Early Modern Notes

The Internet is now in Handy Book Form!

It’s quite funny too. Mac devotees should check out the Schmapple store.

All products available in these shades:
1. Incredible White
2. Fantabulous White
3. Virginal White
4. Snow White
5. Cyphocilus White
6. Black

(They just forgot to mention that Black costs you an extra 200 quid thank-you-very-much-suckers.)

Also, there probably ought to be some mileage in spoofing Wordpress these days. I luv my WP, but is it really necessary to get quite so excited about a new version quite so often? (The last one was in May; there seems to have been a new security update every other week ever since, which doesn’t help that ennui-y feeling.) Is it really that thrilling, Matt dearest? I’m personally raising a shaggy eyebrow at the breathless announcement that they’re dropping a feature (combined link and post categories) that they only introduced nine months ago (and it broke my theme, dammit). And you know, I just can’t get that excited about tags. Am I really the only person left in the universe who doesn’t feel the slightest urge to randomly tag every conceivably significant word or phrase or idea in every bleedin’ post I write? Pfft.

So I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1. All went fine (and like the look of some of the new features!), except that it would have been nice to have been warned that the upgrade would automatically renumber all my blogroll/link categories (appending them to the main categories series, which presumably is meant to streamline the database tables a bit). So, you know, it all ended up a bit broken on the pages where I’ve specified which link categories are to be displayed where and I didn’t know why. (Fixed now.)

Update: well, I discovered today that my old miniblog plugin doesn’t work properly in 2.1 (it’ll display existing posts, but something’s jiggered in the editing page so I can’t add any new ones), and I don’t think it’s being supported any more. So rather than fart about looking for a replacement plugin - and the miniblog was never entirely satisfactory anyway - I’m trying a different way of making quick ‘n’ dirty announcements posts. Some of you might have noticed the News page, which used to list entries from the miniblog and also aggregates stuff from various announcements blog and other site feeds - early modern-related conferences and seminars, CFPs, items in the news, that kind of thing. I’ve now set up a new blog purely for this purpose, Early Modern News, and added it to that page. (Wordpress bloggers who want to know how to do this kind of thing: you can use WP’s own rss-functions code, or there are various plugins.)

It seems that the blog can receive (manual) trackbacks but not pingbacks (no, I don’t fully understand the distinction either; no doubt I’ll find out in the course of trying to solve the problem…). And I don’t think it’s sending them properly either (actually, I’ve just spotted one sent in the last couple of days, so it looks as though that’s OK).

(I have already checked that the necessary boxes are ticked in admin…)

At first I wondered if it was associated with my WP upgrade to v2.0 (the WP support forums indicate that some people had problems with this), but on checking I found I did the upgrade back in January and I had some trackbacks/pingbacks after that, till it dried up in February.

It’s a bit of a mystery to me. Anyone got any suggestions?

(… Still don’t understand the difference between TB and PB - except that it’s different technology. What the WP codex says seems partly wrong.)

You may recall that I was building up to some serious redesigning the other day. I had some ideas as to what I wanted, and some recent WP designs that had got me thinking.

Well, here it is. I like it and I hope you do too. I think it makes a nice change from the usual way of doing these things.

I think this is pretty much done now. I probably have one or two little extra features I want to add later, but it’s time to take a break.There’s one or two little odd behaviours in IE that I need to work out (nothing serious as far as I can tell), but everything seems right in Firefox. I haven’t checked it in Opera yet.* Finally, if someone can test it out in Safari** for me and see if there are any problems, that’d be much appreciated (though I can’t promise to be able to do anything about them).

(Much of the rest of this post will be deeply boring to most of you. Stop reading now unless web design turns you on.)

It was a matter of working out just what I wanted and what I really wanted rid of - and then finding out what was possible (or to be more precise, what I was able to work out).

