Posts from 2007

Okay, with my WordPress install mostly stabilized (I even fixed the archive paging!), I have a LazyWeb request for all you WP hackers.  What I want is very simple:  a WP 2.x plugin that notifies a commenter when their comment has been condemned to the Akismet queue.  I’ve had a few legitimate comments suffer that fate, and I imagine there have been more I never saw, so it’s something I’d really like to have (and something I think other people would also find useful).

At the most basic level, all I really want is for the plugin to die() with a message telling the commenter that their comment has been Akismetted and that they should contact the site administrator about it if they’re legitimate.  If instead of dying it gave that message upon returning them to the post on which they commented, the way “Your message is awaiting moderation” works, that would be extra-cool.  Either way, it obviously only fires if the comment has been marked spam.

I’m guessing this is a pretty simple plugin to write.  I did attempt to write it myself, but was spectacularly unsuccessful in the attempt.  The really frustrating part is that I think I got close to making it work, but, in the end, failed badly.  Then I asked for plugin help on IRC, but nobody noticed.  So I’m throwing the request out to the audience here to see what y’all can do.  Thanks to anyone who can help!

Update 5 Feb 07: Mark Jaquith has come through with Antispam Collateral Condolences, a plugin that does exactly what I requested.  It can put up the warning either as a JavaScript alert box, or a message embedded in the page upon returning them to the post on which they commented.  Totally, completely awesome.  You rock, Mark!

• Wanted: Akismet Warning Plugin was published on Sunday, February 4th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the WordPress category.
• There have been twelve replies.

Among all the other stuff this past week, I let something slip off the radar: an interview with me over at the Lunartics blog.  The interview was conducted via e-mail by Amy Armitage, who I briefly met last year at the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas.  It’s not your usual “why is CSS important” kind of interview; Amy likes to keep things fun while still covering serious questions.  It’s definitely worth a read.

It also scoops news of a development I’ve never gotten around to mentioning: in October 2006, I was inducted as a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.  It’s a pretty incredible honor, given that it’s an invitation-only body of 500 members including “David Bowie, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Internet inventor and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf, ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, and fashion designer Max Azria”.  The fact that my name appears on the same list as those people is jaw-dropping enough.  To me, it wasn’t the most stunning part by a long mile.

I’ll admit, though I’d heard of The Webbys, I assumed the IADAS was one of those name-collector groups, like those “Who’s Who in America” books where you pay to be listed.  Instead, I found that the IADAS levies no membership fees, and I was deeply surprised and pleased to discover that they invite people based on their actual qualifications.  How do I know?  Because my welcoming letter didn’t praise my web design work.  Instead, it cited my “dedication to promoting Web standards”, my “international recognition on the topics of HTML and CSS”, and proclaims that I’ve “helped inform excellence and efficiency on the Web”.

Yes, the text string “HTML and CSS” was actually in the letter.

It’s a little difficult to express how important this recognition is to me.  See, most of the time, I’m introduced and perceived as an influential web designer, which is frankly insulting to actual web designers everywhere.  If you aren’t reading this post via RSS, look around.  Does this look like influential web design?  Hell no.  At best, we can call meyerweb’s design minimalist and maybe—maybe—possessed of a certain elegance.  And it only took me five years and ripping off ideas from Khoi Vinh to get here!

But I’ve never claimed to be a designer.  I think the perception that I am one arises because I get linked to from people who really are designers.  I’ve always claimed to be a communicator.  I’m someone who’s done his best to explain, promote, and advance the technologies that let designers do their work.  I’ve invested tons of time and effort into making good web design easier without sacrificing clean and semantic markup.  I wouldn’t say that work is done by any stretch, but there’s been a lot of progress.  Sometimes I forget just how much.

And so, to be invited to join the IADAS not for what I’m usually thought to be, but actually for who I am—it’s an indescribable feeling.  A fantastically good one, certainly!  But not one I could describe no matter how many words I threw at the problem.

It’s a delicious irony, and I do so love my irony:  my powers of communication fail me when I wish to express my feelings over being honored for my communicating, over all those years, my love of the web and my passion for getting it right and the inner workings of how to make that happen.

But I can at least say this:

Thank you.  Thank you for coming to read my posts, for reading my books and articles, for listening to me speak.  Thank you for being the other end of the conversation.  Thank you for being open to what I have to say, and for responding with your insights and perspectives, all of which have changed me in untold ways.  Thank you for making everything I’ve done and said and written about the web worth far more than what I put into it.

Thank you for making this honor possible.

• I’d Like To Thank The Academy… was published on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Interviews, Personal, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been eight replies.

Okay, so my “Whole Magilla” feeds—both full-content and summary—are working again, and the main archive page actually shows content.  The problem in both cases, as I mentioned in my previous post, was that WordPress’ code was throwing 404 responses.  In the case of the archive page, it would literally put up a 404 page generated by WordPress, instead of list the most recent posts.  For the Magilla feeds, the RSS files were being served up, but with HTTP 404 headers.  In feed readers that respected HTTP headers, like Firefox or NetNewsWire (and probably most others), that meant the feeds were broken.  Other feeds, such as the tech-only feed, were unbroken, but of course the most popular feeds are the Magilla feeds.

