Update Your WordPress Saturday 2006-07-29
WordPress version 2.04 is here in a stable release, and Matt is out on the WordPress blog to convince all WP blogger so update. Safe and sound as it is the new version contains important security updates, as well as some 50 bug fixes – who would believe that?
As you may have seen from recent Bug Hunts, there is also a major 2.1 upgrade under ways, but don’t hesitate to install the intermediate 2.04! The 2.1 version may linger in the clouds for yet some time.
The update is simple enough. Just download and copy the files of the new version over the old.
As usual don’t forget to make a backup of the old one first, and don’t overwrite the following files:
* wp-config.php file;
* wp-content folder; Special Exception: the wp-content/cache folder should be deleted.
* wp-images folder;
* wp-includes/languages/ folder–if you are using a language file do not delete that folder;
* .htaccess file–if you have added custom rules to your .htaccess, do not delete it;
* robots.txt file–if your blog lives in the root of your site and you have created such a file, do not delete it.
Here is the download and the detailed instructions for any upgrade in the all mighty Codex.
Go ahead and just do it!
Hyperlinking Considered Harmful? Thursday 2006-07-13
Oh my gosh!
Lorelle of WordPress fame writes in her very much readable blog “Do I Need to Ask Permission to Put a Blog in My Blogroll?“. She says that she haven’t thought about the question before and writes
“Since a link in a blogroll is a compliment and recommendation, do you need to ask permission to include a blog in your blogroll? Good question.
I would think not. You are not linking to content, and you are not violating any rights. You are linking to the whole blog, not a single post. There is nothing to ask permission for, is there?”
Earlier in the week she pointed her audience to an article by Shel Holz entitled “When is a Link not a Link“, which questions your right to link to somebody else’s content.
This seems to to amount to something, I don’t know what. Don’t blame Lorelle, she is perfectly sane or I’m brain dead, but could it be that the summer over the western hemisphere is too hot , or maybe the web has matured to the point of being suicidal?
Is HTML, “Hypertext Markup Language” to be considered harmful? Oh, Goodbye.
Before we seriously enter the Web 2.0 world of fame an ridicule, let’s take a deep breath and a step back and look at what the web 0.1 – 1.0 is all about.
It all started as a possibility to link text based information to other relevant text based information. When the author of a ( usually scientific ) document referred to sources or or other texts of interest in the domain of his/her article, it would easily be reached by including a link to that material.
With the advent of HTML as a formalized way of accomplishing this, and the hypertext transfer protocol as a standardized communication protocol between the information servers and clients ( consumers ), the web was born. The rest is, as they say, history. And amazing as such.
This is what it’s all about, don’t you, dear reader, agree? Linking information to other relevant peaces of information. In the beginning very few used the web and decided what was relevant. Linking was done in rather closed domains and cross linking between domains sparse.
As the web has grown ( some under stating here 
, the writers and readers on the web have very disparate opinions on what’s “relevant”, and as a consequence cross linking among “domains” abound.
Many links lead to ballooney, and link lists without human comments are useless. Human nature plays its part – and it should. It is to be expected.
For those of us who want the web to be a source of useful information, it may be frustrating to sift through ads we don’t want, sex we don’t like and thoughts we think could be offered by a piece of wood – or worse.
But it’s inevitable, and in some way the start of a new kind of democracy ( oh, how dared I ?), where everyone has his or her say. If you say something clever many will listen. Yes, hopefully, I know.
Am I spacing out? Right, I am. It’s my blog, so I can do that.
Back to the linking and blog roll business, or “can I link to any content on the web?”.
Yes I can, but with some exceptions.
- I can link to anything if I don’t pretend or imply it’s my own stuff.
- I cannot link in someone else’s images or media in my own page without permission.
- I cannot use someone else’s texts in my own pages, except for citations.
Citations should not be extensive and the should be attributed to the copyright owner, possibly linked to the original text.
This means for example that you should not link someones HTML or other document into a frame of your own document, as this could give the *impression* that it is part of your own site.
As for asking permission to include someones blog in my “blogroll” or linking to other recommended reading – give me a break!
If someone doesn’t want to be linked to, or recommended or read at all for that matter, there are lots of ways to avoid that. Here are a few.
- You may choose to send the info by email to a selected audience.
- You can publish your documents in a closed network behind firewalls.
- You can require authentication for individuals or groups that you allow to read your stuff.
- You can set up a robots.txt file to tell ( well behaved ) search bots not to collect all or certain parts of your web.
- Finally you can sell all your stuff and gadgets and hide under a rock.
