Being a technophobe, the backend stuffs of blogging confirms my belief in the late Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ As such, even a normal update fills me with FUD.
Like many other self-hosted animu bloggers, I’m seeing the ‘A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now.’ underneath the menu bar. But I’m going to sit tight with WP 2.3.3 for the time being. Mainly because it’s not at all clear that the upgrade won’t break my theme. The 2.5 theme compatibility list includes K2 but specifically RC5. However only RC4 is available at the K2 download page and, at the time of this post, only RC3 was announced on the main page.
I’d really appreciate any input, feedback, advice from fellow anime bloggers about their 2.5 upgrade experience - especially K2 theme users.
Essay crisis detected. A state of emergency has been declared in the blog area. HSNO, ordered Special Command A-17. Resumption of regular activities is forecasted for the weekend.
In other news, upgraded to WP 2.3.3 - that notification bar sure works. It’s as annoying as hell. All that blog jigging for just one xmlrpc file. Hope this isn’t the start of another flood of little ‘urgent security it’s the end of the wordpress’ upgrades.
BTW pocky is delicious but I feel Kagamin’s pain; have put on 2 kgs in just the past two weeks on a pack a day! OTL
Spurred on by the mystery (now solved) of Myssa Rei’s in-comment spoiler tags being eaten, I thought I’d make a consolidated note on recent changes to the blog’s commenting infrastructure.
First, I’ve replaced Spam Karma 2 with Akismet as my anti-spam plugin. So far, the rate of spam getting through (only one in the past two weeks) and false positives (also one over the same time period) have been acceptable.
Second, the Comment Timeout plugin has been deactivated. I had initially used it to reduce the ’surface area’ available for spambots. But it’s a blunt instrument for this task and probably Bad Behaviour would be a better alternative. Some very interesting and informative emails from readers regarding the contents of previous posts made me realize what I was missing out on and my own pingbacks not getting through to old posts were the deciding factors for this change.
The rest of the changes follow the Sea Slugs! lead:
Third, Simple Spoiler Enhanced now only accepts the square brackets: [spoiler] spoiler text here [/spoiler]. Not more pointy brackets!
Fourth, LMB^Box Comment Quicktags appears to be working ok too. No more having to remember if open pointy bracket is ampersand gee tee semi-colon or ampersand elle tee semi-colon! [Add: Quite irritating how the 'more than' or 'less than' signs aka Pointy Brackets keep getting 'reset' whenever the options are saved. Have to key in as '<' for it to show correctly, confusing because it's quite different from the write screen for normal posts.]
Fifth and finally, I thought that the K2 theme and the WP AJAX Edit Comments plugin was like brother and sister love but now I’ve discovered that they’re *not* actually blood related! I just had to turn off the Live Commenting function under K2 Options to untangle their AJAX incompatibilities for the Asakura wedding to go ahead. Doh. I think the trade-off in functionality is more than acceptable; I’ve made so many boo-boos in comments on other blogs so I think this is a great plugin; experiencing its convenience at Epic Win as well, was the decider for me! So far it tests ok but do let me know if there are any problems.
I usually wait for Kabitzin to take the lead on WP upgrades but as the amount of shouting and screaming on the relevant WP forum thread seemed less than usual, I decided to take the plunge. I was particularly worried that the upgrade would break my theme but, apparently, if it’s K2 RC1 then it’s a-okay. So far so good, though please let me know if you find anything wonky.
In other news, I’ve also made the switch from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet which I’m not pairing it with Bad Behavior since BB has locked Stripey out in the past. Which proves that it’s doing its job. LOL Anyway Akismet has a much higher false positive rate so, again, give me a shout if your comment has been eaten by mistake.
Readers who view this blog via RSS may noticed that, inspired by the Sea Slug! Team, full feed (with <!–more–> tag workaround) has been enabled and hotlinking protection disabled for Google Reader. In addition, the Simple Spoiler plugin and formatting has been updated.
Next up was trying out tags after reading Owen S’s exhortation. I’m still in the process of deciding how to use this new WP 2.3 feature. At present, I’ve pared down non-anime series categories (retaining blog admin, koma, loot, musings and what) and am using tags to relate posts containing elements that cut across series. So far the most used tags have been oneesama and yuri. ;)
Then I noticed a rather annoying problem: I could only get a maximum of seven posts when viewing by month, category or tag even if said month, category or tag had more than seven posts. Hadn’t noticed this before as I normally use the Manage Posts menu under Site Admin rather than the ELA Archive view but the problem became obvious as I started fooling around with tags.
After riding the merry-go-round of checking the Wordpress Codex and forum, the K2 wiki, my template navigation code, K2 archive settings, Extended Live Archive plugin settings, WP Options Reading settings and so on, I finally discovered that the cause was due to the K2 files being located one sub-directory further down the themes sub-directory (themes > K2_RC1 > k2) than it actually should have been (themes > k2) after switching between the default theme and K2. It’s so good to have “<< Older Page 1 of x” back! And so that’s why the custom banner uploader didn’t work either! Doh. Funnily enough, everything else seemed to worked fine before today’s fix. And to think this not inconsiderable navigational problem has been sitting under my nose for almost three weeks! :(
[BTW since WP 2.3, I can't see Incoming Links either.]