PetitOn

WordPress 2.02 Security Upgrade Friday 2006-03-10

The long foreseen WordPress 2.02 security upgrade is released. Much serious discussion and lots of pure ballony has stired up the WordPress forum and the WP mailing lists lately. Some have argued strongly that Matt comes to market with some assurances, just to calm users down and to stop the speculative attacks against WP, being unsecure.
According to release notes there obviously were some issues, kept semi secret, which are resolved in the 2.02 release.
I just upgraded using the normal upgrade route. I took a backup of the database using phpMyAdmin and also using Skippy’s backup plugin. I also copied the whole installation to my work station. Before uploading the new WP distribution, I deactivated all plugins.
Without deleting anything in my installation, I uploaded everything in the new distribution, except the wp-content directory to my blog directory, and run the upgrade.php script from my browser.
After that I activated the plugins I use, one by one.
It all went well, an I was up and running within a few minutes. Hopefully, the complaints, rants and whispers will disappear from the WP forum and other more or less serious discussing areas.

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Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 1 Saturday 2006-03-04

I thought I finally got the solution to a problem that has bothered med for the last couple of weeks. You cannot include the Flash based Flickr badge in an XHTML valid page. It contains such a lot of interspersed markup and styling, that it is impossible to untangle. I had a go at moving styles to the stylesheet and leaving the markup where markup is due. For different reasons this wasn’t possible, and I had to find a solution. The W3C validator service gave me a list of errors, long as a week.

I had succeded earlier to encapsulate the Google AdSense, by embedding an external html document, using the object tag.

I started hunting the web for solutions, and found Geoff Stearns’ FlashObject, a JavaScript Flash detection and embed script.

It is used by including the script normally in the XHTML header and calling it from another JavaScript in the body. The call takes the URL of the flash movie and some other parameters, such as height and width.

The FlashObject writes the flikr badge into a predefined div with the appropriate id=”flashcontent”. Swiffy!

This doesn’t help much though, if we don’t have access to the pure SFW file, the Flash movie. As it is inserted “on the fly”, it doesn’t show up in the View Source mode of the browser - you just see the ugly heap of code, you pasted in from flickr.
By looking at the page info you can extract the URL of the SWF, which means that you can pass it to the FlashObject.

The URL of the flickr badge has a lengthy query string, that tells the Flash move what to look for at flickr.com, including number of columns and rows, the secret word and other useful things.

The whole thing worked, and I got rid of all complaints from the validation service. This had made me nearly bold headed, so you can imagine, I took a good leap and a scream.

There’s something fishy about the solution, I’m sorry to say. It did work for a while, but died on me.
I’m back to square one or possibly one and a half - we’ll see.

I’ll get back to you if something hits me.

[Edit] I’m back. Sorry to say I haven’t yet the solution to the validation question, but I’m working on it.
In the meantime, I have discovered that flickr doesnt want the approach of extracting the SWF from the page info. It’s much better to extract and use the original request that you get from the badge maker. Contrary to the statement I made above, it is possible to deconstruct/reconstruct the badge maker mix of code, style and markup. That’s how it’s working just now.
All styles are in the CSS stylesheet, the markup is clean and the JavaScript logic is encapsulated in CDATA sections.
It still doesn’t validate as XHTML though, because of the iframe is still not dealt with.

[ Edit 2006-03-25] I’ve decided to make a “Flickr Badge” of my own, to get full control over the behavior and the embedding. A first version is ready, and I have even written a tutorial, presented in “Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 2“.

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Serverside Includes in a Post

How strange as it may sound, someone wants a SSI inside a post.
Let’s see how it works
Here it should be:

Its the common header from my web site.
It’s certainly on the same server.

[Edit] Well, it really didn’t work, and it shouldn’t!
The server will by default parse an .shtml document, looking up the SSI commands and insert content. before returning the document to the browser. The PHP pages constructs the web documents on the fly, and the server doesn’t see any .shtml file types.
Searching the web for a while, I found that most people was content with the PHP include, as a good enough replacement for SSI.
Moving the includes to the script is a good thing for most cases, but this means you have to make the decision at coding time. If you want to insert results from a CGI script in run time ( while posting ), you have make a PHP call from within your post, that is executed when someone loads the page containing the post. Kafkaesqui had an answer to that problem in the WP Support forum thread.

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Don’t Get Lost in the Tag Cloud! Wednesday 2006-03-01

Word, words, words. We are spreading single words around us on the Internet as never before. It’s a new kind of poetry, where long lists or big clouds of words pop up where ever you go. It resembles the very long lists of uncommented links, so common in the early days of the web. There are tags for finding related posts on a certain blog you visit, or on other blogs. There are syndicated bookmarks, tags on your every blog post and tags on your photos at flickr.

With two hundred words in different font sizes, what do you do? Should you tag? How would you let others make good use of your tags?

I’ll leave the answer to these and other crucial questions to the more experienced bloggers and taggers, and give you some links.

I recommend you first to read Carthik Sharma’s article “Tags are not Categories“, where he makes it chrystal clear, why you should not confuse one for the other. It’s good reading and will set you firmly on track.

Then I suggest that you read two articles by Lorelle. The first one elaborates on “The Problems With Tags and Tagging“. She writes:

“As the blog administrator and writer, tags make sense. In addition to the high concentrated use of keywords in posts, as well as the good use of categories as tags, and inclusion of tags in my posts, Iâ€™m doing my best to make sure search engines and tag services can crawl my site and store my information in their database for others to find. But then what?”

Se goes on to answer that last question, providing the pros and cons of using tags.
The other article I want to bring to your attention, is her excellent post on efficient techniques you can use to insert tags into your posts. To know how you go about, you should read “A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and wordpress.com Users“.

Categories are for structure, and tells us what domain a certain class of posts or images belong. Tags are for cross reference between more loosely related posts and may very well span different categories. Let’s keep that in mind as we tag along!