Category: Technology

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Media Technology

Mars attacks

Version 1.0 of MarsEdit released last week , and Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise celebrated by issuing the first trailer for the upcoming remake of the ultimate sci-fi classic, “War of the Worlds”.

I am not surprised that War of the Worlds is being re-made, and not terribly surprised that Spielberg is trying it. I am surprised at Tom Cruise being in it–not a person I would have picked for a movie such as this.

This is one of the most beloved movies among old sci-fi fans; if this gives Spielberg a built-in audience, it’s going to very critical one. Stay tuned…

As for MarsEdit, I’m actually using this new Mac OS X goodie with this post to see how it works. I like the live spellcheck feature, and it’s nice to know that if my internet connection dies, the post remains. The tool can integrate with popular Mac Text tools, such as BBEdit or TextMate, though it seems to do fine all by itself.

Wow, I really like that live spellchecking. Now, if it could only point out bad grammar.

Of course, the true test is: will it post to my weblog. It says it works with any MetaBlog API supporting tool, such as WordPress, so we’ll see.

Stay tuned…

Worked a treat, and fast, too. The only problem is that the post was future dated, so it didn’t show up right away. My system clock is set for Eastern time, while my weblog runs at Central. I can’t see a way to change this either. However, not that big a problem. It doesn’t look like I can add my notes, or category, and this is a small issue. Still, I like creating the post in MarsEdit, and then can manipulate the other information in the weblog tool.

It is, all in all, a very good weblog editor. Worth the fee. And I’m not even getting paid to say this–though I wouldn’t be adverse to a ticket to War of the Worlds when it comes out.

later…

Found the category.

MarsEdit closed comments by default, and wasn’t aware of it until now. However, this can be changed in options in the tool.

But that date and time problem is becoming a real showstopper.

update The timestamp isn’t a MarsEdit bug, but a bug in WordPress 1.2. It will most likely be fixed in WordPress 1.3.

Categories
Technology

Wordform kickoff

The Wordform project has officially kicked off, though I’ve been doing some work in this, off and on, this past month. I had planned on waiting for the formal release of WordPress 1.3, as a baseline for Wordform, but I’ve decided to go ahead with development. It could be some time before 1.3 releases, and I’m anxious to try out my ideas.

I created a site for the development process, which will be used for testing, and to document the progress. As I make each change to the original WordPress, I want to document why I’m making the change, as well as provide the new or altered code. I would dearly love non-tech user input, so will try my best not to get too techy.

I appreciate the good work of the WordPress developers, providing such a nice baseline with which to work. I could see possibilities in their source, and this is what inspired me to do a little experimentation of my own; that and the fact that WordPress is GPL, as will Wordform be, in turn.

Since I am diverging from WordPress at this point, I won’t be able to provide as much help or support for this product, as I have in the past. I won’t be able to give the developers such a hard time, either, but that might be considered a perk. However, as you can read at the Wordform weblog, I am converting my ‘floating cloud’ design from this site into a WordPress 1.3 template/theme, including all the comment features I’ve currently enabled–for those of you moving on to WordPress 1.3 and who like what I’ve done with comments.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Start at the beginning

Wordform is a project to create a new weblogging tool that incorporates some ideas I’ve had for a tool for a couple of years now. It’s based on WordPress, an open source, GPL PHP/MySQL application; inheriting some functionality, while extending the product in new directions.

This site serves as the test site for Wordform development, as well as the beginnings of tool documentation. I will be documenting each change, before I make the change, describing the purpose and planned behavior; after with the code.

Stay tuned…

Categories
Technology Weblogging

First change

The first changes being made to the initial snapshot of the WordPress 1.3a code is to incorporate the ‘floating cloud’ design currently being used at Burningbird into a 1.3 theme. While I’m at it, I’m also moving the default pages down into the themes directory, to minimize the number of files at the root directory of the installation.

While I’m making the changes, pages and links may break from time to time. When finished, this effort should also be usable as a template/theme for WordPress 1.3a, and will incorporate, among other things: live comment preview, post-comment editing, and comment spell checkings.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Second change

A vulnerability was discovered with WordPress 1.2.1 and 1.3a, as detailed here and in a forum thread for WordPress, here. This was caused by the fact that an important system variable, siteurl is modified in wp-login.php if the application detects that the URI used to access wp-login.php has changed from what’s stored in the database.

As detailed in both of the above locations, there is usually more than one way to access a specific file, and accessing the file using different variations of URL results in a change to this value that could cause problems with the site. At a minimum, it could result in unnecessary updates to the database.

The current WordPress release was modified to lessen the amount of destructiveness of this vulnerability, but it hasn’t eliminated the problem completely. To fix the remaining vulnerability, I’ve removed the code that updates this value in the database from wp-login.php (though I’ve left the option in the database for now). Unfortunately, this leaves the original problem that served as reason for this code, which is to make it easier to move your WordPress weblog if you need to. Without this code, moving your weblog to another directory can make the administrative pages impossible to access. When I removed the vulnerability, I added back this problem.

To fix this original problem, I added SITEURL as a new parameter to the wp-config.php file, now renamed wf-config.php to differentiate it from the WordPress file. Now, when the WordPress weblog is moved, you can use a text editor to change this value:

define (’SITEURL’, ‘http://wordform.org’);

I also modified the code in the functions.php file that loads siteurl from the database, setting the cached values to that of SITEURL from the wf-config.php file.

if (’siteurl’ == $option->option_name) {
$option->option_value = preg_replace(’|/+$|’, ‘’, SITEURL);
}

This is an interim fix, while the rest of the code is adjusted not to depend on this as an option loaded from the database. Once I’m sure this is so, I’ll remove the option from the database.