The otherwise very fine Bloglines RSS aggregator isn’t liking this site very much, reporting errors when trying to add the Geekrant RSS feed which works so well for most other people.
Uh, yes the feed does exist. Those who like XML can look at it raw.
It’s doing the same for some other blogs, including my personal one, having rejected it since late December. Very odd. And I’m not the only one.
I’ve contacted Bloglines support, so hopefully they’ll be looking into it.
WordPress junkies may be interested to hear that the WordPress 2.0 Release Candidate is out, with the real release expected to be only days away. From the sounds of it there’s a heap of cool new features in it, though much of it is under-the-hood changes that will affect developers more than anybody else.
One of my summer holiday projects is to upgrade all my WordPress installations. I’ll take a look at 2.0, but of course I’m always wary of jumping straight into major new releases, especially since 1.5.2 is incredibly stable.
I thought I was going crazy the other week. I had a Word document, overdue for sending to a professional printers, with an incorrect footer on pages 7 and 8.
So I tried to fix it. Double-click on the footer. Amend “September” to “December”, like this:
Click the Close button on the header/footer toolbar… and it changed back to “September”.
I swear, I must have messed with the thing for about half an hour, trying it over and over, even trying to blank out the footer completely. The change just would not stick. Turning on and off the “Same as previous section” didn’t seem to help either. I tried it on my main machine (Office 2003) and the other one (Office XP). Same result. Somehow, somewhere, it was remembering September.
Possibly it’s something to do with all the sections I have in this document. It’s a newsletter, and has a mix of 3 column (article) and 1 column (heading) sections. Not that it’s any excuse. But perhaps it’s a fairly obscure problem; there’s certainly nothing about it that I could find in the KB.
Eventually I somehow managed to get it fixed on page 7. Page 8 wouldn’t stick though. Given it was past the deadline, I gave up and sent it off to the printers as it was. Hopefully nobody would notice.
A couple of it got shot through to Tony. He found the same thing. He got Rae to try, and… she fixed it. And couldn’t understand what the fuss was about.
Later on I figured it out. If you double-click on the footer, things can go wrong. But if you go via the menus: View / Header and Footer, you’ll be okay. Bizarre.
Mind you, when you change it this way, it temporarily throws the page count and repagination right out. In this case, it suddenly thought it was on page 10 (when actually there were only 8 pages).
Still, the document was finally fixed, and the superb people at Flash Print in Collingwood (Melbourne), used the fixed version on the job, even though the file was 24 hours late.
But my conclusion? Page headers and footers are buggy when using lots of sections. Another item for the MS Word bug bucket.
One of the weaknesses of WordPress and most other web-configured applications is that unless you want to go SQL or config-file-wrangling, it’s pretty much only configurable via the web, at least for tweaking, importing posts, setting up most of the options. This is a problem when, for instance, you’re migrating an existing site onto WP, and it’s on a new server, as you can’t get to the wp-admin screens.
The way to do it is to hack your hosts file. Once the new server is running and WP is setup on it, find your hosts file and add an entry to the new server. On Windows, this is the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.
Chuck in a line that says contains your new server’s IP address, and the hostname. Something like:
192.168.0.1 www.evision.com.au
(Whoopsie, real-world example with a fake IP. The new evision site is going live Real Soon Now.)
Save, then away you go. You can see the new site and tweak to your heart’s content, but nobody else will be able to see any of it until you re-delegate.
The catch? It probably won’t work from behind corporate networks, where your computer uses a proxy.
Scoble writes that WordPress.com has strong comment spam protection, but that it sometimes gets false positives.
I’ve found nothing better for spam protection than WP-Hashcash, which uses Javascript to make sure it’s a human entering the comment, not a robot, but without captchas or other stuff the user has to do. Works like a dream.
The only down side is it doesn’t work with some older WP templates. So while this site is fully spam equipped, my personal blog won’t run it until I upgrade the template (probably a project for Christmas time).
But apart from that, for WPers out there, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Combined with settings that ensure firsttime posters go straight to moderation (subsequent postings are approved automatically) it ensures that those damn spammers never get their comments published on my site.
I might add that the company I work for (which develops B2B messaging systems) is working on a new site. To encourage them to update it regularly (some might call it blogging, but I’m emphasising “regular updates to existing and potential customers”) I’m building it on WordPress. Given WP’s ability to do a site of static pages and dated entries, it should work very well.
The Age and SMH recently launched a new layout, which includes splitting articles across pages. They must have heard the criticism over this, because articles now include a link to view all of the text on a single page.
But there’s still problems with it. Examples:
This article ended up with no text at all on page 3; just an advert. Evidently a few carriage returns got tacked onto the end of it.
This article ended up with no visible text at all, and the adverts hiding underneath other story links (at least in Firefox). (via Tom N)
And this story, about Australian Nguyen Tuong Van’s impending execution in Singapore has as its advert a Qantas promotion including cheap seats to Singapore. The same ad runs with a similar story on the SMH. (via Tony)
Not good.
