mariuss' weblog

I upgraded two WordPress sites to the latest version, one was running 1.5.2 and the other 1.2. The thing is that I was not impressed at all by the upgrade process and provided documentation. Here are the issues I ran into:

• The readme.html provided with the download is totally misleading when it comes to upgrades. It makes you think that upgrading is a 3-step process -- dead wrong. You should check the upgrade instructions on the official WordPress documentation site, it has no less than 17 very detailed steps.
• In both cases as soon as I uploaded the new code, the sites went completely blank with absolutely no error messages. While trying to see what is wrong, I ran into the second major issue: the official WordPress forum. The forum does not have decent search (it looks like Yahoo search is used and it does crash on you) and features in general are missing. Less is not more in this case.
• After manually going through many pages of the forum and seeing that lots of people had 'blank page' problems, for various reasons, it turned out that I had to turn off caching by uncommenting a line in a php file. This is bad. Very bad.
• Upgrading a 1.2 installation is impossible following the official upgrade documents. You are supposed to upgrade in two steps, from 1.2 to 1.5 and then from 1.5 to 2.0. Fair enough, but this means that you need WordPress 1.5, try to find a way to download it. The download page offers only the latest version and even the old postings announcing 1.5 have no links to the download anymore. Again, manually paginating through forum provided the solution: http://static.wordpress.org/archive/

I really like WordPress, I think that it is one of the nicest pieces of software that I ever used, so I hope that I am not too harsh with these comments. I can see two problems with the WordPress official site: simplicity was pushed too far and the not invented here syndrome.

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The Command Line Helper I was imagining back in February 2005 was born on January 3^rd, 2006: EveryGUI. It is a brand new application registered on SourceForge and its creator is Jeffrey Bakker.

I am really glad to see someone working on a project like this! I will try to get it up and running on my Ubuntu box during the next few days.

Every year on the last Friday of November it is Buy Nothing Day. I hope you celebrated by not buying, I missed it this year :-(

And one more Nautilus script that will run meld to show differences between selected files. Meld knows about cvs and subversion so you can select one single file or folder if they are under revision control and meld will show local changes.

diff-1.0.tar.gz

I wrote a simple Nautilus script that will copy the names of the selected files to the clipboard. It is using a small utility called xclip which allows you to control the clipboard from the command line.

copy-filenames-1.0.tar.gz

The Independent World Television has an interesting collection of videos on their site and it keeps growing. It would be great if you could watch them using the DTV Internet TV viewer (Mac only for now), but there is no RSS stream for these videos.

The good news is that you can create such an RSS feed using del.icio.us. I created a special del.icio.us user for this, bookmarked the first few videos and here is the feed:
http://del.icio.us/rss/iwt/system:media:video

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A simple script that will help you to write or debug Nautilus Scripts. Just copy it to your scripts folder (~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts) and then select some files in Nautilus, right click and select Scripts / NautilusScriptsDebug.

Version 1 of the script: NautilusScriptsDebug-1.0.tar.gz.

This script helped with the tracing of a couple of recent issues with Nautilus Scripts.

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Joshu: What is the true Way?
Nansen: Every way is the true Way.
J: Can I study it?
N: The more you study, the further from the Way.
J: If I don't study it, how can I know it?
N: The Way does not belong to things seen: nor to things unseen. It does not belong to things known: nor to things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or name it. To find yourself on it, open yourself as wide as the sky.

Not sure if Microsoft cares about this, but here it is. A petition to ask them to support the Open Document Format for Office Applications:
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/petition

Relatively recent developments in the field of software engineering seem to point out that losing control is not such a bad thing after all.

A few examples:

• Agile development processes.
• Shift from strongly typed, compiled languages towards interpreted, scripting languages.
• Inversion of control (aka dependency injection).

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