I’m wondering if the known bug in gatekeeper 1.5 depends on which theme you’re running? I’m running journalized-blue, and it was rejecting comments with “Sorry, posting has been closed for the time being.” errors.
I’m running Eric Meyer’s gatekeeper anti-spam tool. He has one known bug listed, where the auto-challenge feature doesn’t always insert the challenge in the comment form. I had tested this when I first installed the software, and it worked at the time, so I forgot about it. Then I added a bunch of themes to my site. I started getting a few complaints from people, saying that comments were closed, so I went and checked all my settings–all my comment settings looked correct, so I was stumped. Until I remembered about that known bug…
I found that my journalized-blue theme was rejecting comments from non-registered users. I added an explicit call to gatekeeperposechallenge() per this suggestion on Eric’s page.
I put the following code in the journalized-blue theme comments.php, between the email and text inputs:
if (functionexists(’gatekeeperposechallenge’)) {
gatekeeperpose_challenge(”,3); // default format string, tab index==3
}
(Need I mention that this needs to be wrapped with php tags?)
I have the theme switcher installed and several themes available, so I’ll log out and try to comment on this post anonymously with each of my themes.
Thanks to Joseph and my blogroll, I saw the WordPress 1.5.1.3 security update. I forgot to re-apply the tags patch from Felix Wong’s tags plugin the first time through. Doh! Thanks for posting this, Joseph.
Just a quick little note about The Trouble With EM ’n EN. This is an awesome article on the lost art of typesetting and includes information on em dashes, en dashes, and all sorts of other “special” characters not included in 7-bit ASCII. Required reading for anybody putting content on the web!
I just remembered that “The Trouble with EM ‘n EN” is what got me started on blogging! I read the article, then checked out the author’s website/blog. Some of the things I read there got me riled up enough that I felt the overwhelming urge to post my $0.02 worth in response. So many thanks to Peter K. Sheerin for a great article as well as getting me into the blogosphere! 
If you look at my archives, you can see that I just recently started blogging (and reading blogs). So I missed this post on Acetylene.net. Zeno’s comment mentions listening to podcasts with an I-pod Shuffle. I’ve tried this before, and it didn’t work very well, for the following reasons:
- With the Shuffle, you can’t “bookmark” a podcast. If you’re only listening to a 5-minute podcast, that’s not a big deal. But I was trying to listen to (for example) The O’Franken Factor, which is several hours long. I usually don’t have a chance to listen to the whole show at one sitting, and hitting “Pause” (and not using my I-pod for several hours) isn’t always an option.
- There’s no way to make notes on a podcast with the Shuffle. I’m listening to podcasts, and hearing cool stuff that I would like to be able to re-visit and/or blog. Unless you hit your stopwatch when you start listening to a podcast, and have pencil and paper handy, there’s no way to make notes on what you’re listening to.
- And finally, Zeno’s complaint: there’s no way to change ratings on the Shuffle.
Don’t misunderstand me–I love my Shuffle! It’s great for listening to tunes on the bike trail, or working in the yard, etc. But for non-fluff podcasts, Zeno had the right idea: do yourself a favor and spring for a higher-end I-pod.
Just thinking about what still needs to be done to get tags support in my other themes…
Steam will need to have 4 files modified:
- archive.php
- index.php
- sidebar.php
- and single.php
I’ve already modified at least one of these files for other reasons, but I have saved original copies of all the files that have been/need to be modified.
I need to clean up my earlier work on Borderline Chaos, and then add tags support to it. I’ve got the original theme files in another directory, still need to see which files I’ve already changed. Files to be modified for tags support:
- 404.php
- archives.php
- index.php
- links.php
- search.php
- sidebar.php
- single.php
Sigh…
Elvgren looks like only index.php needs to be modified. I don’t remember if I have already modified this theme, so I’ll need to download a fresh copy.
Journalized-Blue and Sharepoint Like are already finished. The WordPress Default and the pirate theme (”Yaaarr, ’tis me blog!”) will probably remain tag-less, and may even be deprecated. The WordPress Classic theme will certainly be removed.
