Under The Sun

What is the point of Snap Preview? I thought we’d all agreed that uninvited pop-ups are intrusive, distracting, annoying and downright rude. Supposedly it gives the user the opportunity to decide whether the link is worth following, but since the Snap thumbnails are generally too small to read any of the text, all you can really preview is the colour scheme:  “I’m not going there– not with that shade of green…”.

When the little blighters started popping up on web sites all I wanted to do was GET THEM OFF MY BROWSER, not to actually look at them, so it was some time before I discovered that every Snap Preview contains a link to turn all previews off:

• click the “Options” link in the top right of the preview window
• in the options dialog, click “Disable Snap Preview Anywhere for ALL sites”

Relief — at least until you clear your cookies. You can also disable Snap Preview here.

Windows Live Writer is a WSIWYG (and rather wizzy) desktop blog editor. It works with most popular blog backend software, including WordPress. You just point it at your home page and it automatically detects the backend in use. I used it to post this entry, so it must work! (hat tip to Jordan Cooper).

I’m upgrading to WordPress 1.5, so things might look a little wierd for a while.

done! normal service is now resumed…

In case you didn’t already know, Blogger now provides Atom feeds — as far as I can tell, the feeds are enabled by default for BlogSpot blogs.

The blogs themselves often don’t provide a link (the owners may not even be aware of the feature) but the feed can usually be found at {blog-url}/atom.xml, for example my (now defunct) blogspot blog has a feed at http://underthesun.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Many aggregators now support Atom (and I expect almost all will in future), including the Firefox RSS Reader Panel extension (download the extension from this link, as the version on the Mozilla sites is older and doesn’t support Atom).

WordPress provides feeds in RDF, RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0 and Atom flavours. I don’t list them all in the sidebar, but for the record they are:

• RDF: http://underthesun.robstel.co.uk/wp-rdf.php
• RSS 0.92: http://underthesun.robstel.co.uk/wp-rss.php
• RSS 2.0: http://underthesun.robstel.co.uk/wp-rss2.php
• Atom: http://underthesun.robstel.co.uk/wp-atom.php

The problem with posting code was due to a WordPress feature that automatically adds p tags to posted text. This is nice (too nice to just turn it off) because it saves having to type the tags manually, but the code ignores the presence of block tags such as pre, that shouldn’t have p’s inside them.

A search of the WordPress support forum turned up this code by cyberhobo, which improves the wpautop function in functions.php. Problem solved, thanks to open-source code!

Thanks to Dean both for the mention on blogs4God, and for showing how to use the Magpie RSS library for PHP to pull an RSS feed into your blog (in this case, the Verse of the Day from Crossway Bibles).

The code is pretty simple (apart from the rather convoluted expression to output the copyright statement), and could easily be adapted to any RSS feed. Dean’s code loops over an abitrary number of items, but I only look at the first one.

For WordPress, this can go in the my-hacks.php file, so the index page just needs:

< ?php verse_of_the_day($url =
     'http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/share/rss2.0/daily/'); ?>

(posting code samples in a WordPress blog is harder than it should be — some hacking required, I think!)

The WordPress team are running a CSS Styles Competition — a good demonstration of the power of CSS stylesheets.

The stylesheet I’m using now is one of the entries; Human Condition by Ian Main.

Update: rather, is based on “human_condition”, as I’ve started to customize it.

WordPress can import links in OPML format (an XML file). Blogger doesn’t have any link management — links are written as HTML in the page template. My links were in a HTML list, so it was just a matter of a bit of search and replace in a text editor to turn them into an OPML file in the form:

<opml version="1.0">
  <body>
    <outline url="http://wibble.com" text="Wibble" />
    <outline url="http://wobble.com" text="Wobble" />
  </body>
</opml>

I copied this file to the server, and used the WordPress link import facility, specifying the URL to the OPML file.