Tag Archives: wordpress

Temporary LIBXML2 solution

Ginny has been bugging me about the problem she’s been having posting to her blog from the iPhone and other third party tools that she uses.

The problem has been narrowed down to a bug in LIBXML2 that causes leading angle brackets “<” to be stripped off of posts when processed through the XMLRPC support in PHP.   I logged the issue in the WordPress bug tracker, and the consensus is that the problem started manifesting after an automatic update applied by Fedora 8.

Well, to solve the problem I’ve moved Ginny’s blog to a temporary server running in a base Fedora 8 install in a VMWare instance.   Luckily WordPress stores most of it’s content in the MySQL database (not the images, unfortunately).   A bit of NFS magic to mount the appropriate directory in the virtual system, and it’s working fine.   The server itself only has Apache, PHP, MySQL client, SSH, and a few other bits & pieces to keep it running.   No automatic updates, GUI, compilers, etc.

Once the bug is fixed (either WordPress, using a different XML processing mechanism, or LIBXML2) I’ll move her server back to the main server.

In the mean time, her blog is going to run in the virtual machine ‘Hobbittown’ (named because it’s small).

WordPress XML-RPC error

I’ve encountered a weird error in WordPress … for some reason, when a post is submitted using the XML-RPC api (which is used by the WordPress iPhone app), any leading ‘<‘ symbols on the HTML is being stripped out.

Ginny noticed this a few days ago and I just confirmed it on a test blog.

The content that is posted looks something like this …

p>a href="http://beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-
640-480-2fd9116d-5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg">img src="http://
beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-640-480-2fd9116d
--5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg" alt="" width="225" height="300"
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-364" />/a>/p>

I’ll have to do some digging to find if this has already been logged or not.

I wish I was more skilled at PHP … I’m sure it’s someething I could sink my teeth into.

Update: FWIW I’ve opened ticket 7771 on the WordPress tracking system on this issue.

iPhone for WordPress

This post is being written with the WordPress app for iPhone.

As expected, it’s pretty awkward to use, but functional.

  • Documentation is non-existent … but that’s coming, according to the announcement post.
  • Decent integration with the camera & photo roll, although there doesn’t appear to be a way to position the pictures.
  • Can’t see a way to do trackbacks or even enter URL’s.
  • It’s not clear if the text is entered in HTML or just plain text.

It’s going to take some getting used to … but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the next ‘killer app’.

photo

FWIW: This post was originally entered on the iPhone, but edited in regular WordPress.

WordPress Tags to Technorati

I’ve written my first useful WordPress plugin!

In WordPress 2.3, they introduced a new tagging feature … which I think is pretty nice … but I haven’t found a plug-in that lets you turn those tags into Technorati tags.

I’ve played around with a few dinky little plug-in’s in the past … but they were all for my own personal use. This time, however, I decided to try my hand at making a plug-in that could be used by more people.

So, I’m pleased to announce “WP Tags to Technorati”.

You can see the plug-in in action below.

Detailed information can be found on the Plugin’s Page.