I added a 404 page to Mike Little’s journalized theme. It’s nothing fancy, just ripped the content area out of index.php and put some semi-helpful text in its place. This page should work for all of the Journalized themes, and should be site-independent.
The WordPress Codex has an excellent article on 404 pages, including instructions for making your 404 page show up instead of the browser’s default (useless) information. It’s al got suggestions for 404 page content and links to other helpful sites.
Instructions: right-click on this link and save it to a local file. Add any custom text or links as appropriate for your site. Then upload it to your Journalized theme directory, e.g. wordpress/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue.
Enjoy!
Nothing’s been going on here since I’ve been busy hacking up Central Valley NTrak, my model railroad site. It’s now a full WordPress site–all content is managed by WP. I learned a few things about Pages (note the capital “P”) and hierarchal categories which I thought I would share. (Or at least write down, so I don’t have to re-learn them the hard way!)
The site is using a modified version of BB Iverson’s theme, Spirit, which has a few non-post Pages linked from the header. Creating the pages sounded pretty easy, so I jumped in. I got the pages created okay, but I couldn’t view them–I kept getting 404 errors whenever I tried to browse cvntrak.org/archives/. I thought perhaps I had set the page template incorrectly, or perhaps I should have titled the page “archives” instead of “Archives”. I tried all kinds of things, to no avail. Eventually I found a reference to “the default ‘pretty’ permalink format”, so I double-checked that I had indeed set these up correctly, and found my problem–I had turned off write access to my .htaccess file after I got the permalink format set initially, and there were a whole bunch of new rewrite rules to be added for the new Pages I had written. I played with this a little bit more, and it seems like you need to visit the Options/Permalinks page and hit “Update permalink structure” whenever you create a new Page. I tried leaving .htaccess writable, then creating a Page, then viewing it, and I always got 404’s for pages created after the most recent permalink update. I don’t like leaving this file writable, so I’ll just cut-and-paste if I ever need to change the rewrite rules again.
“Spirit” has a category list in the left sidebar, generated by wplistcats(). I set up hierarchal categories for this site, with a couple of top-level “container” categories. Then I made the first post and filed it under the child categories, published it and viewed the home page and wplistcats showed… nothing! I futzed around with this for a while and finally I made a post in one of the top-level categories. Voila! All of a sudden I can see the category hierarchy in the sidebar, at least for all children of the top-level category with a post. I have to play with this some more to see exactly when it breaks. I’m not sure if this is a bug, or maybe I don’t completely understand how wplistcats() is supposed to work.
(NB: If you are asked to login or register for the articles at the SacBee site, just go to BugMeNot.)
Our local paper, the Sacramento Bee, may be doing its best to bury the Downing Street Memo (DSM) story by giving it cursory coverage. One may ask how I can possibly make this claim, considering that the “Bee” is supposedly a liberal newspaper. My evidence:
- This editorial, published last Sunday, 2005-06-19, does all that it can to sweep the DSM story from the public eye.
- Two days later the Bee published these letters to the editor, all but one of them reprimanding the Bee for this slighty editorial and trying to contain the DSM firestorm.
Think about this–two days. There is no mail on Sunday, so all these letters where either emailed or posted and delivered on Monday in order to be printed on Tuesday morning. Typically the Bee will only publish letters to the editor on a given topic ONCE, so the letters that appeared on Tuesday are likely to be the only ones that will ever see the light of day. I believe that the only way the Bee will publish more on this topic is if they are inundated with letters about the DSM and the Bee’s slipshod coverage of it.
So Sacramento… Start writing!
In this post, I mentioned having problems with live updating of the blacklist. (The “URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” error.) In this comment, Matt Read shows how to use curl to fetch the file contents via http. I have posted the curl info on Fahim’s site already.
A bit of hacking on Felix’s tags plugin (version 0.3.0) has cleaned up the Sharepoint theme. I added a new parameter, “countposts” (default true), to the listtags() function. This controls the display of number of posts. The patch is here, just right-click and save locally or use your browser’s “view source” command.
This code could probably be much cleaner, but it gets the job done for me right now. Enjoy!
Update: 2005-09-03 05:36 UTC–the patchfile has been fixed. See this article for more info.
