darryl ramm's blog

[This is a manual repost of an article posted previously but lost when I moved my blog]

I have been putting off upgrading this blog from WordPress 2.1 but I wanted to play with the WordPress for iPhone application so had to bite the bullet and upgrade to get XML-RPC support that the iPhone application needed.

My blog hosts at DreamHost [not anymore DreamHost sucks!] and I should have been able to use their nice “one click install” to upgrade my WordPress installation but I had moved directories and messed around with the WordPress install and had broken the ability to automatically upgrade. The DeamHost Web Panel One Click Account Backup made it easy to grab a pre-upgrade snapshot of everything including the MySQL database content. It packages all that as a tarball that I could download and save to a local system.

Anyhow since I used a modified theme and had played with other things I needed to do a full manual upgrade of WordPress so I followed the WordPress “extended” upgrade instructions. Once I logged into the WordPress Admin panel it let me know that it wanted to update the database and that ran fine.

So upgrading WordPress itself was painless however getting WordPress for iPhone running was not. When trying to set up the blog on the iPhone application I got the infamous “We could not find the XML-RPC service for your blog” error message.

Anyhow I looked around at what others have done and tried the following.

I checked in the WordPress Admin Settings>Writing panel and check that XML-RPC was enabled. But apparently this is not always enough and sometimes the box is checked but XML-RPC is disabled. So I disabled XML-RPC and then renenabled it. That did not solve the problem.

I found my solution here. I checked the header.php file in my current themes folder and made sure there was a correct tag–there was. Then following the rest of the instructions I used the WordPress Admin Appearance>Themes panel to set the current theme to something simple. I just chose the WordPress Default 1.5 theme. Then I configured my blog in the WordPress for iPhone application. Hurray! This time it worked. Then I went back to the Admin panel and changed the theme back to my custom theme.

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So I want to play more, and the Admin panel in WordPress 2.8 is much nicer than 2.1

I am disappointed that the WordPress 2.8 still does not support custom words in the spelling dictionary. This is the most painful thing I find with WordPress. Oh and you would guess that the WordPress built in dictionary would know how to spell “WordPress”. Bzzzt WRONG!

Just a silliness but you would think that a spell checker built into the authoring software for any blog system would know how to spell words like blog and blogging right? Doh, not WordPress’ spell checker. I’m already fed up of seeing those words underlined in red.

More seriously, blogging often involves building communities around specialized topics. Those communities are likely to use specialized words and terms. So specialized dictionaries and word packs, etc. or at least easily user extensible dictionaries seem like a natural. No WordPress can’t even add user defined words. I’m off to look at plug-in dictionaries, any suggestions?

I wonder what Movable Type does? I know I’ll go look for it on their web site, oops I can’t seen any mention of this in a quick look, I know I’ll search their site, uh exactly where is the search box… oh no they have to be joking, another Movable Type barrier to adoption.

Why does Six Apart put barriers in the way to adoption of Movable Type? Even small things like up front click through licensing agreements and requiring people to register to download free binaries are barriers to adoption. Especially when competing with software like WordPress that is easily available.

Sure Six Apart has to weigh the cost of those barriers against marketing and sales benefits like capturing prospect information, but I doubt the math will ever come out in favor of being more restrictive. (more…)

For WordPress, the “famous 5 minute install” is not something I would be so proud of. Yes the basic install is quick, but I spent about two days on and off getting things working like I wanted to.

After procrastinating for over a year I’ve finally started using my blog. I had previously designed a layout with Movable Type 3.x, basically it looked similar to what you see here but it sat unused. I looked at it again and was going to upgrade the version of MovableType but thought more about what blog software to go with, and with some advice from others decided to switch to WordPress. (more…)