Strange things are afoot

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There are some odd things going on with my WordPress installation. The two main issues I’ve noticed are

  1. I am unable to upgrade to the latest release, even when I manually overwrite every file via FTP and
  2. My theme seems to randomly reset itself to the default

I’m a little spooked. Are there such things as web-poltergeists?

Update (01/19/08): Turns out I was making a rather silly mistake. I was copying all of the new WordPress files into my root directory instead of the appropriate /blog directory. Oops! That might explain a few things. We’ll see if the crazy behavior now subsides.

Home stretch

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A quick update:

I’ve accepted a web developer position with a company in St. Louis and will start working there in the new year. This also means I need to brush up on my ASP, since they’re running IIS and the like.

Finals week is upon us and I find myself with little desire to labor through it. But alas, I must. Thank goodness it’s over soon.

College is almost over

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I’ve recently been giving some thought to creating a separate site for a freelance web development business. It’d be nice to keep this domain at a more personal level (although I try to keep it fairly professional and relevant without veering off into MySpace-esque blathering) while having a separate site to give out to potential clients and the like.

But I’ll have to think of a name, first.

It’s the last week of college for me, and I graduate in 12 days. It’s difficult to find the motivation to keep going to class when I’d rather be doing other things like getting my move to St. Louis figured out, cleaning the apartment, etc. I’m taking some more things down to St. Louis on Tuesday, and possibly over the weekend as well. There may also be one more trip to St. Joseph in the cards, depending on how much stuff I find that needs to be taken care of. Either way, things will be hectic at the same time they are winding down.

But perhaps most importantly of all, my Aeron chair has been delivered and I’ve ordered the 24″ iMac. December 15th will truly be a good day.

Button-mashing detected: a duplicate comment filter

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Here’s a feature every website with comments should have: automatic detection of duplicate comments. We’ve all done it; the page is taking a little too long to load, so we start hammering on the “Submit” button over and over again until it finally goes through and we’re horrified to see we’ve managed to post our comment twice.

I was reading one of my favorite websites today – TheSimpleDollar.com – and ran into that situation. Luckily WordPress has this functionality built-in, and sends you to a page that tells you “Duplicate comment detected, it looks like you already said that!”

I’ll try and remember to include this type of feature into any future projects I develop. The code should be relatively easy; just a database call to the last comment made by that user to see if they match.

iMac musings

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My dad is planning on buying me a new 24″ iMac as a graduation present in December and I’m beginning to get very excited about it. A lot of this probably has to do with the release of Leopard, since I know it’ll look and function even better on a newer system than on my dated PowerBook G4.

I can definitely see myself making the iMac my new primary computer. I’ve always been a PC guy when it came to getting actual work done, but that is looking to change. What I will still need my PC for is the occasional game of Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, or whatever else the fellas happen to be playing at the time. However, now that EA has signed on with Apple (and the fact that AAPL is gaining market share) it probably won’t be long before game developers start releasing Mac-compatible versions of their games.

In other news, my capstone project is trucking along, and I shouldn’t have a problem getting it finished in time for the November 26th presentation. In the end it will be functional, and time will determine how feature-rich it becomes.

Vista vs. OS X

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You know it’s bad when having to wait for an operating system to load prompts me to boot up my laptop so I can write about how I’m waiting.

It is taking Windows Vista (Business edition, by the way) an inordinate amount of time to load. It’s been displaying the boot screen for over 2 minutes now….

Ah, finally.

But it doesn’t end there. Once I actually get into the operating system I’ll have to deal with the horribly slow update system. The update process for Windows Defender is so slow that it comes close to causing me physical pain. On top of that, I am forced to click through several “permission” screens because Vista has to double-check every single little action with me before it runs. Even from within the control panel!

In contrast, OS X seems to perform its intended tasks with much more grace. Besides actually doing a convincing job of looking pretty (although I suppose that’s more a matter of taste than anything), it doesn’t bother me with inane messages, or annoying bubbles that pop up from the system tray. It handles security beautifully without me having to do anything. And it boots in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

As a final point, consider this: I’m running Vista on a high-end desktop PC. Some specs:

  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.14 GHz
  • Memory: 2 GB DDR2 RAM

Compared to my Mac laptop:

  • Processor: IBM PowerPC G4 @ 1.67 GHz
  • Memory: 512 MB DDR2 RAM

I find it odd that the PC (with a dual-core processor!) has to labor through Vista, while the dated Mactop just cruises right along. I think you dropped the ball on this one, Microsoft.

My kingdom for a capstone

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After a formidable amount of brainstorming I’ve finally put together an acceptable capstone proposal and am only 1 more faculty signature away from approval.

I will be developing a plugin for WordPress that adds mailing list functionality to the interface. The goal is to make it really easy for people with WordPress to create and manage a mailing list without having to deal with database and server-side code creation. This plugin is being developed specifically for our state representatives website, but I think I should be able to submit it to the WordPress Plugin Directory without rewriting any code.

I have until roughly Thanksgiving to get everything completed, wish me luck!

It’s not over until the FAT32 lady sings

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One of the frustrating incompatibilities that still exist between operating systems is which file system you use to format your hard drives. I have a few external hard drives that I use for storing my media, keeping backups, etc. As far as I know FAT32 can be used by both Macs and PCs to read/write, but using it limits your file sizes to less than 4 GB. NTFS and MacOS Extended do the trick for their respective operating systems, but I learned the hard way that OS X couldn’t write to NTFS. I haven’t tested how Windows responds to the MacOS Extended file system, but I would imagine it’s the same if not worse.

Let’s standardize, people! Sadly, this probably won’t happen.

The horror that is proprietary CMS

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Turns out CollegePublisher is a nightmare for XHTML/CSS guys like me. On the one hand I can understand that they’re trying to divvy every individual component into its “object”, but having to edit countless, separate boxes full of code isn’t exactly easy when you’re trying to redesign a whole site. The main problem is keeping track of which code is going where. Add into this that there’s object-oriented code everywhere and you’re staring straight into a big mess.

To be fair, I’ve only glanced through the system. I’m still clinging to the hope that I’ll be able to keep track of everything, not to mention be able to do the things I want to do once I have a design to work with.

UPDATE: [Sept. 10, 2007, 8:00 PM] To CP’s credit they responded very quickly to a request I made over the weekend and had a test domain set up and ready to go for me by early Monday. I requested this so I can play around with the system without breaking the live site. Thanks CP! :-)