gottahavacuppamocha

Last year I bought the domains gottahavacuppamocha.info and gottahavacuppamocha.mobi, but haven’t done much with them. A few weeks ago, I set up another WordPress blog at the .mobi site, but one that only has the haiku.

Since starting this a few years ago, I’ve seen over 600 films and done a review haiku for each one. I’ve toyed with the idea about putting them in a book, and that may still happen one of these days, but until then it seemed like a good idea to create a separate site just for the haiku. This way, a person can read through the haiku, without having to read the other posts.

The site, http://gottahavacuppamocha.mobi/haiku has over 200 haiku at the moment and I’ll be posting more in the days and weeks to come. Since I’m also learning about iPhone apps, it’s possible there may be an “app for that” in the future.

It’s been quite awhile, so I updated the gallery to the latest version of ZenPhoto. It’s supposed to work well with WordPress via some plugins. At the moment, it’s only a few photos, but I’ve got a ton more photos to process and add. Plus, there will also be some 3d stuff, graphic design, and so on.

I recently got a flatbed scanner that also does film and slides, so the plan is to convert old photos, slides, and maybe negatives, into digital form. Even if they don’t end up being posted (to protect the innocent ô_o), it will be nice to get them scanned in.

Hopefully this will also give me incentive to come up with another theme to unify the look of WordPress and ZenPhoto. At the very least, the thumbnails can be pulled into WordPress like this. It’s a start.

WordPress 2.8 came out yesterday afternoon and I just finished the upgrade. For the past few versions, WordPress has become one of the most user-friendly pieces of software I’ve seen. It seems well thought out and well-constructed.

WordPress has a tool called Upgrade in the Admin panel, which allows people to easily upgrade or reinstall the WordPress code. No FTP needed, since it’s as simple as clicking a button. However, it’s not problem-free.

I have this blog for myself and a test blog I use for work. I logged into this blog and there was nothing new – there was no notice about the new version. Logging into the test blog, there were two banners mentioning the upgrade. Upgrading the test blog was virtually effortless, but I was puzzled by the lack of a notice on gottahavacuppamocha. The Upgrade tool said the blog was using 2.7.1 and that it was the latest version. On a hunch, I clicked on the Re-install button. WordPress 2.7.1 was reinstalled, but when it finished, there was a notice about the 2.8 version. I clicked on the button and let it upgrade. The upgrade went easy, but I had to trick WordPress to do so.

Still, WordPress is far more user-friendly than MediaWiki. MediaWiki is easier to setup, but WordPress is easier to maintain. WP isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.

Rating:  

Gottahavacuppamocha will be down for a bit for maintenance and upgrades. The files are being backed up as I write. WordPress has a new version out with some security improvements and other enhancements. I might try out a new skin to mark the occasion :-)

Also, I want to see if there are any better WordPress plugins for Twitter. For regular posts, it sends a tweet to @lafnlab whenever I post something on the blog. However, it doesn’t do this for posts that are scheduled, such as the Review Haiku posts. :-( Since there are so many of those scheduled (’til the end of March, at the moment), it would be nice if the blog would send a tweet for each new post.

SixApart buys Pownce

Just as well, I guess. There’s too many social networking sites/apps, it’s hard to decide which ones are worthwhile. Since SixApart is a competitor to WordPress, I’m not interested in transitioning to their service.

The site had some quirks to go with the redesign and the software upgrades, but I think they are all taken care of now. The comments are back on, so feel free to try it out.

One of the main reasons for getting MediaWiki going is that it should be a good way for me to make notes while I’m doing research for a master’s degree. I keep running across linguistic terms that I’ve seen before, but don’t recall exactly what they mean (like lemma), so it would be a good idea for me to come up with a glossary of terms and definitions. If my understanding of a term evolves, then I can easily change the definition in the wiki. Writing something down usually helps me understand things better, plus I can put them in easy-to-understand (for me) terms, rather than academic prose.

I also formally applied for the M.A. program yesterday, so that’s out of the way.

