Many thanks to Grandad. This absolutely horrendous, disjointed post is all his fault but he’ll probably blame it on K8.

And here we go….

I seem to be getting older these days. Not only am I getting older but it seems to be becoming a habit, a perpetual thing if you will. Knowing full well that it’s always a changing world out there, I began to feel that dreaded sensation of old(er) age that life was beginning to pass me by. I just didn’t seem to be attracted to all that new and interesting stuff out there. A mere 5 years ago, life at home was nothing like it is now and things like having a PC and being connected to the Internet hadn’t been part of my life for at least 4 years at that point. When I finally came to live with my honey in old Stove Pipe City, I was more than way behind as far as the old WWW was concerned and my disabilities from my time in the service had begun to take their toll. In short, my health was lousy.

But being a veteran of the Cold War, serving as one of those strange, stubborn, thickheaded, tenacious, twisted breeds of Navy men called submariners (who are always on the best bad behavior), it didn’t take too long to pick myself back up from the stresses of taking care of my folks, getting back to work and start building my life back up again. I even enrolled in the VA and let me tell you, life as a veteran hasn’t been the same since.

Even so, every night I still dreamed of the ocean mist in my face as I stood watch on the bridge of that submarine during the rare times we were surfaced, watching the reflections of the sky dancing on the surface of the water and thinking how beautiful the day was and of all the destruction those nuclear weapons we and other subs carried hidden from sight under the ocean could do to this world, erasing these beautiful days forever. One saving grace was that my boat was a “fast attack” and our job was to prevent just such a thing from happening…and we did.

We pause from this utterly disjointed, meandering post in order to change the subject entirely…

An oddball and an “off the subject” thing I might mention (so I can use up several tags at once) is that I was born in 1959 and this makes me one of those boomers. In fact a lot of these folks my age and up go around advertising this fact quite a lot lately and even more of the same age that hate the word boomer and spend a lot of time making sure everyone knows it. And strangely enough a lot of these folks have blogs out on the WWW. In fact, we have a regular blogging community having adventures in SEO, metrics systems advertising and spam protection using Akismet and Spam Karma. They’re blogging about the going green, clean energy, global warming, warm winters, the weather and hernias. A lot of them also have WordPress installs because they decided to “do it themselves” no less and these bloggers have learned all about wp plugins and the havoc a bad one can cause, upgrading from WordPress 2.1 to WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3 and hacking their own themes. So who says you have to be young to do this?

I find these blogs to be the best reading around with a ton of great info and insight to be found. A regular digital democracy by jeezum!

I call these folks (and myself) BC Bloggers (Before Computers).

We now return you to more of the same boring nonsense as before…

So one morning, shortly before the holidays, while reading a new Yankee Magazine I found myself taking interest in my surroundings again and with a gift of a digital camera from my wonderful lady, my fascination with gadgets came flooding back. Another item I received also helped peak that fascination was my first set of hearing aids. One disability I ended up with from my time spent poking holes in the ocean was being deaf and since this particular form of deafness is self perpetuating, I began to realize that if I was going to hold down a job, I needed to be able to hear. Logical thinking on my part I thought.

By the way, do me a favor and don’t call me hearing impaired please. I’m deaf…period! Thank you very much.

And so came my first pair of hearing aids (complete with remote control no less) and life in general changed drastically–I now could hear the comments made behind my back. Made life at work a great deal more interesting for those so called friends of mine and their brilliant ideas. All of a sudden they found themselves on the business end of my subtle, dry, sarcastic wit and humor as I quietly stabbed them with their own misc nonsense.

Getting back to what I was saying…at home with the cats, I was just thinkin’ on how I just might finally want to get me that new computer so with hearing aids in my ears I began to peruse the local community at large to see if there was anywhere nearby where I might do this. Okay…there wasn’t. Up here in the Northeast Kingdom by the Canadian border where the local environment, the seasons and the amenities thereof hasn’t changed for the last 50-60 years, I decided the only way to get this new PC was to order it online. My lady was nice enough to let me use her computer to do so.

Too make an already too long post short…

Six months later, DSL finally came to our area (yup, 2004 and all we had was dial up) and with DSL…the blog was born and I was back in business with all my backwoods tech yearnings at full steam. Of course I started with a first post and quickly followed with a few misc posts but then went on to more specific subjects like absentmindedness, at which I excel, posts about space and science and basically ending up wandering all over the place with my various ramblings which entirely confused any readers that happened to stop by thus establishing my reputation as a complete knee biter. Google became my best friend and I even managed to take on a few blog projects put forth by Liz Strauss. I managed to survive them as well (just kidding Liz).

I wrote up posts about my lady’s Long Meadow Farms Quilts (her long time quilting business), quilts, quilting and stained glass. Just so you know, I test each new quilt that she makes by sleeping under it. Good God, I hope she doesn’t read this.

Things have slowed me down of course. I spent quite awhile at the VA hospital in Boston, MA for an endoscopy and surgery for instance and while I was there I spent the initial recovery wandering around as best I could, gazing out of the various windows at the grand vista that was Jamaica Plains…okay, maybe not exactly what one would call a vista but it was better than gazing at all the old farts like me laying in bed in various stages of decomposition. That can get to you after awhile so the hallways and various lounges were the places the hospital staff often found themselves searching after they finally noticed that I had been missing for a day and a half.

