Year: 2007

Fixing Sociable plugin implode error with WordPress 2.2

ReallyVirtual

I’ve been trying to find some spare time to properly set up this blog before actually blogging. So far things haven’t gone as smoothly as I would have liked.

First, I started getting the same 404s after upgrading to WordPress 2.2. After a few email exchanges with webhost4life, they upgraded my server to PHP5 and that seems to have solved the problem.

Then I had to select the plugins to run here, and each plugin came with its own bugs and problems. For tagging support, I’ve switched from Jerome’s Keyword plugin to the Simple Tagging plugin, as it has more features, and more importantly, because the next WordPress version (2.3) is going to have a native tagging support, and the alpha release has import functionality implemented for Simple Tagging (I’m not sure about other tagging plugins), so the upgraded should be relatively easy.

Sociable, the social bookmarking plugin, gave me a tough time. On installation, its Options screen was generating a bunch of php ‘implode’ errors, with a messed up configuration screen. Though I’m not a php guy (C++/Java are my main tools), after looking at the code, one of the errors seemed to have to do with its auto-update functionality. Disabling the auto-update functionality by creating a new empty body for the function by change the line

function sociable_update_version() {

to

function sociable_update_version() { }

function sociable_update_version_original() {

seems to work. After setting the options to default, I was able to drag/drop/enable/disable the various buttons, and though the save button still generated the php errors, the blog post pages reflected my changes.

But… (why is there always a but) it broke the theme that I had finally settled on and tweaked for the blog, and all other themes were working fine.

I think I’ll let it go for now and move on to more important things, like blogging for example.

Tag test

ReallyVirtual

Testing the Tag Warrior plugin… it mentions using .htaccess so I hope this works… here goes…

UPDATE: It didn’t work 🙁 I was getting 404 on the local tag links, so had to disable it. Trying other plugins now.
UPDATE: Ultimate Tag Warrior didn’t work, two other tagging plugins didn’t work, now trying jerome’s keyword plugin.
UPDATE: Jerome’s plugin works, after hacking the theme template… I’m afraid of dependencies but I’ll let it stay for now.
UPDATE: I got tagwarrior to work by using /index.php/tags as the base url… but the search doesn’t work, so I guess I’ll have to disable it and go with Jerome’s plugin after all.

Age is not just a number

ReallyVirtual

Reorganizing my online presence is one of the items on my agenda this month. It includes updating my profiles on the 100+ websites that I have become a member of in the last 10 years or so.

Today, I started with editing my Yahoo profile, and here’s what I had in the ‘age’ field:

yahoo-age

 

Now I know that they have my birthday in their database somewhere, so I can’t seem to comprehend why my age is not automatically updated. It may look like a small thing, but if a few million Yahoo subscribers have to update their ages each year, and if each such update takes a few seconds, that translates into many man-months of wasted time, when it should have taken the developer a few hours to add and test this small feature! Isn’t saving the users from redundant tasks the whole point of software in the first place?

Next I went to the MSN live website to see what needs to be updated there, and here’s their version:

microsoft-live-age

 

Atleast their programmers know the limits of a ‘short’, if not the human lifespan.

Microsoft also has my birthday recorded. Here’s how they get it:

microsoft-live-bday

 

So they are letting newborns create an account, but require them to grow up to the age of 18 before they can have a profile… hmm

Naturally, I went to google to see how those guys are handling things, and guess what … I couldn’t find any form field that required my age OR birthday (correct me if I am wrong please). Don’t they have to profile me for ad targeting?! The closest thing I could find was on Orkut:

orkut-age

Very nice! They are restricting the newborns from registering AND enforcing the 18-ish year limit all using the simple combobox. They are also using my birthday to figure out my age.

Since this post was supposed to test the image upload capabilities of BlogDesk (yes, it works!), so I will end it here.

I don’t know how many people get frustrated by these things, but I strongly believe that getting such small features just right plays a major role in creating a positive brand image.

Switching from Community Server to WordPress

ReallyVirtual2 Comments

The last time I started blogging, I chose Telligent’s .TEXT (later renamed to Community Server) after some research on the options available. It was the sensible choice at that time because

1- It used the (then hot) .NET with SQL Server, which I was playing with.
2- It was Open Source.
3- I had a feeling the community will contribute and extend the functionality through its (pretty good) plugin-based architecture.
4- Though I did not need its forums, the photogallery was really powerful.

The post (one of the few I managed to post) about my installation experience, and enabling anonymous comments did help out a couple of people so I feel less guilty about not continuing to blog.

Fast forward a couple of years… I am restarting blogging and searching for the latest version of community server and it turns out they are not “serving the community” anymore and have gone commercial. Yes they do still have a “free” license, but no its restricted features no longer suit or attract me. So I have to either stick to the older version, install the new version with all the restrictions, or switch to another blogging system.

As you can see, I chose the last option and switched to WordPress, after another two hours of research to see what has been happening in the blogosphere while I was away. I feel sorry for the people who can’t switch due to lack of web applications deployment knowledge (drop me a message if you need help), and I am glad to see about 2 million results in Google for “community server” vs. 12 millionish for WordPress. One more win for the REAL opensource!

I use a free redirection service from www.mydomain.com which points www.reallyvirtual.com domain to the rv.cypherone.com subdomain, this way I can use my existing hosting for the blog, until I find a reason to get a dedicated hosting space (1000+ readers ought to be a good reason 🙂 ). My hosting provider is webhost4life.com, which has real human (and fast) support and had the best value for money that I could find at that time.
Now webhost4life has a decent set of ready-to-install plugins (WordPress included), which I immediately set up using their single click install, only to find out it was an older version (2.0).
The WordPress upgrade documentation page made upgrade sound like a painless process, but after upgrading, I somehow ended up with only my homepage displaying, with all other links giving a 404. Back to Google I went… at first I thought that WordPress in getting confused by the base URI (www.reallyvirtual.com) and the redirection, but found out later that since the server is windows based, so a combination of mod_rewrite and .htaccess unavailability, if you try to use custom (pretty) permalinks, could do this. *SIGH*

I decided to start with a clean slate, and after a few minutes of tinkering around, finally found the php.ini solution to WordPress permalinks error that works for me. Thanks Taragana 🙂

After installation from scratch, tweaking the basic settings, creating categories for topics that I plan to write about, and being impressed with the range of plugins available (Community Server doesn’t even come close here), I can now safely say WordPress is the best choice at this point in time. The only thing I still need is a photogallery to go with it. If you have any recommendations, do let me know.