It struck me that what was really grabbing me about some of the new designs was not that they jettisoned scrolling (I don’t mind a bit of scrolling, within reason), but that they got rid of the sidebar. I hated those sidebars. So what if they’re the norm? I didn’t want to lose all of the information conventionally contained in sidebars (although no question that mine had got filled up with a lot of baggage), but how to escape from them while retaining key information in a convenient location?

As a solution, I stole the idea of the central horizontal menu bar below a single post on the front page from Squible. But I didn’t want the rest of that package. I wanted more posts on the front page in the conventional manner, to run below the horizontal bar (and I didn’t want just short excerpts. You’d think it’d be possible to alter the default length of excerpts (120 words), wouldn’t you? But no, apparently not).

I wasn’t entirely sure if breaking up posts on a page in this way was actually possible in WP. The solution I discovered was a template tag I hadn’t noticed before: get_posts, which allows you to do exactly that (by creating ‘multiple loops’ within a page, for those familiar with the WP terminology).

So on the front page there’s now a ‘middlebar’ and ‘bottombar’, which have been seriously streamlined compared to the old sidebars. I’m also thinking about whether it’s possible to put a bit more info on other pages without cluttering it up again. We’ll see.

…………

*Update: Opera seems fine except that there’s a clear space 20-ish [now reduced to about 10] pixels wide down the right-hand margin of the page. No idea why (I’ve noticed that it does the same thing to EMR, to a lesser extent). And IE has a funny little bug I haven’t quite figured out: the white border line down the left-hand side of posts should start right below the underlining on the post title, but it doesn’t always show properly (on my screen anyway). [Both of these are fixed. I think.]

**Further update: found a useful tool for this: iCapture takes a screenshot of how your webpage looks in Safari. There was a problem with the middlebar which I think I’ve sorted out. Other than that, one or two very minor variations that I can live with.

Therefore, naturally, I keep getting this intense urge to redesign the entire blog. And now the Easter holidays are here, I think it may become inevitable.

So, dear readers, is there anything that would increase your viewing pleasure?

I’m contemplating following the in crowd with one of the recently emerging WP themes that do away with forever scrolling down the front page: they show just the most recent post (or even just a chunk of it) and titles/summaries of previous posts below. Chapati Mystery and History:Other are both using versions of Squible (which also does away with the sidebar). Or there’s the similar Hemingway reloaded theme. But neither of those feels quite right. The one that’s really got me thinking since I saw it in operation at Alun’s place is kiwi. Mmm.

The downside I can see with this type of theme is for irregular visitors. It’s fine for people who subscribe to the RSS feeds and/or come by every day for their, um, fix. But not everyone does that. There are blogs that I stop by maybe once a week or so. Then it’s more convenient just to scroll down the page and see what’s been happening. So I like the fact that kiwi (in Alun’s version anyway) shows the full text of the most recent post plus excerpts of the previous posts. Takes up more space on the screen, but it’s more accessible. Squible is lovely aesthetically (I think) but just too compressed.

Whatever happens, I can guarantee it won’t be straight out of the box. (Because that would just be too easy.) So your ideas and requests are welcome.

Now I’d better get on with some real work…

[Update: Frustratingly, the link to download the theme so I can take a look at it seems to be buggered. Same with the site forums. And can I find an email contact address anywhere on the site? Pah. Anybody got an up-to-date copy of the zip file they can send me? Please?]

So it goes. There’s been a worrying growth in spam comments breaking through the defences lately, so time to move: Enter Akismet. (Comes bundled in with the latest version of WP; looks very impressive and simple to use.)

Also, you can now get a WordPress blog hosted at http://wordpress.com. Most of the WP features except that there’s only a limited number of themes (that will probably expand) and you can’t edit the templates at all. But it’s still way better than Blogger…

Dear folks,

It’d be much appreciated if you could leave a few comments here to test out whether that side of things is working OK… If you have some amusing links, share them with us too.

