Category: {miscellaneous}

Attempting to solve one problem with the WordPress theme has only succeeded in raising several others. For now commenting is possible but your comments will be rendered invisible for reasons I’ve yet to resolve. Your indulgence is requested. Thanks.

Update: So the moral of that episode was don’t try and fix anything that isn’t (too) broken. The problem—the front page occasionally needs reloading to render properly—was solved by upgrading to the latest version of the theme. (K2 is updated regularly.) Unfortunately this raised considerable, and far worse, problems involving the inability to post comments using either Safari or Opera. Firefox was okay but considering that 14% of visitors here are Safari users (not least myself!) that was an unnacceptable state of affairs. So I’ve returned to the older version and will update when they have something available that isn’t a flaky point release.

One final thing: I’ve disabled the comment spam catcher plugin as this was causing problems for some people when posting comments. The built-in WordPress spam filter is now running in the background which should make things more user friendly.

Update 2: Page loading delay was possibly caused by a faulty plugin which I’ve now disabled. We’ll see.

Things are in a state of flux here while I upgrade the WordPress software. Updating to the latest version went fine, it’s been running for the past couple of days, but upgrading the theme is proving less than satisfactory since I’d been using an old version of the K2 theme that I’d hand-modified.

I’ve also been thinking about switching to a three-column arrangement, as Geoff did recently at Bldg Blog, although the three-column version of K2 still needs updating. It also seems to occupy more screen width than other three-column solutions which isn’t good for people with small monitors. Hmm…. If you notice any bizarre changes or alarming errors over the next day or so, this is the reason why.

Regular readers may have noticed the coming and going of certain features here recently, due to my experimenting with different plugins. One of the great features of the WordPress blogging software is its open source quality which allows anyone to write a plugin to extend the application. Ones I’ve been playing with over the past week are Justin Watt’s Random Image plugin which is creating the “Previously” “From the archives” images in the sidebar and the Social Bookmarks plugin which adds a “Bookmark this” feature to the end of posts. The latter I’ve disabled for now since it refuses to allow me to choose which bookmark selections are shown (del.icio.us and digg, for example), presenting instead a fruit salad of different gifs that looks messy. I may return this later if I can find a way to get it to work properly—PHP is not my forte—or find another plugin that does the required job.