Posts in the Tech Category

MW Latest Tweet 1.1b1

Published 16 years, 9 months past

There’s a new beta of MW Latest Tweet available.  It does four new things.  Four and a half if you count the new options setting as a half.

  1. All the files are in the mw_latest_tweet directory now, instead of having the plugin PHP outside of that directory like 1.0 did.  Yeah, I know, that should’ve been the case all along.  Sorry!  Learning on the job here.

    If you’re upgrading from 1.0, you should probably delete the 1.0 file and directory outright before uploading the 1.1b1 directory.  Alternatively, you should be able to upload 1.1b1, deactivate 1.0, activate 1.1b1, and then delete just the 1.0 PHP file.  I haven’t tried that, so I don’t know if it will actually work, but it seems like it should.

  2. URLs within a tweet are turned into hyperlinks for easy clickin’.  To go with this new feature, there’s a new option on the settings page to either shorten displayed URLs, like twitter.com does, or to not shorten them.  The default is to shorten, which means any URL 29 or more characters long gets shortened to 27 characters and gains a trailing ellipsis.  Again, like Twitter does it—although I used an ellipsis entity and not three periods.

    Note that if you upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1b1, this setting may default to “No” instead of “Yes”.  I’m not sure why, but it’s a pretty low-priority item right now.

  3. On a related note, @names are autolinked as well.  I’m using the pattern [A-Za-z0-9_] since that’s what Twitter says are valid characters for a username even though if you type in a grawlix on the signup page it will tell you, in nice bold green letters, that it’s available.

  4. If you want to see everything the plugin has cached, append &debug to the end of the plugin’s setting page URL and hit return.  You’ll get the settings page with a dump of the cached data at the end.  This is clumsy and will be much less so before 1.1 final.  I’m thinking click a link, enter debug mode.  Probably won’t go all AJAXy, though you never know.

So that’s the state of things.  Let me know if anything breaks.

Subverting WordPress

Published 16 years, 9 months past

I’m going to get back to posting here in just a bit with word of conference appearances (some overseas), plugin updates, and a small elegy, but first I need a little help with WordPress and subversion, if someone could spare the cycles to assist a newb.  (Which would be me.)

So I have meyerweb’s WordPress install all subversion-managed.  The only problem is that there are three core files I’ve had to hack (reasons upon request) and that makes updating really icky.  I fire off… 

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1/ .

…(where 2.6.1 is replaced with whatever the latest version is) and it updates everything.  For my custom-altered files, though, I get diff files and a .mine file that has my old copy and then a copy that’s littered with diff markers, which cause PHP error-crashes, which takes down the site.  At least until I go in and copy the .mine files over the diffed-up files.

So: how do I do some kind of local checkin of the altered files so that I don’t attempt to post them back to the WordPress codebase (these are very specialized hacks) but future WordPress updates don’t break my site?  For extra ideal points, it would be great if those files were updated with my changes merged into the files.  If it helps, the files thus affected are /wp-blog-header.php, /wp-includes/classes.php, and /wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php.  Thanks for any help!

Survey Halfway

Published 16 years, 10 months past

Okay, so yes, I posted about this two weeks ago and haven’t said anything since, but still: we’re halfway to the close of this year’s survey, so if you haven’t already done so, please devote ten minutes to taking it now!  You’ll make your voice heard along with literally thousands of fellow web professionals, hobbyists, and other people who make websites.  My copy of Excel is already weeping at the thought of having to crunch all that data, and I think that if there’s one thing on which we can all agree, it’s that anything which makes Excel cry is a good thing.

I TOOK IT! and so should you: The Survey for People Who Make Websites

Thank you.

I Took the 2008 ALA Survey

Published 16 years, 11 months past

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s back, bigger and better than ever.  Please read Jeffrey’s wonderful introduction, and then start answering!  It shouldn’t take much more than 10 minutes to complete (it took me 6 minutes, 44 seconds, but who’s counting?).

I TOOK IT! and so should you: The Survey for People Who Make Websites

Last year, we had an astonishing 32,831 responses; I can only imagine where we’ll end up this year.  And just as with last year, we will report our findings and release an anonymized raw data set.

The more people who take the survey, the better the results will be, so please—post the link on any relevant sites, mailing lists, discussion boards, or other communities.  Print up flyers and post them around your town.  Anything we can do to get the word out!

Thank you.

