I’ve spent years at a desk job and very little in the way of extra-curricular activity, so I’m not in the best shape of my life. In fact, I’m in pretty poor shape. I’m grateful that my doctor was diplomatic about it when I had my 40-year-old physical last week. But I’ve been making somewhat of an effort to get myself into better general health over the last couple of years. If nothing else, I … Continue reading
This is a little story about customer service. It’s about bad customer service, and it’s about good customer service. It’s about how a customer service rep should make sure that he really knows the answer to a question before spouting off, and if he isn’t sure, he should ask someone else. The dramatis personae in this little skit are Comcast and Tivo. Comcast will be playing the role of bad customer service, and Tivo is … Continue reading
The word just went out today that the WordPress.com blog hosting service now supports OpenID, both as a server and a consumer. Supporting it as a server means that if you have a blog on WordPress.com, you can use your blog URL as an OpenID. Supporting it as a consumer means that you can use any OpenID to login to your WordPress.com account (once you’ve associated your OpenIDs with your regular login). This means that … Continue reading
In the interest of getting the word out as quickly and as widely as possible, a brief word about a new WordPress release: If you recently installed version 2.1.1, you should upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 immediately. There was a security breach on the server which housed the download archives, and some files in the 2.1.1 download were modified to include a serious security hole. There are more details in the official WordPress Dev Blog announcement. … Continue reading
Many of you are probably currently familiar with hearing about the tornado that hit Enterprise, Alabama yesterday. What you might not realize is that my wife and I both graduated from the high school that was leveled in that storm system. Seeing the devastation in our old home town has been very surreal for both of us. Our niece, who is a senior this year, was at the high school when the tornado hit, and … Continue reading
I’ve discovered a bug in my clock that’s been causing me all sorts of headaches. It’s really messing with my ability to complete projects when others are expecting them. If I can’t find a fix soon, I’m definitely going to have to get a new clock. See, the problem is that this clock only counts 24 hours in a day. I think I need to upgrade my clock to a 36 hour model. That would … Continue reading
Announcing not one, but two new WordPress releases: WordPress 2.0.9 (for the 2.0 branch), and WordPress 2.1.1 (for the 2.1 branch). Both versions include fixes for a minor XSS (cross-site scripting) attack vector, plus various other small bugfixes. Due to the possible security bug, all users are urged to upgrade to the newest appropriate version. See the announcement on the Development Blog for full details. For those of you who may be confused about why … Continue reading
Here’s an addendum for my previous post about OpenID: AOL supports OpenID authentication for all(?) screennames. I’ve verified that this works with AIM usernames, even if you don’t have a “real” AOL account. In other words, if you have an AOL account or even just an AIM account, you already have an OpenID. For example, my AIM ID is EMCampbell3, which means that I could authenticate on any OpenID site using openid.aol.com/emcampbell3 as my login. … Continue reading
Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute. The rel=”nofollow” idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying … Continue reading
Since my WordPress upgrade and theme change, the OpenID sign-on functionality here has been a little iffy. I think I’ve got all the kinks worked out now, and it should be working correctly again. There seems to be a buglet in the functions that attempt to automagically add the OpenID login fields to the comment form. So I had to disable that option and manually edit my comment template file to insert the appropriate bits. … Continue reading