The wurster, the better

I experienced not being able to login to 2 of my blogs last week. I could view all the posts and access everything outside of the admin. I then checked another blog in a subdomain and I was able to gain access to the admin area. Strange! I hadn’t changed anything. I did upgrade one site to 2.5.1 but the other site was still on 2.3.3.

Then I decided to look at error logs for clues. I saw errors but they have been there for several months. What could have happened. Was I hacked? No. All the files were intact.

So then I decided to compare the files on the site that was working with the site that was not. I found the culprit. It was an htaccess file in the wp-admin folder. Apparently, something changed on the host server that did not require this any more. Once I deleted it, I was fine.

I started working on 2 updates to this gallery script. I wanted to be able to add a new image to new galleries that are uploaded. And I wanted to expand my captions mod to include the default image viewing. This is taking me longer than I expected. The js I tried didn’t work in FF but did in IE. I them found a cross platform js script called sarissa which I will try. I still need to add some way of getting the date modified on the gallery folder so that I can determine when to show the NEW image.

The files I’m modifying are:
ajax.functions.js
ajax.init.js
ajax.gateway.php
gallery.css

I wanted to make my forum be W3C compliant and pass the HTML validation. I found 2 problems that I corrected. One was with my Flashclocks extension for Vanilla. I was using the embed tag to show an swf file. This was not valid and I replaced it with the object tag. The code for embedding should be:

[object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="extensions/flashclocks/clock_large.swf" width="165" height="165"]
[param name="movie" value="extensions/flashclocks/clock_large.swf"]
[img src="extensions/flashclocks/clock_large.swf" width="165" height="165" alt="flashclock"/]
[/param]
[/object]

Note: replace [ and ] with < and >.

I also found that the Announcement extension was not valid because the style tag needed to have type=”text/css” added.

It’s seems that whatever I do, I put myself further behind in many other things. I seem to have been somewhat preoccupied with helping others on the support forums that I have ignored what I need to do. This is a common occurrence for all of us. There just isn’t enough time to do everything. You really have to set your priorities.

I’ve tried to help someone recently integrate the Vanilla forum into WP. It was (and is) quite a learning experience. There have been instructions by others which I tried to follow, but didn’t work. As it turned out, the person I was trying to help actually figured it out. That sometimes happens to me, too. I ask a support question and when I don’t get any help or get help that doesn’t work (for me), it makes me think harder and in different ways. I have solved problems many times and I’m happy that others have done this, too. I hope to try these new steps and see what happens.

As an aside, I have noticed that there are very knowledgeable people who manage the support forums. They could easily (in a lot of cases) answer the users questions. But if they did, the user wouldn’t learn. Managing a support forum appears to be an art and not a science. In some cases, you have to give someone explicit instructions. In other cases, simple clues will help them solve the problem. And in other cases, no response will help the user think harder to look for the solution. Managing a support forum is like teaching. You have to learn who your students are in order to adapt your teaching to their learning styles.

There are 2 solutions as I see it: complete integration with the two and just a look theme-wise for Vanilla to match the WordPress theme. I was trying to go for the theme look and did succeed by doing an iframe in a WP page and create a page template. That really seems to work for me and my type of blog. The other person wanted complete integration with users and passwords and stuff. He wanted the forum to also display in the WP content area. For their scenario, that was the proper solution. I just want to learn so that I can possibly help another at another time. Here is their site, if you want to chek it out.

I thought I would write now since I just uploaded my second extension for the Vanilla forum software. Both extensions were ported from WP plugins: wp_dash-flash-clocks and weighted words. I ported the weighted words plugin back in July creating the WeightedWords extension. I just completed the flashclocks extension tonight. Having contacted both plugin authors for permission to do this, I found that both had used others scripts or flash objects in the making of their plugins.

I also ported the Prolific plugin as a Vanilla extension recently in my experimentation for increasing performance of the WeightedWords extension, but have not distributed this yet to the Vanilla community. It counts the number of words used in posts and display the number. Now, in the Vanilla world, it counts the number of words in the comments and discussion items. What I liked about this plugin was that it only updated a text file with the count when a new post was added. It took me a little while to figure out how to do this in Vanilla, but finally did. I hope to use this technique when I create the next version of WeightedWords to alleviate any performance issues there are with the keyword list now being generated any time the page is refreshed.