Finished the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and put the movie next in my Netflix queue. Good book, but short. It was translated from French, but the English was very witty. I assume Bauby’s original text was just as witty.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been working on a new design, which I was finally able to apply. The redesign of MediaWiki didn’t take as long as thought, but it may have been that I was so into it that time flew by.

There are still some quirks, however. I forgot to add the comment form stuff for WordPress. There’s no convenient way to search on MW or WP. MediaWiki has a ton of different elements I haven’t defined in the stylesheet. I was mainly concentrating on getting the overall design to work, that I didn’t worry about the things that are infrequently used.

Two things: first, I’m reworking the site a bit and trying to develop a look that will work with both MediaWiki and WordPress. I have the WP version started, but not yet finished, which can be seen over here. Given the architectures of MW and WP, the overall look will have to be coded separately for each piece of software. It still has a way to go yet, and there is a glitch in viewing it in Firefox 3 RC1, though it seems to look okay in Firefox 2, Opera, and Safari.

[edit: it's finished now and looks fine in Firefox 3 RC1]

Second, coming in this morning I saw bicycle commuter coming in a door I was passing by. However, what caught my eye was the bike jersey he was wearing. I saw the logo of Bristol Brewing’s Laughing Lab Scottish Ale and did a double take. I’ve never seen Bristol beers here in Indy, so it was strange to see the jersey. I stopped and talked with the guy for a few minutes, and it turns out his brother works for Bristol Brewing as a QA person (what a job that must be :-D)

As usual, when I upgrade, something breaks. In this case, the blogroll at the bottom isn’t working. WP changed the template tags a bit so now wp_get_links doesn’t work and they suggest people use wp_list_bookmarks instead. It’s not just a name change, but apparently has some different functionality. Anyway, I can’t get it working at the moment.

I’ve been thinking about coming up with a new theme, but haven’t figured out which way I want to go with it. Brown is kind of good for a coffee/mocha motif, and there are even some themes out there that already have coffee motifs. However, it would be nice to have tome other colors too, so I have to ponder a bit.

BTW, I’ve come to the conclusion Macs are horrible development platforms, for the web at least. They don’t even come with a decent GUI text editor. It’s a sad state of affairs when Microsoft’s Notepad outshines anything Apple has to offer on their systems. There are text editors available for download or purchase, but an OS should come with a decent GUI text editor as part of the basic suite of programs. Mac OS X doesn’t even allow people to upload to FTP servers. I’m aware of the security issues of FTP, but if it allows me to download via FTP, why shouldn’t I be able to upload. At the moment, my MacBook is relegated to being a jukebox and DVD player. It’s very good at those things.

A week ago I did an upgrade of the site to the latest version of WordPress, but I kept getting an error Fatal Error: PHP Allowed Memory Size Exhausted then it would give the name of a script and a line number. Browsing around the net, I was able to figure out the problem and find some solutions.

The problem is an issue with the default setup of PHP, where is has a memory limit of 8 MB. This isn’t necessarily a big issue, but some more sophisticated scripts require more memory of the server, and since PHP is limiting how much memory is allocated, it returns a fatal error if a script wants too much.

The first solution is to change the memory_limit section of the php.ini file on the server. However, since this site is hosted, I don’t have access to that for security reasons. Also, most hosts are not inclined to change those setting for fear they will break other sites they host. Makes sense.

The second solution is to add the line php_value memory_limit 32M to the .htaccess file in the root directory of my site. I did this and it didn’t work. I tried it with different memory values with no success. I tried using M, MB, and Mb, also with no success. This was really frustrating because the FAQ for my hosting service said to change values in the .htaccess file as an alternative to making changes to the php.ini file.

The third solution is to add ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ‘32M’); to the top of each script that might require extra memory. Depending on how your scripts are setup, you might be able to get away with adding this to a header file or template file. It didn’t seem to work for me, until I added it to the upgrade.php file for WordPress. It’s not a very elegant solution, but it works. I actually added 64MB because I was frustrated.

I still don’t know why the second solution didn’t work, unless the server is ignoring that portion of the .htaccess file. I can’t say I’m 100% pleased about it, but if it happens in the future I will know what to do.