The Curious Frog

We’re Going Through Changes…

Hugh — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:39:55 +0000

Bad musical puns aside, you may notice a few changes on the site. I decided to remove the Twitter and Last.fm widgets from the sidebar as part of an effort to speed up the site. Also, because I implemented WP Super Cache at the same time dynamic content doesn’t do too well. It is possible to set the cache to expire each time the sidebar changes, but given that I use Last.fm and Twitter a lot it rather negates the point of caching!

Don’t despair though, you can still keep tabs on my digital life via my new Tumblelog page! The page is generated every 15 minutes from my feeds, currently del.icio.us, Twitter and Last.fm, mashed together by the WP SimpleLife plugin (hat tip: Kieran Delaney). I’ve made some tweaks to the plugin to better suit my needs, watch this space for a published version when I’m happy.

PS: Wordpress 2.5, 3 hours to go and 374 tickets still active! It might be a close one

WordPress Auto Save Woes

Hugh — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:04:57 +0000

It seems like there’s a real problem with the auto save function on WordPress at the moment, if you let the auto save kick in before pressing ‘Save’ or ‘Publish’ then all your musings are lost. Unfortunately for me I only found this out after spending about 20 mins writing a post

It seems to be ok if you hit ‘Save’ before the first auto save hits, you’ve got about 2 minutes as far as I can tell. So the moral of this story is get in there first and press ‘Save’ yourself! Or you could always resort to offline authoring instead…

Hopefully this’ll be fixed in 2.5, I’ve seen at least 10 threads on WordPress.org complaining about it, so it seems to be quite a common problem. Roll on the 10th of March!

Edit: Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus! | Happy Saint David’s Day!

K2 Style Switcher

Hugh — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:57:02 +0000

Recently I started porting my sites from Wordpress to Wordpress Multi User (WPMU). It’s brilliant if you manage more than one blog, I now don’t have to spend a day FTP’ing every time a new version of WP is released! I took the opportunity to upgrade K2 and implement the K2 Style Switcher plugin which you can see in action in the sidebar. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come out of the box with WPMU support, so I made the necessary changes. ~~The modified plugin can be downloaded here~~. This version will work with both vanilla Wordpress and WPMU, enjoy.

Update: I am now working together with Kimya Hasira (the original author) on the development of this plugin as described here. It has found a new permanent home on this site. Check out the page for information about the plugin.

Offline Blogging with Windows Live Writer

Hugh — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:58:02 +0000

Probably old news to most of you clever types, but Windows Live Writer is a really rather good tool for editing your blog. As well as Windows Live Spaces it also supports other popular tools including SharePoint, Wordpress and Blogger. Predictably I’m using it for this post after spending all of ten minutes installing and configuring it. Well worth a try if offline editing is on your wish list.

Twitter Tools for Wordpress 2.3

Hugh — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:57:28 +0000

I recently started fiddling around with Twitter and was pleased to find a plugin called Twitter Tools by Alex King that integrates your tweets with your blog and tweets when you post to the blog. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with the Wordpress 2.3 taxonomy, but never one to be put off that easily I’ve modified the the code to suit the new DB structure. You can see it in action in my sidebar. ~~Download the code here~~. Update: Looks like Alex has fixed the bug in the main version, check out his site.

Signing up for Google Apps

Hugh — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:49:46 +0000

So you’ve decided its a good idea to let Google manage the email for your domain? You’ll find after sign up that you have to prove you own your domain, the easiest way being to upload a page called googlehostedservice.html to the root of your domain. Unfortunately, the Google help page isn’t to helpful on the format, so here’s an example:




googlehostedservice


googlexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Replace the line starting googlexxx etc. with the one they supply you during the setup process, upload the page to the root of your domain, your sorted. You can then go back to the setup page, click verify and the process should complete in less than 48 hours.

Extended Live Archives fixed for Wordpress 2.3

Hugh — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 08:03:14 +0000

If like me you rather like the Sons of Skadi Extended Live Archive (ELA) plugin, you will have been dismayed to find that as soon as you upgraded your blog to Wordpress 2.3 it promptly fell over. Pages full of MySQL errors when posting, all sorts of badness. Turns out that when the database structure changed for version 2.3 the catagories table amongst others was removed. Unfortunately ELA relied heavily on this so badness abounded. Luckily a bit of digging around revealed this patch which fixes the problem nicely. Overwrite the files, clear the cache and update your options then it’s archivetastic one again

The Treehouse

Hugh — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:14:52 +0000

I’ve recently started work on a new project, a webpresence for a guesthouse run by a friend of mine. It’s called The Treehouse and it’s a rather nice place on the south coast of South Africa called KwaZulu-Natal. Why not have a look?

Hello world!

Hugh — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hello indeed! This is to be the home of The Curious Frog, oppressed code monkey by day and pixel herder by night. I rather enjoy fiddling with the interwebs, so expect wittering aplenty.

Anyway, I’m off to fiddle around with the site some more now, ttfn.