A new site, a shiny-new Wordpress platform, a new web domain and new content to come (none of those cruddy ‘I hate life’ blog posts). Above all, this site will be much more informative, interesting and coolsome to browse through.

Indeed, this was a crazy hiatus - many things happened while I was hibernating: two sets of exams, my birthday, public holidays; including: labour day and Christmas, and soon enough, we’re going to hit the new year. Being away for such a long time is some-what justified - I’ve been developing this site of course! However, the viewer-base has dwindled since I didn’t post anything so basically I have to regain my audience (which I plan to do by spamming these linky site things).

Shiny things

So yes, a new site and a new platform - this, however, didn’t come without the painful task of re-learning all the PHP and stuff I have forgotten, and on top of that, fighting browser incompatibility like a ninja. The sad thing (which will eventually devour me) is that whenever I whip up a new site, within moments of uploading it, i feel unsatisfied - I browse website galleries and then this salt-water starts to leak out of my eyes. ‘Gwash’ - The human hamartia of idealism.

Among the other shiny new things I got are: a new monitor (not going to brag about size and type etc, because I hate when people do that - especially on Trademe. They’re selling an old item [say an LCD monitor] that just got replaced, right, then they say in description:

Selling old monitor because I just got a brand-spanking-new Samsung SyncMaster 243T 24-inch LCD Display and hence the old monitor is now surplus to my requirements

I say that’s over-the-top and totally unnecessary) - now back to my list of new things I got - a Boss guitar pedal (me-50) and… uh, that’s it. I’m sure I had more new things - but no, that’s all I can think about. For now.

Wordpress Woes

A cliche sub-header - deal with it. Never been on Wordpress before so this was a step into water which wasn’t actually water, but was nitric acid with mutated cannibal frogs lurking within. I assure you this is not and over-statement. Okay, maybe so - but Wordpress had a few silly-poos which made my brain implode and eat itself, twice.

I’ll share with you some of the trick-dicky stuff, in hope that you will not suffer the pain and anxiety that I waded through.

Problem 1 - Permalinks

So, when I had my permalink structure like so;

/%category%/%postname%

My ‘previous posts’ link things didn’t work - Can’t remember what happened when I clicked on them, but I think I got an error 404. The solution? It’s super simple and is comparable to panadol if you had as big a headache as mine:

/%category%/%postname%.html

Oh my gosh. Now it works. This needs to be documented somewhere. I would credit my source I got this from - but I don’t remember where it came from. I think the site’s guy’s name is Daniel or something, had a dark blue theme and was extremely anorexic - about 600px in width.

Problem 2 - HTML Comment Bug

To be frank, I can’t remember the other Wordpress problems I encountered (which goes to show I should write stuff down so it’s ready to document, ’cause at the moment, it’s basically an impromptu post). However, some of the IE related problems I was faced with is the mystical “repeater bug” which happens to annoy people on IE 6. Basically what happens is that there is this thing which triggers the last (few) letter(s) to be repeated after a closing divider. Apparently (from a source which I also cannot remember), this is caused by the magical html commenting function:

Circumstances it occurs under are inconsistent (from what I read). The solution is to remove HTML commenting until you isolate the culprit comment.

Problem 3 - Image submit button

IE 6 hates the world. The problem? It doesn’t want to submit. Combine:

<input type="image" src="button.gif" name="submit" />

and a PHP submit to self thing:

if(!isset($_POST['submit'])){

And the result is a non-self-submitting form. The crazy solution which I don’t understand why it helps make it work but nonetheless it does work:

if(!isset($_POST['submit_x'])){

Add an ‘_x’ and it works! Truely fascinating.

This must seem like a super-boring post - but let me reassure you, subscribe to my yummy feed and you’ll never regret it. Listen folks, posts only get better from here-on-in. Subscribe now, think later - because thinkers are geeks - now you wouldn’t want to be classified as a geek - would you?