Once, while gazing out one of these windows, I noticed that part of the window had been cut out and had been replaced with one of those flat panel LCD TV’s that’s replacing the old CRT sets these days. There was a live interview with an author of some best selling book going on at the time and in my slightly drugged state I remember thinking that this author guy was a real windows live writer. I found out later on that some other author, in a fit of jealous rage, tried to burn down the poor guy’s home and although the local fire department was able to save most of his property, they said it was a real scribefire.

Amazing what you can learn in a hospital. Even more amazing what one will go through to get just three more tags taken care of for the sake of two extremely bad puns.

So there you have it. After starting 3 new sites and keeping one of them, through the 1st writings of nearly 15 years ago to finally publishing on my own blog, seeing my blog referenced in the news section of the online version of Time Magazine, through snow days, spring and Springfield….I’m finally done with this unbelievably horrendous, disjointed, discombobulated, post!

I may not exactly be the person of the year, but you can just call me the ultimate tag warrior! Now where’s my pogo stick?…I’m outta here!

Disclaimer: Of course a few of the tags and categories had the same name which means I really need to weed these things out and none of the tags/categories are necessarily related to the various horrendous, disjointed post subjects. And since I use these tags for my Related Posts feature I decided not to list all them at the bottom of this post for obvious reasons.

Oh yeah, and I simply could not find a way to use Firefox/Thunderbird and JT Evening News so I…wait minute, I guess I used them after all. Good deal!

Did I pass?

Update 11/15/07: It has been pointed out to me that I haven’t tagged anyone with this meme yet. This was strictly due to the fact that whatever brain cells I had left fried for good after I finished this horrible thing. In short, I had to take a few narcotics and pass out on the floor. But now it’s morning and it seems not all brain cells died in the fire of the moment and since my friend Cat stopped by to comment and had the audacity to state that she had over 100 categories and it would be too much hard work…after I managed to shoehorn over 100 tags and categories into the above post…consider yourself tagged Cat!

I also tag Elaine, Emma and Micki as well since I admire these ladies as writers and also because I haven’t given them any reason to harass me lately.

And yes…I was scrutinized by the originator of this meme, K8 and I did indeed pass. Almost makes it all worth it.

UPDATE 08-18-07

I have been banging emails back and forth between the author of OneClick and myself while testing his plugin and due to this and his efforts in making OneClick as stable as possible, he has released a new version this morning (0.9.8) that incorporates the failsafe fix as shown below. And this new release also takes care of a couple of other minor bugs so once you upgrade to the latest version, you no longer have to change any of the plugin’s code.

But there’s something else you need to know…

OneClick Upgrades Itself!

OneClick upgrades itself right from the OneClick page without the user having to do anything at all but click the upgrade link in the “Smilie” section of the OneClick page and follow two simple instructions. No going to the site, downloading, extracting or uploading via FTP required. Just click on a link right in your WP Admin and watch the darn thing do everything itself. One small insignificant bug I found in this new version is that when you upgrade from the OneClick page it will tell you that you’ve successfully upgraded to version 0.9.7 when it should state 0.9.8. The correct version number is shown on your plugins page though so no worries there…just a minor typo glitch.

So why am I taking all this trouble to keep you folks updated about OneClick? Because currently, the author is having trouble with his name registrar and his site is down. This doesn’t interfere with OneClick’s ability to upgrade itself though since the plugin itself resides elsewhere. Another reason is that OneClick along with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin is going to cause a not so minor revolution in the way WordPress bloggers do things from now on. These two plugins alone will allow the average WP blogger to devote a good deal more time to writing good content and working the “front end” of of their blog which, after all, is what blogging is all about, rather than having to spend a significant amount of time upgrading their WP install every time a new security release hits the streets or mucking about with all the downloading/extracting/uploading of plugins and themes.

When Anirudh does get his site back up and running I’ll post it here and then take a back seat so he can drive.

I’m also willing to bet that we’ll see a lot more WordPress newbies around that have been previously holding off due to the complexities of maintaining the WordPress install. There’s still going to be a learning curve for any new WP blogger to work through of course, but the biggest hassles have just been eliminated for most* of us.

* I’m sure there are going to be hosts/servers out there that will keep either or both of these plugins from working due to ridiculous restrictions and lack of permissions. Who knows, maybe WordPress and these great plugin authors of ours will force these hosts to finally adopt a set standard…maybe. One can always hope.

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Previous post

Two plugins that are going to change the world of WordPress blogging and the way things are done are the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin and the new OneClick plugin which automatically uploads and installs themes and plugins into your WordPress install. From your admin and through the use of a Firefox extension.

