vapourtrails.ca

I’ve just released the newest version of my keywords plugin. This minor release includes two new features that I find very useful:

• Suggested keywords - A list of your eight most popular keywords will show up below the keywords field. Each time you save, they will update to reflect words used in the post. The algorithm used is very simple but should help you to remember other relevant keywords that you’ve used in the past.
• Natural sort for tag cosmos - By popular demand, the tag cosmos now uses a case-insensitive natural sort order. What does this mean? Upper- and lower-case keywords are no longer separated and the “natural sort” will put values like “9km” ahead of “10km”.

Enjoy!

I’m going to be out of the province on election day (May 17) so I took advantage of advance voting which started today. So it’s too late to sway my vote — yes, Gregor, I’m talking to you.
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Ok, I think everything is sorted out after the switch to LightPress. Comments are working properly again, feeds are fixed (despite my best efforts to break them over the last few days) and I think all of the permalink & style issues have been sorted out.

I can’t blame this on LightPress, the 1.0.0 release is solid and works fine if you don’t tinker with the code. But I’m constantly trying to “improve” things and as a result I’ve been busy fixing my own bugs! I’m happy to report that my tags/keywords plugin for LightPress is working very nicely now — if you wondered why my feeds were scrambled, this was the culprit. It’s not ready for general release just yet, but soon I hope.

Rest assured that if you’re using any of my WordPress plugins, they’ll continue to be supported. After all, they’re still running “behind the scenes” on this site, even if LightPress is handling page rendering.

Things that have been removed during the switch:

• Comment thread feeds — this isn’t supported in LightPress yet, but I’ve added it to the list.
• RSS 0.91 feeds — there’s a limit to how many old formats can/should be supported. I’d recommend switching to the Atom feed, if only for it’s support of relative URI’s.

The provincial election is in full swing here in B.C., so when I answered the phone tonight and was asked to take a political survey my Spidey-sense immediately started to tingle. My first reaction was to determine who was conducting the survey (Ipsos-Reid? EKOS?), but she politely told me that it was confidential to prevent introducing bias on the part of the surveyor. It turns out that wasn’t necessary.

The questions started off innocently enough. “What issue facing BC concerns you the most?” “Do you vote regularly?” “If the election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” “Who would be your second choice?” But shortly after rating the three major parties’ leaders, the questions took a sinister turn.
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LightPress 1.0 was released earlier this week and I finally made the switch. I’m really hoping that I haven’t missed anything in the transition — the initial conversion was simple but my test site diverged from my WordPress site several times in the past. If any parts of this site seem broken, please let me know!

I’m much happier with my LightPress templates, they’re much cleaner to work with. I’ve also written a bunch of LightPress plugins — including a new version of Jerome’s Keywords — and they took about 1/4 of the effort of the WordPress versions. I think that’s a pretty good trade. I’ll post the new plugins as soon as I can, along with a quick conversion guide. Ludo has received permission to convert Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme so look for that to appear shortly, too.

Comments are the only thing not working properly at the moment. All of my test comments have gone straight to moderation. It could be a Spaminator problem (bundled with LightPress) but it’s more likely a bone-headed configuration error on my part since they seem to work fine on all of the other LightPress sites, including both of my test sites. More to come…