Update 10am: This article also features the ad for Qantas cheap fares to Singapore.
One of my most hated things from recent versions of Outlook is the way it edits plain text messages by chopping out supposedly extra line breaks. Inevitably, they’re not extra — they’re there because the sender doesn’t like hitting enter twice between paragraphs — particularly when writing short lists of things.
Outlook does give you the option of restoring the linebreaks it’s taken away by clicking an option near the top of the message. It’s a right pain to have to keep doing it on every message though.
In Outlook XP, I never found a way to turn this off. Maybe it was there, but very well hidden.
Fortunately in Outlook 2003 it’s possible to turn it off for good, though the online help is no help at all at finding it.
Here’s how you do it: Tools / Options / Preferences tab / E-Mail section / click E-mail options. Then find and turn off the checkbox “Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages”.
(Note that after turning it permanently off, it still happens if you’ve been mucking about in a message beforehand, shown the “extra” linebreaks, then hidden them again and saved the message.)
I’ve been working with somebody else’s template. Irritating things have included:
I’m sure in older versions of Outlook, the Followup Flag was somewhere on the left hand side, and that’s still where I’m used to seeing it. But in Outlook 2003, it’s on the right, and apparently can’t be moved. Unlike the other columns, it’s not draggable, and if you go into the dialog box that sorts the columns, no matter where you think you’ve moved it, it stays put on the right hand side.
It turns out you have to employ some special trickery to move it. In the Other Settings, there is an option called Quick Flags. This needs to be turned off to hide or move the column.
The down side is, Quick Flags does nifty things, with a left-click alternating between setting a red flag, and ticking off (to show a task is completed). It also provides a special right-click menu that allows quick access to the flags (hence the name), instead of via the main right-click menu via the Followup option. MS, in their wisdom, made all this only work when the Flags are in the rightmost column. Weird.
Well, I sorted out my problem of confusing warnings appearing whilst controlling Excel with VBA. Turns out there is an Application.DisplayAlerts property which, when set to false, hides warnings such as the one I was getting. It took a little Googling to find the solution, which wasn’t readily apparently in any of the MS help for the methods I’d got the warnings from.
The other Office applications also have a DisplayAlerts property.
Okay, this is annoying. I’m working on a VB program that uses the Excel object library to automate a fairly complex update into Excel. The general idea when you’re automating Excel is to smoothly do your operation behind-the-scenes, to hide the complexity from the user.
So the last thing you need is complicated dialog boxes popping up to ask the user questions. I’m the programmer: I’m meant to make the decisions. Tell me, the programmer, that if I save this Shared Workbook with a password that certain parts of the file won’t be encrypted. Don’t tell my user, and ask them to decide if it should happen or not.
Brian Jones on why Microsoft Office 2000 (and later) produces such godawful HTML:
Our scenario was that people would start saving “docs†as HTML on their intranet sites and browse them with the browser. We viewed the browser as “electronic paper†that we had to “print†to (i.e. perfect fidelity). We had already got a lot of feedback from our Word97 Internet Assistant add-in that any loss of fidelity when saving as a web page was unacceptable and a “bugâ€. As it turned out, this usage scenario did not become as common as we thought it would and a zillion conspiracy theories formed about why we “really†did it. Many people assumed that a better approach would have been to save as “clean†HTML even if the result did not look exactly like what the user saw on the screen. We felt that the core office applications (other than FrontPage) were not really meant to be web page authoring tools, so we focused on converting docs to exact replicas in HTML. We didn’t want people losing any functionality when saving to HTML so we had to figure out a way to store everything that could have existed in a binary document as HTML. We thought we were clever creating a bunch of “mso-” css properties that allowed us to roundtrip everything. HTML didn’t take off in the same way we had expected, and today, the main use for Office HTML is for interoperability on the clipboard, though of course the biggest use is within e-mail (WordMail).
None of this explains why Office 2003’s “Filtered HTML” is so riddled with proprietary tags, though. Admittedly, a filtered HTML file is smaller than a roundtrip HTML file out of Word, but it’s still hugely bigger than the type of HTML you’d write from scratch (or in a web page editor such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage), and the source code is unreadable.
To my mind, Filtered HTML should be just that: HTML, filtered in such a way that the basic structure of the document is preserved, but none of the junk that Word (or whatever) stores along with it. Leave that for the roundtrip HTML — though I can’t see the appeal in that either, since if you want to store documents in a viewable form on the great InterWeb, PDF is the way to go. Or just store it in the native Office format for internal use, when you know every user will have the application or a viewer.
(By the way, when I was trying out the roundtrip HTML the other day, while reloading, Word presented me with a strange warning that it was going to query from some nonsense “Z” table to put data in the document. Bizarro. The test document did quote some SQL, but this would seem to suggest the roundtrip HTML isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.)
Anyway, Brian’s full article is about the progression of the Office formats from binary in the 90s into the XML to be used in the next version. Well worth a read if you want some background on the history, and where they’re going now.