Wordpress – Not Your Average Engineer

December 3, 2008July 1, 2020

Tarski 2.4 RC1 and fixing some Gravatar problems with WordPress

The guys that develop the Tarski WordPress theme released 2.4 RC1 today. I already have it running on my site and am enjoying some of the new features.

One problem I was having prior to and after the upgrade to Tarski 2.4 was my gravatar wasn’t showing up on comments I made. Granted, this isn’t a particularly popular destination on the internets but there are a couple of comments here and there. What I’ve been able to deduce was going on is that my comments had the wrong email address attached. I was using a different email account as my admin email for a while. Switching it over to the email address I have registered at Gravatar.com cleared up the problem for new comments but the old comments still refused to show my gravatar.

Some more poking around led me to realize that WordPress hadn’t switched over the email address assigned to my old comments to my gravatar-friendly account. A quick trip through the comment edit menu and everything is right in my blog once again.

An interesting note is that in the default WordPress theme, I didn’t have any problems and all of my gravatars showed up without having to edit anything. Perhaps there is some sort of unforeseen interaction between Tarski 2.4RC1 and WordPress 2.7RC1.

November 8, 2008November 8, 2008

oobject.com – how do they do it?

The oobject.com website has a style that I would like to replicate on my website for various parts of it. I was thinking of a similar style for the front page and for a few of the other pages (portfolio, my travels page, etc). Poking around their website, I don’t see how oobject does it. Is that hand-coded or is it a plugin or ???

Update: It looks like they do it using a service from wists.com. It’s a shame that there isn’t a locally-hosted option because I would enjoy running something like that on my website.

November 8, 2008July 1, 2020

Best way to display content – pages or posts?

I’ve been slowly porting content over from my old website host to my new website. It’s been a bit of a painful process as I had hand-coded most of the html on the old pages in such a way that it is rather difficult to move directly from one server to the other. Back when I made the pages in question, I didn’t own a domain name and was thus hosting it off of my university’s top-level domain behind a “/~username” setup. To bring them over to my new site, I’ve been replicating the content of the old pages into pages on WordPress. I have also moved the photos from the old site, where they were static, to the new site and a Gallery2 installation that allows more flexibility with some tradoffs that I have discussed in earlier posts.

As I’ve been moving the content over, I’ve been placing it into pages. The way I’ve understood pages and posts is that pages are for static content, such as my old travel photos and writeups, and pages are for dynamic content that rotates through, such as what I am writing here. Pages are organized hierarchically in WordPress while Posts are put into categories and have tags attached.

Looking at my traffic patterns, it seems almost as if the pages that I have put up aren’t registering in search engines. My posts certainly get lots of hits, as is evident by the traffic spike I had for my Sarah Palin Erotica post. Who knew so many people wanted to read about her having eskimo threeways? I didn’t!

Is there a reason that I haven’t been getting very many hits on my pages? Is it because there are no tags assigned to them? Is it from the plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) I use to generate sitemaps? Is it somehow related to the way WPG2 displays images on the pages?

This all leads me to wonder if it would be better to put my old travel photos (and newer ones) into posts rather than pages. Thoughts, anyone?