Luv, Sharon

Update: Well, the new interface is pretty n’ all (love the fully formatted post preview), but I’m turning off that WYSIWYG editor RIGHT NOW. I’m sure it’s way better than most, but I can’t stand those durty things.

I’m trying out a plugin called Bad Behaviour. The idea is to stop spambots from being able to access the site. I haven’t had any problems with spam commenting lately, but I’m getting quite close to my monthly bandwidth limits, and keeping the spambots away should help to cut bandwidth usage so I won’t need to upgrade my hosting package for a few more months.

By all accounts this is a very good and reliable plugin and it shouldn’t cause any problems for human visitors (or legitimate crawlers like Googlebot)…

As I’ve said, I like Blogsome. It’s very convenient, and it’s based on WordPress!

But there are a few niggly things that have irritated me about the setup. I know enough about the back workings of WordPress now to be able to fix them, but newbies might not.

For example, when it comes to organising your links in your sidebar: all the standard templates I’ve tried give you a single list - compared to this blog, where I have several different categories of links (’About’, ‘Weblogs’, etc), which is what people often want. Any different link categories you create in the Links Manager in the admin interface are just ignored.

This is because of a particular template tag that is being used in the main file. If a Blogsome user goes into ‘Manage’ in the admin interface, and clicks on ‘Files’, they get to the online editor which by default should show “index.html” (or go down below the box and click on “Main Page”).

If you explore the file in the box and scroll down, you will come to this piece of code, which is a template tag:

{get_links (probably followed by various attributes) }

That is Blogsome’s way of structuring the “get_links” WP template tag. But if you want “a nested HTML unordered [ie, not numbered] list of all links as defined in the Links Manager, sorted under link category headings” - all of which means: what you can see on the right in my sidebar - you need a different tag, “get_links_list”.

So, what you need to do is to replace the existing get_links tag in your Blogsome template with this

{get_links_list order=’name’} (or ‘_name’ if you want Z-A instead of A-Z)

to get the list sorted (alphabetically) by the link categories. Alternatively, if you use

{get_links_list order=’id’} (or ‘_id’ for descending instead of ascending order)

the categories will be ordered by their ‘id’ numbers rather than alphabetically.

Then remember to hit the ‘update template’ button, and when you view the blog again (assuming that you have created links under different categories in your Links Manager, of course), it should have had the desired effect.

(Don’t forget that if anything goes wrong, the Blogsome setup is such that you can easily retrieve the previous version of the template. It’s a pity that it doesn’t have a preview facility though.)

(I will shut up about it once the novelty wears off, promise.)

It’s been installed one week and caught over 700 spam already. And this isn’t a high-traffic site. (I know those numbers are peanuts compared to what some bloggers get.) Scary.

However, it also tells me I’ve had nearly 50 real comments in the same time. Which is very groovy too. (And only about a quarter of them were by me, I think. Although at the time of writing this, the Recent Comments list suggests rather more. Hmm.)

It’s great to have all these conversations, and of course the point is that really it’s programs like SK that make it possible. Without them, I’m not sure that I could have comments running at all. Having to deal manually with 100 spam comments every day? Not my idea of a good use of my time.

So I think I might drop off a small donation to Dr Dave, the creator of Spam Karma, some time over the weekend.

Man, I love the admin page where you can see all that spam it just killed.

Trying out an acronym plugin and an email obfuscator.

My email is: sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk (you need to look in the source code to see if this is working… update: yep, although I don’t really know just how effective this technique is).

What do we think of IE? (I’ll be adding to the list. Got to decide which are the essential ones not already on there. Mmm, how about ROTFLMAO?) (Decided to drop the acronym thing for now.)

Thanks to Jeremy, I’ve finally got around to replacing my old anti-spam (which is no longer supported) with Spam Karma. Now I just want to test that it’s working, so you could help me out by leaving a comment here. And if it blocks you, please email me (sharon AT earlymodernweb.org.uk).

To make it more interesting, you could tell me about something fun that you’re doing or planning to do this weekend. And if you’re not having any fun this weekend, you can moan about that too.

