Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

Today I made the decision to move a lot of the content on my site into WordPress using it’s "pages" feature.

Previously, my site was separated into two sections. My WordPress blog, and everything else. At one time, I had my blog matching the theme of the rest of my site.

When I updated my install a while back I pretty much lost that. Considering that I hate the visual look of my site as it is, I didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to bring down the prettiness of WP’s default theme with my horrid artistic sensibilities. So now I have the task of copying and pasting a bunch of text from my custom PHP content management system (if you could call it that) into WordPress’s online page editing page.

I was really hoping that Windows Live Writer would give me the ability to compose and edit pages in adition to blog posts, but as far as I can tell, I don’t believe they do.

In other WordPress related news, I’ve updated the template to create better RDFa for this site. I don’t know exactly how many other sites out there give the complete SIOC information for their blog in RDFa, but this one does. I’m actually not sure how good my attempt at RDFa is. I use an extension for Firefox called Operator. It’s a really great program for identifying microformats in a page, but the current release isn’t fully updated to the new RDFa spec. Because of that, I can’t tell if some of the things I’ve tried to do (like using @instanceof) are actually producing the desired triples.

Did I mention that at least some of these pages should be showing up as hAtom enabled? Well they are. I really wish that WordPress would include a lot of this stuff by default. I’ve been thinking of taking my changes to the default install of WordPress and publishing a patch file that people could apply. If there is any interest out there, let me know.

Windows Live Writer sees like it’s a pretty good tool for writing blog posts. The only problem, Wordpress supports tags natively now. Hopefully, with the help of this tutorial, I’ll be able to add tags from right within Writer.

I’ve been meaning to do it for some time, but I finally got around to upgrading my Wordpress to the latest release. Once I did that, I installed the WP-OpenID+ plugin. I tried installing it once before, but was having problems with the libraries. I also wrote my own ages ago, but never had it quite working right and gave up on it.

You must now be registered with a valid OpenId to comment.

I just updated my old installation of Wordpress 1.5 with a brand spanking new Wordpress 2.0.* install. If your feed reader picks up my older posts several times, I’m very sorry. Things should be stabilizing here shortly.

Apperently, I must have broken the comments feature of my site some time ago. Why didn’t anyone leave a comment to tell me? (odd that the ads for online poker and v1@gra and c1al1s still make it through)

Scatman Dan has released an OpenId plugin (sorta) for Wordpress. It’s still really early beta, and not quite working right for me, but I’ll finally be able to allow Livejournal users to use their own id’s to leave comments here.

One note: I tried messing with one of his RegEx’s, and I kept breaking the page. If you see just a white screen in the next few days… I’m working on it.

Is it wrong to want to re-write half the Wordpress files in my style of coding so I can read them better?

All it really takes is a quick Google search to turn the crappy comment system that comes with Wordpress into a spiffy nested comment system. Thank you, Brian’s Threaded Comments!

I just installed Eric Meyer’s WP-Gateway plugin. You must now answer a random question to post comments to my blog. Let’s hope this helps fight the comment spam.

This is my first post in my new blogging software. I’ve moved to a new hosting provider, and have installed this program.