Any-Element Linking Demo

Published 16 years, 11 months past

In support of the still-to-be-finished proposal for allowing most HTML 5 elements to become hyperlinks, I’ve written a quick proof-of-concept demo for your perusal.  Basically, it’s a page with some JavaScript that captures the whole document tree, looks for any elements with an href attribute, and then sprinkles some events on those elements in order to make them act like hyperlinks.  There’s also some CSS that applies old-school link presentation to said elements (blue and underlined, baby!).  I’m using href because it was the easiest thing to do.

I’m sure I could have written a more elegant script (and yes, I know, your favorite JS framework would done it in half the lines and seventeen times the page weight) and I suspect there are some things I’m missing.  I’ll be interested to hear what those may be.  Meanwhile, if you want to try out your own arbitrary-element linking, grab a copy of the demo and edit the markup to your heart’s content.  Or you could suck out the JS and apply it to your own test pages.  Your call.

The demo works fine in Firefox 2, Camino 1.5, Safari 2, and Opera 9.2.  I didn’t test it in anything else.  It may well fail spectacularly in every other browser known to man and dog.  That’s not really an issue, though.  The goal here is to have a working demonstration, not a universal solution.  (The latter may come later.)  It’s a handy way to show people how browsers should behave in an arbitrary-link world.

The one thing that didn’t go right is the status-bar URL handling when hovering over a linked element (other than an a element) that descends from another linked element.  For some reason the descendant’s URL never shows up in the status bar.  I’m sure there’s an easy fix.  I regard this as a minor issue.  [Update 7/23: this has been fixed thanks to Allwyn Fernandez.]

The biggest thing that’s missing is simulating “visited” styles on non-a elements; in this case, turning them purple.  That would require mining the history and dynamically adding classes and, well, all kinds of stuff.  I’m sure it’s possible.  I’m also sure that I don’t have the time right now to figure out how to do it well.  Besides, ship early, ship often, right?

As I said before, I’m very interested to know what people think of the demonstrated behavior and how it might be improved.  And hey, if anyone wants to contribute improvements to the JS, I’ll do my best to keep up.

One more step toward a concrete proposal…

Phone for Direction

Published 16 years, 11 months past

At one point during An Event Apart Boston—for which I finally uploaded my few pictures, to add to the much larger pool—I observed that Boston, like parts of New York City and most European cities, is a place where maintaining a relation to the cardinal compass points is almost impossible.  Thanks to its centuries-long Organic Growth Syndrome, finding one’s way can be next to impossible, even when you have Google Maps giving you directions on your iPhone.  (Not my iPhone; I don’t have one yet, which makes my posting of the perfect ringtone deliciously ironic.  But certainly on whoever around you has an iPhone, which is put-near ever’body, these days.)

Of course, the soon-to-be-released 3G iPhone will have true GPS capabilities, I said, and that’s when it hit me: someone should take the iPhone SDK and an insanely high-resolution copy of the Safari logo and put them together to create a 3G iPhone compass.  Hold it level and watch the needle find true north!  Genius.

So somebody get on that, okay?  Thanks much!

Linking Up

Published 17 years, 2 weeks past

The “href everywhere” document (which is officially titled “HTML5: More Flexibile Linking”) has been updated, so kindly give it another look and challenge my assertions, use cases (or lack thereof), and any weak points.  Unless you consider the whole idea of extending linkability to be a weak point, in which case, never mind.  You may or may not be right, but attacking the whole premise isn’t going to get much traction.  I’m convinced the general idea is a good one.  Now it’s up to me to make the best case for it and convince implementors that I’m right.

Thanks to comments on the previous post in the series, a few elements were added to the list of those which have plausible use cases, and I added some documentation of the elements that either aren’t on the list or don’t need to be on it at the end.  Eventually, the “Possible Additions” section will disappear entirely, and at that point I’ll be ready to submit it for consideration to the Working Group.

There are a few outstanding questions raised by commenters on the previous post:

  1. Is there a reasonable case for linking any of ul, ol, or dl?  In cases where they represent quotations of other documents, they’re be wrapped in a blockquote anyway, and I’ve already got a use case for that one.  Linking li makes sense, but the whole list?  There are also questions about dd—would it make sense to allow linking to the paired dd?—but I don’t see a use case for dd.  The whole point there is it’s supposed to be the definition, not a shortened reference to a longer definition.

  2. I was persuaded of the utility of linking video, my previous uncertainty having been based in a misunderstanding of how click-this-video worked now, but what about audio?  I haven’t noticed it being common to link embedded audio clips to other sources, but maybe I’m missing something.

