Jun 14th, 2008 | Web
I should have known that not all would be rosy in my move to WordPress. It seems that core WordPress’ default implementation of TinyMCE consumes <div> tags in hand-coded HTML posts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That behavior has caused me no end of headache as I’ve tried porting the HTML pages from my old completely hand-coded website as WordPress has mangling those finely-coded masterpieces <sic> beyond all normal recognition.
A little googling and I uncovered lots of discontent on the topic along with a few hacks and a hackish plugin, none of which I really want to implement in given WordPress constant upgrade cycle. The suggestions to fix this in core were so well received that I was surprised that the topic does not appear to have been addressed by the core WordPress team.
However, I was finally able to stumble upon a plug-in called Dean’s FCKEditor For Wordpress that appears like may solve the problem by simply replacing TinyMCE with FCKEditor. Don’t know if this is going to be my panacea or not, but after installing it the first thing I notice is how FCKEditor’s normal fonts are too small for my tastes (I guess I’m going to have to dive in and figure out how to change that.)
If Dean’s plugin does not ultimate solve that problem I ran across two other plugins worth considering. The heavyweight TextControl Plugin and the lightweight Disable wpautop Plugin. I’ll revisit this issue and those plugins in the future if the topic becomes obviously worth revisiting.
Jun 13th, 2008 | Miscellaneous, Personal, Software, Web
It’s been a really long time since I last blogged, and it’s all because I got totally fed up with my old blog software and vowed never again to blog until I replaced it with WordPress. Well as you can guess getting around to replacing it took far longer than I planned, but now it is finally here! I’ve still have other non-blog related things that were housed at my domain I still need to fix such as this but now that the domain is switched over to WordPress I’ll have a bit more urgency to get those fixed. I look forward to rejoining to ranks of the blogging community.
What’s more, a lot has happened since I last blogged so I have lots of things to blog about in the coming weeks and months. Of course I have plenty of billable work that needs to get done so for all those of you who are waiting with baited breath for me to blog (LOL!), future blog posts won’t be coming as fast and furious as I’d like but at least with the new blog they can start to trickle out.
Sep 1st, 2007 | Web
Yes I know, it’s a blogger’s cardinal sin to post about why he hasn’t posted in a while. But live with it.
The irony is I’ve had so much to blog about. The reason I haven’t is because a while back I finally gave up on dasBlog and decided I’d switch to WordPress before I blogged again. dasBlog makes so many things difficult that are either easy or trival on WordPress, such as commenting and monitoring spam. After years of putting up with dasBlog I just finally got fed up and decided I’d wait to switch to Wordpress. Sadly I’ve waited a long time, and it’s possible it may still be a while before I can move everything over.
Of course I could have tried upgrading dasBlog, but it’s so much harder to enhance dasBlog with it’s limited templating system that requires compiled .NET plugins vs. WordPress’ PHP scripting (reminiscient of classic ASP+VBScript, only better) that I was finally able to shed my programmer’s guilt for not learning how to write usable .NET plugins just as I was able to shed my guilt for never becoming proficient in x86 assembler back in the late 80’s.
I’ve got a huge backlog of posts that are anywhere from 10% to 99% complete, many of which will never see the light of day because they just won’t be appropriately timely enough by the time I’m ready to finish and post them. Ah well, story of my life; I can envision far more than I ever have time to complete.
Anyway, the reason for this post is to introduce the next post about a module I’m writing for Drupal. I’ve spend a lot of time recently with Drupal and am getting quite good at it, even if I do say so myself. I would have liked to have posted several Drupal related posts as a recursor but if I waited for that I doubt I’d ever manage to post about the module!
So without further adieu, on to the next post!
P.S. It may actually be a few days before I get that post finalized, but if it is not posted yes I am working diligently on it so just hold your breath… :-)
Aug 14th, 2007 | Atlanta, Software, Technology, Web
I’m at the Fox Theatre in my hometown of Atlanta today checking out the Adobe AIR Bus Tour Summer 07. It’s nice to be at the first event nationwide. I’m attending at the behest of a friend who thinks it going to be the "next big thing." I’m skeptical. I fear yet another proprietary attempt to empower developers to craft unique custom web interfaces to provide desktop functionality as a layer over web technologies, and that’s not a compliment. These types of things, especially when looking at the black box nature of opaque Flash SWF files, do their best to ignore those things that make the web work, i.e. stateless URL-addressed resources. The reality of Adobe AIR remains to be seen… P.S. It would have been nice if Adobe had consulted me to ensure that this event was more convenient for me. I mean, I actually had to leave my home and cross the street to attend. Adobe, Please! ‘-)
Sep 27th, 2006 | Opinion, Software, Web
I blogged about dasBlog 1.9 on Friday and was planning to upgrade, but I’ve been monitoring the developer list and it seems there are still a few too many little problems to make upgrading a smart proposition, at least for me. Better to wait a bit for the dust to settle.
Sep 22nd, 2006 | Software, Web
Just a few hours ago, dasBlog 1.9 was released! I’ll probably upgrade my blog to use it, hopefully this weekend. It has tons of new features over 1.8 which is what I’m using for this blog at the moment.
The following are the new features that I found most interesting:
Kudos go to Scott Hansleman, Omar Shahine, and the rest of the dasBlog team. If you are running dasBlog, looks like a worthy upgrade. Or, if you are new to dasBlog and are interested in consider it, now’s a great time to download it and check it out!
Aug 28th, 2006 | Miscellaneous
On last Friday I blogged about my new Saleforce.com blog that I recently launched. Now you might ask why didn’t I just post my comments about Salesforce.com here on Miscellanous Ramblings? The simple answer is I’ve learned over the past several years of blogging that, aside from being a vanity play, unfocused blogs really don’t benefit anyone least of all the author. And I find it rather ironic that I in hindsight chose "Miscellaneous Ramblings" as a moniker because that’s what I’ve done here; ramble on and on about miscellanous topics with no obvious direction. Well, they do say hindsight is 20-20.
Moving forward I’m going to expend the vast amout of my blogging effort on blogs that focused on specific topics. And I do plan to keep this blog online, at least for the foreseeable future. If I feel inspired to blog about a topic for which I have no other place to blog, I’ll do it here. Otherwise, you’ll be able to find my thoughts at my other blogs, and you’ll be able to find a list of my blogs here: www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
Aug 25th, 2006 | Miscellaneous, Personal
Jul 20th, 2005 | Software, Web
Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.
Jun 22nd, 2005 | Personal
Okay, so you may have noticed that my prior blog post was a really, really long time ago. Why? Well….
We hosted my blog on a server here in the office. I made the mistake of not mirroring the hard drive on that server. My net admin made the mistake of thinking that server wasn’t important enough to back up. Hard disk crashed. You get the picture….
So I paid $1500 to recover the data (that server had other websites on it too), and my blog sat there on CD until just earlier today when I thought I really should resurrect it.
Why didn’t I do it sooner? Well, I kept thinking I would get around to implemented .TEXT and move to it, but every time I tried I couldn’t get the d@mn thing to work. I’m a developer, not a net admin who understands security contexts (I don’t.)
Then today, I spent over 1/2 the day trying to get it dasBlog to allow me to post, even upgrading to the newest version. What was the problem? "NETWORK SERVICE" hadn’t been given rights on the directory. Grrrrrrr!
So there. That’s why it’s been down so long.
Hopefully it won’t happen again. :-)
