Going to start to posting more blog posts over the next couple of weeks. I’ve been doing a fair bit of research on solar electricity, and adding solar to my camping rig. I will post my plans in the next couple of days. Also, finished up my draft of camping and outdoors plans for the spring. I will post them I spend sometime editing old drafts that I hope to get up at some point. Should be an interesting week on the blog.
Blogging
Forgot to Comment Out That Line
Sorry about the double posts, you may been seeing lately. It turns I didn’t think to check to see if I had commented out the publish_to_publish hook in my blog, that I had temporarily enabled last weekend to find a bug in the code. It has been fixed and hopefully you will no longer be seeing double posts.
Still Working Out Bugs in the Blog
It’s winter. That means heavy renovations on blog are underway. You might describe it as being the a South Mall style-project, where the whole blog is operating on planks and orange caution tape and under heavy construction for months on end.
While I use the core of WordPress for my blog these days, all of the media code is written and managed by myself. Unfortunately, the code is pretty complicated with a mixture of AJAX powering the interface. I am increasingly using common libraries to reduce the amount of coding – such as jQuery, but there is always room for bugs to crop up, and for things to go wrong.
Once the weather gets nice, I will give up on messing with the guts of the blog. But for now, while the weather is cold and miserable out, I figure I should renovate it as much as possible. It can be a bit difficult to live test at home without the Internet, but I do get a lot more coding done without the distractions of the Internet – even if at times I have to use my clunky, minimally smart phone to find out answers to coding questions I might have.
The good news is the winter will soon be over, both outside and on the blog. Like roadwork, most all work will cease on the internals of the blog, and I will be spending my time in the wilderness.
Every time I think I have found all the bugs in a code, another one pops up. It's more then a little annoying.
Small But Important Blog Renovations Done
- Started adding new content types to my blog — Videos, Google Maps, Links, and Text. This will provide more interesting content, in a compact form. I hope to have most content that goes on Facebook to also be on the blog, in case people aren’t Facebook friends or searching. Less important links and content will remain Twitter-only, but that will still be archived on the blog every night.
- Fixed the scheduling mechanism for the blog. Now there should only be one or two PDF/image maps per day, and similarly only a few Google Maps. This will keep the good stuff rolling.
- Still working on fixing the image/map uploader. I have fallen behind on pictures, but it’s getting better and should be more reliable soon.
Just a lot of miscellaneous improvements on the backend and some and interesting content.
Sticking with WordPress for Now
There’s a lot to like about WordPress, but there also is some limitations I really did not like.
What I Didn’t Like About WordPress
The standard category manager built into WordPress is awful, it can be slow, and clunky with many categories. It simply slows down and malfunctions a lot with many categories.
This is not a problem navigating the site, but the way it works internally, the category navigator creates excessive SQL queries and is slow. It turns out a simple re-write of the category editor, using plugins greatly speeded it up, and is much easier to use. That fixed that problem, and at some point, I may release my replacement category editor.
I also wrote a plugin to replace the default categories widget in the post authoring section. Rather then use a navigation pane to look for categories, the new category box now use auto-complete to select the category. So rather then search for the blogging post, it now provides me with an autocomplete box.
Another speed and reliability issue comes in with 404 errors. It turns out that when WordPress can’t find a particular post, it tends to do a lot of searching in different places for the proper post — regardless of whether or not you want it do that. Part of that was the fault of the 404 Redirected Plugin I had installed, and some has to do with the unique permalinks set-up I currently use — but it’s still an occasional problem, only faced by people who follow a bad link. It can sometimes bleed over and cause the entire site to go down over, but that’s pretty rare problem.
The 404 problem goes away entirely if I disable permalinks entirely, but not if the permalinks are left on in one form or another — even in preferred ID-based structures. I don’t really understand the issue, but it seems only slow down a small number of page views, so at this point, it’s been put on back burner.
Been Exploring Drupal 7
I spent several weeks reading up about the internals of Drupal 7, and trying to decide if that was the blogging product right for me to replace my WordPress installation. I was surprised how much work it would be to make the switch, and retain many of the unique features of my blog that I currently enjoy.
Drupal 7, at least it out of the box design, is very bare-bones. There are limited quality, free modules for it compared to all-popular WordPress. But there was some things I liked a lot about it — namely the robustness of it’s module structure. I got a couple of books out of the library, and started hacking away at it. It was really difficult to get my head around though, as the whole system is very abstract, and getting it molded into my vision of how my blog should work, proved much more difficult then I expected — at which point I abandoned my efforts with Drupal for now.
I also did not like how much Drupal breaks between major release versions. It’s true that WordPress sometimes breaks it’s API — sometimes even in minor versions, but it seems like the whole WordPress platform is more stable than Drupal.
Back to WordPress for Now
Re-writing the category editor and category selector in the WordPress post editor, made things a lot nicer for now. It made the site immediately more maintainable, and made the whole back end work smoother. It convinced me that it would be easier to stay with WordPress for now, and focus on content and improvements to WordPress, rather then moving away from it.
I made some adjustments to infinite-scroll, to speed up the automatic loading of pages. Little things, but they kind of made a big difference.
I also spent some time fixing the categorization of posts, adopting a County-based system for places.
Right now, maps and photos are tied to the blog via shortcodes and automagically-generated posts via the API. This is not a perfect solution, as it sometimes breaks the permalinks by regenerating the WordPress page, every time a photo is updated. It also can be a bit sluggish in the back end, and cause weird problems from time-to time.
The media (maps, photos, google maps) is stored in a custom table, totally seperate from the WordPress tables. It uses a seperate interface to maintain it all, while connected via a menu, and relying on WordPress API calls and categories, it really is only minimally integrated into WordPress. But it works fairly well.
During the Winter Months Will Continue to Explore
I enjoy writing PHP code. WordPress coding is a lot of fun too, because there are so many great APIs to call and easily accomplish things without doing much work.
I recently started using NetBeans IDE, rather then the much more minimal GEdit text-editor to code — which is great, because it provides many more helpful hints including integrating the WordPress API and PHP documentation, provides easy roll-back and tracking of changes, and makes finding coding errors much faster.
We will see where this all leads. I have a lot of free time during the long, boring winter, to explore WordPress and take blogging into a new direction.
There's a lot to like about Wordpress, but there also is some limitations I really did not like.
Aware of Blog Compatiblity Issues
Somebody emailed me a couple of days that my blog doesn’t display very well in Internet Explorer, and at least on the Twitter archive pages, Mozilla Firefox doesn’t display the images correctly, making them too large. I am aware of those issues, and as time permits, I will fix them.
I honestly don’t care much for Microsoft products, such as Internet Explorer, and their obsolete browser, so fixing that will be the lowest priority, probably waiting until next winter. I generally do minimal blog maintenance during the summer, so things get fixed on rainy, quiet days, the few that actually happen during the summer.
Why I’ve Switched to WordPress
Over the past two years, I’ve been studying, writing code, and developing concepts for the future blog, to replace that long-in-the-tooth blog with something much more modern, and using a code base that I would not have to maintain entirely myself.
The reality is maintaining blog code, all by oneself is a lot of work, especially if your not doing it professionally. While it gave me something to tinker with on the long winter nights, I simply got bored with updating, adjusting, and bug fixing code that could be done by others.
After doing some research into WordPress, I found it was a very flexible form of code, that could be easily extendable for my needs — including being able to be tied to a MySQL table with an indexed-geometry column, to allow very quick sorts by distance from a point. I could also easily tie in my existing maps and photos, into the code, by writing a custom plug-in, and using shortcodes.
So welcome to the new blog!