  3. Can a table have multiple thead, tbody, or tfoot elements?  If so, linking them starts to make more sense.  I only wish I could find the part of the HTML5 draft that answers this one way or the other. In a like vein, I can’t decide if it makes more sense to add linking to caption or table.  I’m kind of tending toward the former.  Anyone have good arguments either way?

  4. Should embed and object have direct linking, or is that better handled with already-extant markup patterns?  (If so, using param, I would imagine.)

  5. Is there a reason to link a whole pre to some other resource, other than linking part of a program to a codebase?  Because in those cases, I’d probably use the <pre><code>...</code></pre> pattern, and link the code element.  pre is a presentational element, really, and you’ll note that I haven’t proposed adding linking to just about any of the presentation elements, sup and sub being the exceptions.

  6. There’s a list of “(Possibly) Unsuitable Elements” near the end of the document that might bear some review in case I’m missing some obvious use cases.  Obvious to someone other than me, I mean.

Let me know what you think!  I’m definitely moving forward with this, as I’ve received encouragement from a member of the HTML WG,  but I’d like the proposal to be as solid as possible before I do so.  Thanks for everyone’s help!

Excerpts Exacted; Shielding the Admin

Published 17 years, 2 weeks past

In response to my request, the indomitable Hamish Macpherson has created NeverForgetcerpt, a plugin for WordPress 2.5+ that will warn you if you’re about to publish a post that lacks an excerpt.  I’m already using it on meyerweb and it’s working like a charm.  He’s also expressed interest in the idea of a plugin that does that and also warns you if you forgot to add tags or categories, so stay tuned.  Meantime, all hail Hamish!

I have another plugin request, but in this case I’m looking for help in modifying something I’ve already done.  Or half-done, maybe.

I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of comment spam.  As I type this sentence, Akismet has stopped 837,806 spam attempts in total.  A false positive makes it past Akismet and my other defenses to land in the moderation queue about once every four days, on average.

Some of those false positives are really, really, really easy to spot, and they get marked as spam in order to help improve the recognition algorithms.  Others are hard to evaluate just by looking at the comment.  Many are trackbacks from sites in langauges I can’t read, and others that I can read look legit enough.  In such cases, I usually go visit the author’s URL to see if it looks spammy or not.

Now, the way I used to do this was to right-click on the blog link, copy the URL of the target, open a new browser tab, and paste the URL into the address bar.  Why?  To prevent my WP admin URL from landing in the referer logs of a potentially unscrupulous site owner.  But sometimes I forget to do all that, and just click.  I figured, well, why not stop fighting the tendency to just click and write a plugin that routes all outbound links through a redirect service?

So I did.  You can grab it for yourself if you want, but if you do, understand that it’s pretty clunky right now.  Which is the part I’d like help fixing.

The heart of the plugin is simplicity itself: 

if (is_admin_page()) {
	add_filter('get_comment_author_url','_mw_obscurify',5);
}

function _mw_obscurify($url) {
	if ($url) return 'http://google.com/url?q=' . $url;
}

There’s a little more to it than that (specifically, the routine is_admin_page(), which I got from someone else’s plugin and wish now I could remember whose it was) but that’s the core.  So any time the URL of a comment author is fetched, it’s prepended to turn it into a Google redirect.

That’s true for both href values and displayed URLs, though, which is the clunky part.  The end result is that on comments from the aforementioned mighty Hamish, for example, I get the following markup on the “Comments” page: 

<a href="http://google.com/url?q=http://hamstu.com">
http://google.com/url?q=http://hamstu.com</a>

What I’d very much prefer is: 

<a href="http://google.com/url?q=http://hamstu.com">
http://hamstu.com</a>

Or even: 

<a href="http://google.com/url?q=http://hamstu.com">
hamstu.com</a>

So what I’d like to know is if there’s any way to make that happen short of rewriting and replacing get_comment_author_url, which I’d prefer not to do since it could change in future versions of WordPress and I’m not particularly interested in turning a basic plugin into a continuing maintenance headache.  I mean, I will if absolutely necessary, but I’d like to find a better way if there is one.  Thus the request for help.

Also, are there better redirect strategies than using Google the way I have?  It’s very slightly annoying that I have to click through the Google redirect page, and though I absolutely understand why they do that, I’d love to find an automatic redirect that wouldn’t expose my referer to the target site.  Anyone know of one, or have a related sharp idea?

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