In the end, a post from Alex King showed me the way to a “fix”.  I put that word in quotes because this is really more of a hack.  No, actually, it’s just gross, but it works.  In order to get WP to stop throwing inappropriate 404s, I commented out lines 35 through 135 of classes.php in the WordPress core.  Here’s the beginning and end of the block I commented out:

if (! empty($rewrite)) {
   // If we match a rewrite rule, this will be cleared.
   $error = '404';

[...a ton of redacted lines...]

      $this->did_permalink = false;
   }
}

There you go: with one hundred lines of code commented out, my feeds and archive page work again.  This is not a good idea, but it’s all I could figure out to do.  Obviously, having modified a core file, I’m taking a chance that this won’t cause other problems.  So far I haven’t seen any, but you never know.  I’m also making upgrades much harder on myself, given that the new core file won’t have my modifications.

Similarly, I commented out the mod_rewrite.c block WP added to the end of my .htaccess file, so that I can use my own rewrites and not invoke WP’s rewriting.  With every upgrade, I’ll have to check that file to make sure the block didn’t get added back.

I’m mostly posting this as a reference for anyone who might run into similar problems with their WP 2.x installation.  It’s my hope that a future version of WP will offer some kind of hook or option that will let me easily disable WP’s rewriting and error handling code, since I already have a web server that’s configured to do those things for me.  I don’t mind if it’s a hook that I can address via a plugin as opposed to an option in the preferences, but I’d like to have it.  It would make WP a little more attractive to power users as well, since they’d know that they could do their own rewriting and error handling without having to fight with WP’s internals.

• Fixing My WordPress Install was published on Thursday, February 1st, 2007.
• It was assigned to the WordPress category.
• There have been seventeen replies.

So I upgraded to WordPress 2.1, and it immediately broke stuff.  For example, check out the RSS feed validator’s results for the summary version of my all-posts feed (full-content feed validation results; same problem).  I think it’s just so cool how the software manages to get the sever to return a 404 for a file that’s clearly being served.

Of course, I only got to that point after commenting out the IfModule mod_rewrite.c stuff WP apparently tacked onto the end of my .htaccess file.  Before that, the above-referenced feed URLs just brought up the home page of the site while preserving the feed URL in the address bar.  Keen.

Exactly the same progression of trouble has applied to the Distractions feed, too.  At first the server (or WP) was filling in the home page, and now it returns the feed along with a 404 response.

I’ve also had the same problems with the main page of the post archive—at first, it redirected to the home page.  Now it just returns a 404, although unlike the feeds, it doesn’t also create a full page to go with the 404.  At least, I don’t think it does.  I can’t see it, anyway.  A shame, too, that it does its own thing rather than use the 404 page I already defined in the .htaccess file.

Anyone have any guesses at all as to what’s going wrong, and how I can get WP to stop throwing around inappropriate 404s?  I assume this has something to do with my .htaccess file’s Rewrite rules—which worked just fine in WP 1.5.2, by the way—and the new error handling routines.  Or maybe it’s just the new error routines.

Oh, and while we’re at it, what’s the story on the “new tabbed editor” that’s supposed to let you “switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post” that was mentioned in the WP 2.1 announcement?  Because I’ll be switched if I can find it.

Ah, the joys of upgrading…

Addendum: anyone know of a quick and simple way to just disable WordPress’ internal rewrite code, so I can go back to using my .htaccess file?  That might solve the problem just as well as trying to hack my way around the problem with WP, and a lot more simply.

• WP 2.1 Breakage was published on Monday, January 29th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the WordPress category.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

In case you’re one of the people who’s been following the Twitter stuff, and you’re on OS X, then kindly allow me to direct your attention to Twitterific 1.1.  Despite its paltry 0.1 increase in version number, it’s acquired some great new features.

The most wonderful addition, in my opinion, is a preference setting that lets you make the window act modal, or not, as you prefer.  Having set my copy to “act as normal window”, at least half my problems with Twitterific were abolished.  They’ve also changed the auto-hide behavior so that it will auto-hide a short interval after popping up, whereas before it would only auto-hide after a manual refresh (at least, that’s how my copy behaved).  This makes it a lot easier to ignore in the background, since it won’t behanging around until you bring it to the foreground.  Perhaps this is a side effect of it acting like a normal window.  Regardless, it’s welcome.  In addition, I like the ability to define a hotkey to bring up the Twitterrific window and the “launch when I login” option.

They’ve also added a post character counter, so you know how close you are to hitting the tweet cap.  That’s nice to see, though as I understand it, the number of characters permitted for a post is dependent on the number of characters in your username.  Twitterific just gives you a flat 141 characters—which, given the basic nature of Twitter, seems like it really ought to be more than enough.

Now, if it just let me define my own background-foreground colors and made it easier to replace the alert sound, I’d regard it as being pretty much perfect.  (Yes, I can dig into the package contents and replace the alert sound, but I’d rather there was a preference setting so that I don’t have to futz around inside the package every time I update the software.)

