Tuesday 25 September 2012

Getting annoyed by wordpress

This morning I was trying to publish the blog post I wrote for my photo website yesterday. I wanted to link to some Amazon and ebay items in the article, so thought I might as well affiliatize the links. This wasn't such a good idea though.

To affiliatize the ebay links, I decided to use my ebay wordpress plugin (since this is quicker to use than generating links through EPN and also automatically serves correct links based on the user's geo location). But, the plugin is still in an alpha stage of development, so I wanted to make sure it worked okay on the development copy of my photo website before I uploaded it to the live copy of my photo website.

Unfortunately when I tried to access the blog of my development site, it came up with a load of PHP errors thrown up by wordpress. I did some googling, and found something that suggested these errors had been fixed in the latest version of wordpress. So I downloaded the latest version of wordpress, then made it XML compatible (replacing named entities with numeric entities). I then tried it out, but was greeted with a number errors, just different errors to what I got before the upgrade.

Again, I searched google for some info on fixing the errors. But the only relevant info I could find was a thread on the wordpress forums. There was one reply where the thread starter was directed to read an article about integrating wordpress with an existing website. This seemed to be irrelevant to the errors, which were due to the wordpress class WP_Widget having two constructor methods (one using the same name as the class, one using __construct).

Eventually I decided to just go back to my previous install of wordpress. I then turned off display_errors in PHP (and restarted PHP). This allowed me to test my post on the dev version of my website okay. (I normally always have display_errors switched on for my dev website since I want to see any errors my code throws up.)

By the time I got that sorted out and the article posted to the live blog, it was well into the afternoon.

I contacted my credit card company to let them know that I was going to be using the card abroad. I also downloaded an MP3 album from Amazon, who had a special offer of downloading one album (from a reasonably big selection - 26 pages) for 99p. I worked out what time train to get to the airport on Friday. I took some photos of Mauser's stuff:

Above is part of Mauser's windowsill, where he has his Lenin bust. Surrounding Lenin are the Chicken Pope, an England Bulldog, Major Armstrong, and a Golliwogg playing a drum. The Bulldog and Golliwogg Mauser won on 2p machines. Major Armstrong is a character from 'Full Metal Alchemist', an anime that Mauser likes.

This photo shows the Scary Monster, which is actually an audio cassette holder. I think inside it has some random tapes, like The Best of William Smith compilation album that I made ages ago.

Above shows the Fly Swat from the Philippines and my C-3PO bag, on top of a pile of DVDs and Blu-rays including Mahabarat. On Mauser's main DVD shelf he has a Belarus flag that he got when he went to the Olympics football in Manchester. And also a Cochem-Mosel flag that Billy got when he visited Deutschland.

This last photo shows Mauser's Bavarian hat that I bought him for his birthday when we visited Bavaria this summer.

In the evening I watched an episode of VR Troopers and a film called Ghengis Blues. The film was about a blind American guy who taught himself to throat sing and then visits Tuva (along with some other people) to join in a Tuvan throat singing competition. Pretty good really.

After that I spent ages trying to fix an ebay wireless flash trigger. I had to try and solder a wire into a hole, but it was very difficult. The problem was that the hole was filled with solder. So you had to push the wire into the solder at the correct position on one side of the circuit board while melting the solder on the other side of the board with the iron. Then pushing the wire against the board, it should go through the hole when the iron melts the solder. Much trickier to get right in practice than it is in theory.

I did eventually get the wire part-way through the hole, and that seemed to be good enough. For the rest of the evening I wrote up this blog post.

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