

I love working with computers, but sometimes it can be a chore. You want to work on one thing, but other things break and you have to deal with them sooner or later. It can feel like such a burden. Petty distractions from what we really want to do. Do you ever get the feeling we’re building a big technological house of cards?

But it’s always satisfying to fix things and keep the night at bay for a little while longer.

Ethernet

My wife mentioned Friday she couldn’t get to her GMail account, which I mentally filed as a possible transient connection problem. I’ve had a couple of network hiccups lately where I needed to reset my router and a switch. She wasn’t trying when she told me, or trust me I …

HOWTO: Installing and Running WordPress on Ubuntu GNU/Linux

Step right this way for instructions on setting up your own instance of WordPress using Apache 2 (with mod_rewrite), PHP5, and MySQL. I’m using Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), but I suspect this will apply to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) also.

You may already know that WordPress is free blogging software, Apache is a free web server, PHP is a free server-side scripting language, and MySQL is a free database, but maybe like me you haven’t used the supporting “AMP” pieces that much and would like to get WordPress running with a minimum of fuss and bother.

NOTE: This guide is for running WordPress locally for development purposes. It may help you in setting up a WordPress instance to be served on the Internet, but you’ll …

Comment Preview Feature

I added a comment preview feature, courtesy of Il Filosofo. Seems to be working great and wasn’t much trouble to get working. The only problem I’m seeing is that if I click on the W3C XHTML 1.0 link to validate the page, it complains that the page is not valid because no doctype is found. But there is a doctype, and if I view source and then manually paste that in to the W3C form, it validates fine. The only thing different from other pages I validate on here is that the url ends in .php. Does the validator make some kind of assumption when it sees that? My OCD will compel me to figure this out, but my ADD may allow me …

Getting Images to Display in a FeedBurner Feed and Some Hasty Thoughts on Free Software

I’m trying out FeedBurner for managing my feeds and for email subscriptions. (See: New! In the right sidebar under the syndication links.) It was pretty easy to start using with the help of this WordPress FeedBurner plugin for redirecting the RSS and Atom feeds to FeedBurner. My initial impression of their service is very positive. The only problem I’ve had is that images don’t show up in the feed anymore, because I’m using relative paths and they need to be absolute. (That was most noticeable at first. I’ve since realized that internal links were broken also.)

I contacted FeedBurner support and I think Matt Shobe must have been responding to me even before I clicked the “submit” button, as if they have …

Standing on the Corner with Pamphlets in Hand

Welcome to my street corner. I recently listened to a speech by Eben Moglen called “Freedom and the Future of the Net: Why We Win.” It’s good stuff. Very interesting. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find a transcript of it, but as a value-added service to the MTF community, I transcribed this, where he is discussing how the “artificially large person” (e.g. Christina Aguilera) is manufactured for the purpose of selling things, and:

But all of this depends upon denial. Exclusion. You can’t have it unless you pay. And it’s not actually the

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