The Lair of the Pythia

One of the great things about running Wordpress-based web sites is that when you want to do something different you can often find exactly what you want thanks to someone’s neat plugin. I’ve written a few myself by now, though nothing that is worth issuing publicly as they are all pretty specialized. However, I’ve also make good use of other people’s work, and it is about time I gave some public thanks, so here goes:

• All of my blogs rely on Michael Hampton’s fabulous Bad Behavior for protection from spam;
• Many of the people I interact with won’t use any form other blogging other than LiveJournal, so I am indebted to Evan Broder, whose LiveJournal Cross-poster works perfectly and does everything I want; and
• One of my sites is making liberal use of Lester Chan’s WP-Polls, and that is also doing a fine job.

Thank you, guys. You’ve been a great help.

One of the less elegant things about open source software is the upgrade process. Because systems like Wordpress are so dependent on third party themes and plugins, it is inevitable that any “breaking” release is going to cause havoc. And any problems are likely to be exaccerbated by the fact that so many of the users have little or no programming skills.

Wordpress 2.3 looks like it has suffered in this way. In the first few days after it came out there was a rash of complaints about broken plugins and themes. A lot of these were apparently due to people making raw SQL calls in themes, which rather boggled me, but again what can you expect with so many inexperienced developers involved.

Plugins had problems too, because 2.3 changed the database schema (surely it should have been called 3.0 in that case?). Those that still have active support have now mostly been updated, but there do appear to be a few weird things still happening.
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Well, things have been a little quiet here of late, so perhaps it is time for a change of direction.

If anyone is still reading this they may recall that I started this blog with the intention of documenting my experiences with the Delphi Turbos. That hasn’t happened, for a variety of reasons, including:

• The Turbos have proved something of a dead end;
• I can’t talk much here about work I do for clients; and
• I still can’t find a good reason to upgrade from Delphi 7

On the other hand, there is interesting stuff happening. I am using Delphi for PHP, though not the VCL as all of my PHP work is Wordpress-related and Wordpress is not a VCL application. I’ve also downloaded the 3rdRail trial, and hope to find time to take a look at that.

So it would seem that the thing to do is to talk more about general programming issues to make up for the lack of talk about Delphi. My guess is that mostly I’ll be talking about Wordpress. I also suspect I’ll end up saying a few dumb things because I know PHP much less well than I know Object Pascal, but so it goes.

Time for a Wordpress post, I think.