Oh, and if you’re a Twitterific user, you absolutely want to add Twitterific as a friend, since they use that channel to tweet release announcements and tips on using Twitterific.  If I’d had them added to my Twitter account, I wouldn’t have had to post about my frustration over trying to change usernames—they’d tweeted the answer the day before I posted here—and could have thus been spared the shame of broadcasting to the world my ignorance of the proper spelling of “terrific”.  Though I suppose in that case, I’d still be ignorant, so maybe it’s better I posted after all.

Well, either way, if you’re using Twitterific 1.0 or an OS X user interested in using Twitter, check out the new version.

• Twitterific 1.1 was published on Sunday, January 28th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.

I’m entirely willing to admit that this is me being a half-blind doof, but how do I change the Twitter account in Twitterrific?  I set it up to talk to one of my accounts, and I want to change that so it logs into and updates the other account.  I poked around the application preferences, dug through the package contents, and searched my hard drive for related preference and application support files.  I came up empty.  So now, O LazyWeb, help me, please!

(Anyone who knows me well is probably now surprised that this was not a post about how frustrated I am that they left off the second “f” in the application’s name.)

Update: the login information is stored in the Keychain (thanks, Dan!).  I altered the login information via Keychain Access, and that fixed things.  What I found interesting is that Twiterrific stores an e-mail address as the login, not the username.  So what happens if someone signs up two usernames via the same e-mail address?  How would Twitterrific tell the difference?

• Twitterrifically Frustrated was published on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been thirteen replies.

Having just spent the better part of an hour working my way through various phone trees and listening to a metric crapload of insipid hold music, I realized that there’s a huge product opportunity just waiting for someone to exploit.  I don’t have the engineering skills to describe it for a patent, let alone make one, so I’m going to toss this into the public sphere in the hopes that somebody takes it and runs with it.  If you become a multi-zillionaire off this idea, then bully for you!  I hope you’ll remember me when that time comes with a nice cushy spot in your web division or at least a bunch of stock options, but if not, at least the world will be a slightly better place thanks to the two of us.

What I want is an office phone that’s also a iPod dock.  It would charge the iPod when docked, and also be able to play through the speakerphone, handset, or headset.  And here’s the really useful part: it mutes the incoming signal when there’s hold music and plays the iPod.  When it detects a human voice, it pauses the iPod and passes the incoming signal through.  If the hold music comes back, it goes back to blocking the incoming music and plays its own.

In other words, it would let me define my own hold music, rather than have to tolerate what someone else thinks is soothing.  I would pay an exorbitant premium for that product, and there’s no way I’m the only one.  So somebody get right on that, would you?

• Hold Music Substitution was published on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twenty-two replies.

After a couple of months of fairly determined avoidance, I finally joined Twitter a week ago.  I’m already thinking about leaving.  Have been for the last six days, in fact.

There are two easily-explained reasons why I want to just walk away.  The first is that in order to have a public comment stream and also be able to share more private messages with my friends, I have to have two accounts.  If I could post friends-only messages to an otherwise public account, then I’d only need one account.

And why would I use a public commentary service for private information?  Because it is a very good way of keeping my friends informed of where I am, where I’ll be headed next, what’s happening in my family life, and so on.  That’s not public information, to my mind.  Using Twitter is a lot easier than setting up a private blog to distribute the same information.  (Side note: if you had a friendship request with me declined, this is why.  No, I don’t hate you.)

The second reason is that I don’t have a way to filter out people who are swamping my Twitter stream.  Yes, I’m very glad that you have so much to say, but you’re burying the other people who are just as interesting but not quite so loquacious, obsessive, or just plain bored.  In my current short list of friends, I have two that are, um, extra-expressive.  (Both women, in fact.  No comment?)  I want these people to remain friends so they can get my updates, infrequent though they may be.  I also want to see what the rest of my friends and followed are saying.  How to resolve it?

Sadly, “leave” only filters their stuff out of phone and IM updates, neither of which I use.  It doesn’t take them out of the RSS feed nor the web view, both of which I use.  Is the solution to de-friend them and let them just follow me?  Sure, for the public account.  For the private personal-info account, that solution fails; they’ll stop getting my updates.  I just wish there was a way to say “this person is my friend, but I’d only like to get updates from them through the following services”.  That way I could set the chatterers to show up in the web view and nothing else, thus restoring some sense of balance and diversity to my RSS feed and thus to Twitterific.

Then there’s the bonus reason I want to throw the whole thing into my bit-bucket:  the way people are using Twitter right now, it’s rapidly becoming the most inefficient and unusable version of IRC ever.  Look, people, if you want to chat, then get a chat room.  You know?

I know, Twitter is new and growing.  Feature sets and social conventions are still in flux and expected to evolve.  Personally, I feel like there’s the kernel of a really good service in there, only not quite the one they’re offering.  I’m not saying Twitter is useless or somehow wrong: it clearly provides something that some people want, and it does what it does fairly well.  I just have the sense that there’s a similar service with a different focus that would provide something that some other people want, myself among them.  Anyone else feel the same way?

• The Twitters was published on Sunday, January 21st, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Web categories.
• There have been thirty-seven replies.