July 9, 2007

Category Based Permalinks with Wordpress

As part of a site overhaul, I moved from date-based permalinks to category-based permalinks. I did this to segment the site by top-level categories, and to improve search engine friendliness. Many people argue that this is a superior permalink structure, but very few point out the downsides.

Broken URLs are the single biggest problem. The initial change isn’t a big deal. I used Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration plugin to redirect all the old URLs to the appropriate new URLs. Watch out, though: whenever you change a category you will end up with a broken URL that’s the above plug-in does not fix. Also, if you change the name of one of your categories, all of the posts under that category will have changed URLs.

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July 5, 2007

I Wanted to Like TextDrive

I wanted to like TextDrive. I really did. They have an active online community. They have an amazing range of services available so your hosting solution can easily grow with your needs. They’re endorsed by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, my experience with TextDrive was awful.

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June 28, 2007

The Truth about Dreamhost

Dreammhost is a great value as long as you know what you’re buying. For less than six dollars a month you get a fully-featured shared hosting account with extremely generous storage and bandwith limits. Understand, though, that you are not getting a fast or reliable web host.

THE GOOD: Dreamhost accounts have every feature you could imagine. FTP, SSH, and secure email are all supported. The latest versions of Perl, PHP, MySQL, and Python are there, as you’d expect. Ruby on Rails is also available and fully suported. Beyond the above, expected feature, Dreamhost also offers Subversion repositories, streaming media servers, Jabber servers, and more.

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June 26, 2007

PicLens Almost Fixes Slideshows

PicLens is a plug-in for Safari and Firefox that adds full screen slideshows to a variety of popular online photo sharing sites. This is a great idea. The problem is, it doesn’t work very well.

I installed the plugin and went straight to the photo sharing site that most of my friends use, Smugmug. Piclens doesn’t work with Smugmug because they only support a list of six specific sites or any website using auto-discoverable Media RSS feeds. I couldn’t find any photo sharing site or software package using Media RSS, though all of the sites I checked are publishing some form of RSS feeds with image URLs.

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Standalone List Items in IE and Firefox

I ran into an annoying diference in the way IE7 and Firefox render pages. List items (<li>) not enclosed in a numbered or unnumbered list (<ul>, <ol>) display differently when the list is of type “none.” In IE, each list item’s first line will be indented, while in Firefox there is no indent. Setting margin or padding does not change this. The below code sample demostrates this issue.

<HEAD>
<STYLE type=”text/css”>
li {list-style: none;}
</STYLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>

<LI>foo
<LI>bar
<LI>foobar

</BODY>

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June 25, 2007

Please Excuse the Mess

This website has been a mess recently. Up, down, errors on the main page. Random items showing up new in the feed. All the old posts showing up new in the feed. I apologize. I’m done messing around, and things should work properly from this point forward.

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