Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

I’m having a little play with Wordpress 2.7’s image handling. Here are some pictures I took today at Sheffield Park Gardens.

I’ve been plagued lately by registration spam (mostly from @gmail). It doesn’t seem to be doing any harm, but it’s irritating; especially as Akismet seems to do such a good job on eliminating the comment spam.

So I’m going to make two changes here in the village of Little Storping. Firstly, for a trial period, I’m removing the requirement to register in order to comment (I originally used this to avoid comment spam). Secondly, any user who hasn’t yet commented on a post will have their registration deleted. Don’t worry if you haven’t commented yet – that’s what this post is for! Make sure you’re logged in and just stick a comment below saying, well, whatever you like, in the next 48 hours, and I’ll believe you’re human.

My apologies to those of you who miss this post and haven’t commented before midday (BST) Sunday 19th October. Of course, you don’t now need to re-register, but I like it if you do, and it allows you to edit your comments if you need to (and, of course, add and edit recipes in the Happy Ploughman!)

Update: I’ve carried out a slightly less radical cull that originally planned, removing everyone who hadn’t posted and who had an @gmail.com or @gmx.com address. I’m not picking on you guys, it’s just that’s where most of the spam seems to come from (I’m surprised gmail doesn’t filter them out…). Anyway, it’s still cut the number of registered users by 75%, and I know most of the rest of you are human…

I finally got an iPhone. The trauma of its aquisition is still too raw (and I’m still too poor a typist) to relate, so this is a test for the Wordpress App, to see if I can post a picture from the phone…

Edit: practising editing and getting used to photo orientation (taking photos with the app isn’t as intuitive as it could be). I notice the iPhone keyboard doesn’t seem to have the thingies for doing HTML…

I’m going over to Wordpress 2.5, it looks groovy, I’m looking forward to it. Things may look a bit funny on the site for a while, however, as I disable all the plugins for the upgrade, and then work out which ones I won’t need anymore because of the new functionality.

Thank you for your patience!

If funny things start to appear on the site this afternoon, it’s because I’m (finally) upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 “Ella”. Bear with me, normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Here goes.

Update, 13.18: All seems to be working, but please post any issues!

Little Storping-in-the-Swuff has been going for about 16 months, though it hardly seems like it. When I started out, back then, I was new to Wordpress, but the best theme I could find was the old “Classic” theme that was the default until Wordpress version 1.2 (we’re on 2.somthing now, but it was 1.5 “strayhorn” back then). I liked it because it was simple, suited my immediate needs, and I always intended to refine the site design if I actually managed to keep the blog going.

Finally I’ve got round to the redesign. I’m using the theme 2cgreen, hacked about a bit to include the Little Storping picture and to make it widget friendly. I’ve probably got a bit more hacking to get it exactly how I want, but I’m quite pleased with it so far.

It’s on probation at the moment. Comments welcome.

The village of Little Storping has only one pub, the Jolly Ploughman. Don’t be put off by the sinister barman or the strange locals. Head on over and see the new recipe wiki: read, eat, enjoy, contribute.

The wiki is powered by wikiwiki, based on erfurt wiki but using WordPress’s authentication. I’ve tinkered and hacked away a bit to make it fit with the theme (plus a modification to functions.php as described here). I need to hack away at it a bit more: I’m not happy with the English localisation (if you get some odd English, I didn’t do it – honest!), but I wanted to launch it right away, after adapting Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiced baked desert apple recipe for my pears – for my adaptation click here.

I am allowing all registered users of Little Storping to be able to edit the wiki as I’d like to have as much user contribution as possible.

So go on, dive in!

Woah, these are fun!

Looking for the hack to get a login box on the sidebar, I’ve come across Wordpress Widgets, old news and well known, but no one told me! If you’ve viewed Little Storping in the past hour, you’ll have seen the sidebar jumping all over the place.

After I downloaded the login widget plugin I became discouraged. It didn’t work. This is where reading the instructions help: you need the widgets plugin. And a compatible theme (included, but I didn’t twig that). Anyway, finally I got it working. Most people will read the readme and be up and running in minutes.

After all that, at first I was dubious. Great concept: drag and drop widgets onto the sidebar for your links, pages, categories etc. But it wasn’t how I wanted it: the login box looked wrong, the categories didn’t indent. Then I realised there were all these options, with explanations if you hover over… So ironically although at first I thought it would be easier just to go straight in and hack the php, with just a little bit of learning, I’ve now got a framework for doing whatever I want with my sidebar. And I’ve got a great login widget.

Right I’m off to find some more cool widgets. Please ignore the sidebar if it dances around for a bit. And let me have any requests… Google search box? Display RSS feeds, recent comments etc?

Hmmm. Wordpress 2.0.3, which Little Storping upgraded to 11 days ago, seems to be escaping characters when comments are edited or I write posts with the Bookmarklet (and I suspect it of turning off comments too). It is claimed this (known issue) can be fixed with this tuneup plugin and as soon as I get to an ftp client I will try it. In the mean time (all together now) we apologise for the inconvenience.

Update (17:44): It worked.  Hurray for TxFx.net.

Wordpress Upgrade: plugins will be deactivated and there may be some downtime as I upgrade us to Wordpress 2.

Update 19:47: Everything has gone smoothly and I have reactivated the plugins. It’s taken about 16 minutes to do the upgrade. The only thing that I can see currently needs attention is the handy login box, for those of you who use it, that used to be at the top right on the sidebar. For now you have to click the login link down the bottom right.