Childish things, I know. But I finally found the WP List of Emoticons. I’d often wondered how to do more than the basic and so on.

I rather like But as far as I can tell there isn’t one for :sarcasm:

If you don’t yet have a blog or you’ve had it up to here with Blogger, and you really like the look of Wordpress blogs (like this one and this and this and this and…) but you don’t feel ready to take on hosting, installation and the rest of it, you might want to try out Blogsome, a free blog host that uses WP themes.

(I should say that I have no idea how reliable it is, what the support is like, etc. But it looks as though it has the flexibility to tweak themes if you want to and it might be a good way to get the hang of both blogging and WP.)

If you come by this weekend and things look unfamiliar/weird/completely broken, it’s because I’m playing with a possible new theme, which I found at the latest WordPress Themes Competition. If you’ve still got the default installation since your 1.5 upgrade and you’re bored with it, there are lots of fabulous designs there, all ready for you to download and make your own with just a little tweakery.

I’ve just noticed something. When I click on any of the monthly archives or categories links in the sidebar, I only get a limited number of posts showing. I’m pretty sure it didn’t do that before the upgrade. Before I turn to the support forums, does anyone here know what I could do to fix it?

The moderator is working well, so you’re not (usually) seeing it, but the comment spam is just starting to creep up. And I don’t want to have to waste time deleting that rubbish. So I’m installing Kitten’s Spaminator (done!). Hopefully, readers won’t see any difference, but if you have any difficulties, send me an email (sharon AT earlymodernweb.org.uk). In fact, if you want to just send a brief comment to this post to make sure they’re getting through OK, that’d be appreciated.

What I’d quite like to have, but I don’t know if it’s available for WordPress, is the system at Pharyngula (amongst other sites), where commenters have to type in a random code word displayed on the screen in order to send a comment. (Alternatively, scribblingwoman forces commenters to preview before they can submit; that’s on Movable Type I think.) The challenge, of course, is finding ways to stop the spambots without obstructing genuine comments. And if other WP users have killer tips (I’m already using a few of the methods listed here), it’d be good to hear from you.

And I really have to think about that WP upgrade before long…

Greg kindly pointed out that my RSS feed doesn’t work (you just get a 404 message). I’m not sure if I can fix it yet, but will have a look at it. But in the meantime, I can assure you that I do have a working Atom feed, and you can subscribe to it through services like Bloglines. But I don’t think it’s worth putting the link that I have on this page, because it works in a rather odd way. Maybe I can also set up a ‘normal’ Atom feed this weekend.

I’ve also noticed that since I stuck all those photos up, the blog no longer fits properly in the computer screens I’m using at the university (and I didn’t think they were that small; it’s fine on my laptop screen and that’s only 13 or 14″). The main column’s a bit too wide and the sidebar gets pushed down to the bottom. Of course, I could make the photos smaller, but I don’t quite understand why it does it, especially as it already has a slight ‘overflow’ (if that’s the right expression). So I apologise if you’re getting this effect; it’s not how you’re supposed to see the thing. (But I’m not alone: the same thing is happening when I visit some other sites too - though not all of them.) In fact, even if I take the photos down, the fit on this screen is a bit cramped. It’s hardly a big issue, but it irritates me.

But at least the damn page validates for XML">XHTML.

With some of these picture-heavy posts, I’d like to use the ‘excerpt’ function. (Yes, I have something with a lot more pictures coming up…). At least I think that’s the tag I want. I gave it a try, and seemed to get the whole post plus excerpt, for all posts, on the index page (didn’t stop to look at individual pages!). Not what I was after. But reading the support forums for more detailed advice, I just got rather confused. I need someone to explain to me in simple terms - or point me to an online tutorial for dummies where I can get this information - what I do to have an excerpt on the main page only when I want one; if I leave the excerpt box blank, it’ll be just a normal post. If that’s possible.

Can anyone help please?