I don’t think I’m being harsh here The web is all about hyperlinking and it is a social endeavour. It’s all about information and it’s all about people.
Link on, and happily so!
The Flickr Spinnr 0.3 Release Tuesday 2006-05-16
After a intense finishing session I’m happy to announce the release of FlickrSpinnr version 0.3. As before you can download the WP plugin at Headzoo’s place. The new version, as predicted, uses a Flash presentation layer – the cube. Images are fetched from Flickr and presented on a rotating cube. You can see the cube in rotation in the sidebar. A mockup for the upcoming stand alone version for more or less static web sites can be seen in my labs.
[Edit] Well, the coding session was a bit to hot, and we made a mistake. It was not a feature – it was a bug. If you downloaded the Flickr Spinnr version 0.3 before May 19, you may not see the cube. A bug fixed version is ready for you at Headzoo.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Update: Version 0.4 is released, including a new stand alone variant.
The Flickr Spinnr Saturday 2006-05-06
It’s been a while now, since I had an opportunity to work on the 3D Cube or Flickr Spinnr. Among many other things, such as a bit of gardening and spring start up of the Fridhem house here on Öland, my computer was invaded by stupidity ( my ) and hijackers ( idiots ).
Today I’m up and running and solved a problem with the cube. The images on the cube should link to the Flickr page for that image, but due to concurrent processing of the images, the coupling between addresses and images got lost. An extra wrapper MovieClip around the one holding the image, carries the image id to the processing event handler. It’s a bit technical for a blog post, but the explanation will come in a planned tutorial later on.
I also had an annoying flicker as the images were placed face up on the Stage area before they are glued to the cube. The simple solution was to place that construction area out of sight, i.e. outside the view port of the Flash movie.
Now one quirk is left to think about. The images are mirrored as they are glued to the cube, probably due to the ordering of points that describe the cube faces. As I haven’t written the math for the cube, that will take some effort to change.
[Edit] After lots of ad hoc experimenting with the math of the cube, making symmetric changes to point positions for the cube faces, I gave up that approach. Instead I attacked the inncoming JPEG images and flipped them around the y-axis, before converting to bitmap and throwing them at the 3D engine. Yippee, that works
For now, have a look at “A Flash 3D Image Cube“, to become a tutorial in the end of time – or maybe earlier.
A Flash Image 3D Cube Friday 2006-04-14
Just a short message before I rush for the bus, for transportation to the capital Stockholm, to enjoy the company of my children.
I’m working on a 3D Image Cube, I want to adapt for getting Flickr images. Could be nice. Maybe a new tutorial?
Until next time!
[Edit] Back from Stockholm with a message from Headzoo, who made a WordPress plugin for Flickr stored images. The Flickr Spinnr uses PHP to get images from a Flickr user, caches them for better performance and uses Javascript to drive a rotating cube. At the time of writing, you can see the result in my left sidebar.
[Edit again] I had a proposition from Headzoo, a fierce competitor in the Flickr 3D Rotating Cube arena 
The Javascript 3D engine is a bit slow, and we may work together to use a Flash engine. You can follow the results of our joint efforts on the 3D Image Cube page in Petit Labs.
[Eidt] We’re on our way, the results soon to be shown on a blog near you.
WordPress Widget tutorial
If you use WordPress, and follow what happens at the WordPress dot Com blogger site or in the WordPress community, you haven’t missed the new web 2.0 Ajaxian way to treat Widgets. If you have, here’s a short resume to get you in touch.
A WordPress Widget is some facility you place on the sidebar, like a calender or a list of, say recent posts. We all have something like that in our blogs, so that’s nothing new per se. The news is that you can do all kinds of fancy things with a WP Widget widget from an admin interface, like switching them on and off, moving them around or change their behavior.
Now you know. But do you know you how to craft your own widget?
The always alert and helpful Kaf at guff szub.Net has written a short and readable tutorial “My Widget – Example WordPress Widget“
Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 4 Thursday 2006-04-06
In my tutorial series “Building a Flickr Flash Display“, I have come to Part 3. Here we go through the code needed to make the images of the display zoom out smoothly, when the user mouses over one of the thumbnails. We’ll also make a version in which the zooming in and out of randomly selected images is done automatically. It is fairly simple to accomplish the smooth and professionally looking behaviors, using the versatile Actionscript Tween class and its easing helper classes.
Please join me to craft a dynamic Flickr display.
Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 3 Sunday 2006-03-26
Some progress is done on the stand in for the Flickr Badge, as we move on in the Petit Labs. In the tutorial “Building a Flickr Flash Display, Part 2“, we add some interactive dynamics to the image display. The beholder who’s eyes stare at the tiny thumbnails of our Flickered images, will be able to zoom in on any of them, to get a doubly sized version, by just pointing the mouse at it. As before, clicking an image will take the user to the Flickr page for that image. Come on and have some fun!
Global Tag Clouds on WordPress Dot Com
In the web 2.0 era tag clouds have become popular as a means of providing a semi semantic web. I say semi semantic, as we have humans rather than machines, making the relevant bridges between islands of information. The tag cloud or tag list is supposed to find connections between articles or posts, witin the same or neighboring domain of interest. Quite a few tagging services gather tags from blogs and web sites, to fasciltate this type of connections, and by visiting or subscribing to a service like Technorati or FeedBurner, you get freshly published information on your pet subjects.
There are some problems with this kind of syndication though. Do you really get relevant information links?
Well, as long as machines dont understand meaning, the only possible way to connect information in a meaningul way, is to use humans. The problem is that all connections that end up in a tag cloud are made blindly. That is, when you tag your article, you don’t know what other articles in cyberspace will get the same tag. Every contributing author adds tags, that he or she thinks are significant for the article or blog post. These tags are then automatically added to one or more centralized tag clouds. Not everyone will have the same idea on how to tag a certain piece of information.
I know this from my own experience. I’m farly good at creating categories for my own projects, but I often stumble when I add information to them. For a long time I had the distinct project types “Java” for Java programming and “XML” for my XML/XSL experiments. They resided in different directories on my hard disk. Then came the “Java and XML, a marriage made in heaven”, and I wrote every tiny XML handling software in Java. Where to place a new project? Is it about Java or about XML? Here tags comes to resque.
Tags are not categories, but have the advantage of connecting information over category boundaries.
That works for me, but how about sharing my tags with the world. First of all I have to specify by adding more tags to my projects, such as “java”, “xml”, “xsl”, “soap”, “web service”, “http”. If this covers my story, anyone searching for a “web service” will get a link from the tag cloud to my story, together with articles on certain wheater services, stock services, mapping services and so forth.
As there is no human supervision of the relevance of the interlinking, I’m sure the signal to noise ration will be very low on this centalized tag clouds. Contributing to this low ratio is the fact that the ranking of tags is based on popularity. Probably the most prominent tags are meaningless and yields the the longest lists of results.
So what’s the alternative?
A Google search does’nt give you the latest and hottest articles at the top, but the relevance of the results are normally high, because the ranking depends on popularity of the sites rather than the search terms ( comparable to tags ).
A search or a tag cloud within a domain/sub domain or directory/category would be more effective than a world popular tags cloud. If you are like Lorelle, read “The Problems With Tags and Tagging“, you don’t want to encourage people to leave your site, by presenting a Technorati or FeedBurner link to a central cloud of which you are part, but rather drill your own site local cloud. If you do this in a clever way, the relevance is inherent, as you have now added the missing survaillanse of interlinking.
Yesterday Doncha in “More WordPress Feeds” at WordPress Planet plugs for the new WordPress Dot Com new global tag cloud.
“When you write a post on WordPress.com it’s categorised in the usual way but it’s also added to a site-wide pool of posts and identified by a global category. Matt’s announcement this morning means that I can track what people are talking about photography, photos, gimp and even wordpress all from the comfort of my aggregator!”
The new cloud in the WordPress.COM sky, was annonced by the “Unlucky in cards” chief developer of WordPress, aka PhotoMatt in “Tag Feeds and Paging” at the companies blog.
( My spell checker died, sorry about that! )
All Columns Are Born Equal Saturday 2006-03-25
Three column layouts are popular for web sites and blogs. At least among those among us, who want to present lots of widgets and ads along with our main content. A problem we encounter is how to make all columns stay equally tall in all browsers.
There are a few methods to make it work, using CSS and sometimes JavaScript. Here is a good solution, although somewhat complex, using negative margins to make the columns equal in height.
Here is a funny animated JavaScript solution for making 2, 3 or 4 columns equal: I’m not keen on using JavaScript, if I can avoid it, but the effect can be brought to good use in other DHTML situations.
If you want to really dig in to the multicolumn domain, the css-discuss Wiki lists an impressive collection of articles on ThreeColumnLayout
If you are lazy and want the basic layout automagically made, you can visit the ClevaTreva Piefecta Pagemaker.
Or maybe better, the CSS Creator‘s CSS Creator
As an extra bonus for reading this I’ll give you marvels at CSS edge, like CSS menus and wrapping text around curved images.
Waddayaknow?
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