At this point in time, since both plugins need to call on the zip libraries for extraction a small fix needs to be applied to a bit of code in the plugin’s oneclick.php in order to keep them from arguing about it and OneClick failing in the process. Simply do the following:

change:

require_once(‘pclzip.lib.php’);

to:

if(!class_exists(‘PclZip’))
{
require_once(‘pclzip.lib.php’);
}

I happen to use a specific program to edit any php but all you really have to do is login to your blog’s Admin and head to the plugins/plugin editor and bring up “OneClick” (from the right sidebar) into the editor and scroll down around halfway until you see the above snippet of code and just make the change as indicated above. This change will allow OneClick to operate alongside any plugin that calls upon the zip libraries whereas the plugin will only call up the libraries if they have not been called up already.

The author of OneClick will be releasing an update in the next few days to the plugin and the Firefox extension to take care of this particular bug and a couple other minor problems.

That’s it…have fun. Oh, and don’t forget to drop by the author’s website and give him a thanks. Same goes for the author of WAUP. After all…they just made our lives a heck of a lot easier didn’t they?

Technorati tags: WordPress Automatic Upgrade, WAUP, OneClick, automatic plugin install, wordpress

Keith’s working on a fix for the problem. Here’s an excerpt from his comment about the matter:

Found the bug, it’s apparently no one’s fault but there is some code in the DoFollow plugin that breaks the entire operation.

In there on line 44

if (is_plugin_page()):
$wppDoFollow->options_page();

is causing the problem since the plugin was not activated already the method throws a fatal error and the plugin fails, the reason you may have seen a blank page is because your server settings are not set to show you errors or something. But I am fixing the errors right away and will release patched version which will continue without activating the plugin and show the user a message about it.

His patched version should be out soon but as long as DoFollow is deactivated beforehand and reactivated after then there’s no reason not to start using the plugin right off.

Upgrading your WordPress install just got a whole lot easier!

Update 08-08-07: Keith has just released a new version (0.5) which fixes the bug where the DoFollow plugin and certain other plugins cause WordPress Automatic Upgrade to hang when attempting to reactivate your plugins after the upgrade. It checks every plugin before attempting to reactivate just to see if it might throw an error in the reactivation process and if it finds a particular argumentative plugin (like DoFollow) it leaves it alone and reminds you to reactivate the plugin(s) manually at the end of the upgrade process. You can find a better explanation and the download for the new version here.

I tested it myself and it works just as Keith says it will. Good job Keith!

Technorati Tags: WordPress, WordPress upgrades, WordPress automatic upgrades, WordPress plugins, plugins

Now is that enough links for one paragraph or what?

of course this came after I had done my usual manual upgrade but whose complaining? I downloaded the plugin, put it through it’s paces and with one small exception it worked right out of the box. This is what it does:

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades WordPress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

And that’s exactly what it did on both this blog and a series blog that I’m (slowly) writing. What a breeze.

Now here’s the small exception:

It does not reactivate the DoFollow plugin by Kimmo Suominen or any plugin after said DoFollow in your plugin list. I haven’t figured out why yet but I have emailed Ron and Keith about the problem. The work around is simple enough though. Before you run the automatic upgrade just deactivate the “DoFollow” plugin beforehand and then go ahead and run the automatic upgrade (Manage/Automatic Upgrade) and everything works correctly. And it’s quick!

Looks like our respective WordPress installs just got a heck of a lot easier to upgrade.

Personal note: For the upgrades that involve major revisions such as the next major version of WordPress (2.3), I’ll probably still do the upgrade manually just so I have a hands-on control of every step especially since the next version of WordPress includes tagging as a core feature and I have to import my tags from my tagging plugin and all that happy horse manure. But for the several security releases that come between major revisions, this plugin will be an absolute “must have”.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, WordPress upgrades, WordPress automatic upgrades, WordPress plugins, plugins

Powered by ScribeFire.

The first of these two plugins is wpSEO (the German one) which hopefully will take the bother out of setting all the relevant meta data into the header.php by hand that isn’t handled by a standard WordPress install. This new plugin supposedly takes care of all that kind of stuff automatically once the few dozen options are set up. The author had kindly provided a screenshot of the optimum set up which of course was in German so using the Translator extension for Firefox in this case wasn’t an option.

The second one was much easier. The newly upgraded for WP 2.2 Samsarin PHP Widget hit the streets recently and I couldn’t wait to grab it. When I upgraded this blog to WP 2.2 I lost my King Text Widgets which allowed me the option of using PHP code in the text widgets it provided. Having 20 or so extra text style widgets besides the standard 9 built into the Sidebar Widgets plugin came in handy also. But with the upgrade I found that I was not only stuck with just those 9 text widgets that were now built into WordPress itself, but no way to use PHP in the sidebar at all unless I hard coded myself into the sidebar.php template of my theme.

Blah! You want to play with the code for the sidebar feel free. Me? Give me widgets any day. So I have an extra 9 text widgets at my disposal that allow me to use PHP calls if I wish. Life is good in WordPress land.

Now I just have to wait a couple weeks to see if wpSEO is doing the job or not. We’ll see. And if anyone happens to be using it and reads this post, please do me a favor and leave a comment as to how it’s working for you. It would be much appreciated.

Technorati tags: plugins, WP plugins, wpSEO, PHP widget, Samsarin PHP widget, WordPress