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A little here and there

My blog has been acting up the whole of last week – which is why I haven’t been able to post about the other mundane stuff I’ve been up to.

Some geek shit

I had just upgraded the core WordPress engine, and for some reason, my index page won’t display articles. All other pages work though. There was nothing wrong with my code; and I don’t say this arrogantly, but because I tried plugging my code to a default template and it worked flawlessly. (Of course it did… why shouldn’t it? Ok that was a tad arrogant 😉 hehehe.)

Anyways, I had the time to sort it out today after finishing work. Turns out the new version wouldn’t play nice with concurrent database connections like the older one did. 1 my peer list, and social network icons, are stored in another database Anyways, nothing that a simple mysql_select_db(); switch couldn’t fix. So back to regular programming Read More

Notes

Notes
⇡1 my peer list, and social network icons, are stored in another database
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WordPress plug-in hacks

I’ve been meaning to post this ever since I transitioned to the new blog.

I’ve already explained in another post the frustrations I have with regards to the approach of WordPress plugins 1 How “snobbishly self-contained they tend to perform, etc.

This post however is to assert that despite all these “limitations” there is one developer that seems to have found an awesome workaround – and if people just get on board with his plugin architecture, most of the “silly issues” plaguing WP plugins could be solved.

So yeah, I guess this post is more of an evangelical one to [hopefully] give more exposure to Mr. Rob Marsh SJ and his extremely versatile Post-Plugin Library. Read More

Notes

Notes
⇡1 How “snobbishly self-contained they tend to perform, etc.
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WordPress vs MT revisited

Now that it’s been a while since the blog started being powered by WordPress, I figured it was the time to do a comparison of the two systems.

I guess the short of it is that if you don’t need plugins that much… MT would be the better system. It’s highly configurable on it’s stock setting. In other words, you probably can do most content “filtering” with a base install of MT, while you’ll be needing a bunch of plugins on WP to accomplish the same things.

Having said that though, if you need lots of “special” functionality, WordPress can be a practical choice because of the sheer activity of the plugin development community.

For the next post, I’ll be evangelizing a certain plugin-architecture that I think may benefit a lot of WP plugin developers. I’ll also drop some code in to extend and make it more useful. In the meantime, I’ll go through my general opinions of the new system after the switch. Read More

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Now powered by WordPress

Recently, during my downtime, I’ve been slowly migrating the blog to a new system 1 doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what that system is 😉

The “move” wasn’t really prompted by one being superior over the other (i.e. MT vs WP). Truth be told, while migrating it became very clear to me that MovableType was by far the more superior system simply by the way it tackles data-flow processes. The best analogy I could give now is similar to why I still use Windows for my audio recording when I use OS X for everything else: because it’s more practical.

PC audio apps are cracked left and right whereas OS X audio apps aren’t as easy to find. Take out the whole piracy aspect out of it, and we have a similar situation: WordPress has more plugins being developed than MovableType 2 or at least the plugins I use. I initially wanted to upgrade to MT 4.x, but when I looked for the plugins I considered to be indispensable, I found that WordPress was the better choice.

I’ll do another post for my opinion regarding the switch; for now, let me just welcome you to the new system by pointing out the changes. Read More

Notes

Notes
⇡1 doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what that system is 😉
⇡2 or at least the plugins I use