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Stuff I Like: Bamboo Cutting Board

My friends Acacia and Ray gave me a bamboo cutting board for my birthday or Christmas a couple of years ago. Since then, my other cutting boards have sat lonely and neglected. The bamboo board has several advantages. First, it’s very hard, so even rough chopping doesn’t cut into it much. There are a lot of shapes available, but mine seems perfect – small enough to fit many places on the counter, rounded corners that are pretty and nice for holding, an overall square-ish shape so it’ll stand up for storage and drying. This board at Amazon appears to be about the same size and shape as mine. They’re also very inexpensive, which will be nice if I ever need to replace mine.

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Photopress 1.0.2

First of all, I made a lot of changes, in a lot of places, so there’s probably something broken. So, if it doesn’t work, revert to your old version. But what if you didn’t back up your old version?? In that case, head over to the familypress repository for the version you want. Complete with tarballs for your downloading pleasure! (removed – ask if you need an old version) If you need an even earlier version that won’t work with WP 2.1+, those are still at wp-plugins.org.

I added support for Lightbox. I wasn’t able to get it working manually, but this plugin did the trick. Install the plugin, set the Use Album option to Lightbox, and it should work. If you’ve been using tags, all your previous images will automagically use Lightbox too. No Lightbox groups yet because I’m not sure how to make that work.

Based on some comments (yeah, I do read those now and then), I did some testing of non-English characters and found some serious brokenness. The suggestion to remove htmlentities2 was on the right track, but some escaping was still necessary to keep Javascript/TinyMCE happy. The combo of js_escape and attribute_escape seems to work right but those of you who regularly use funky characters should test it out and see if it’s really fixed.

Apparently edit_posts is a bad default capability to use because it’s normally for Editors, not Authors. I’ve set the default to publish_posts instead. If you’re seeing the “Ask the administrator to promote you.” message then you need to go admin and edit the options at Options:Photopress so the uploading capability is something your blogging user can do, such as publish_posts. Sorry for the confusion!

Download it: photopress.tar.gz or photopress.zip

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Contactz 0.2

The blank lines thing should now be fixed. If you’ve been using it and you have a bunch of blank lines, going to Edit and updating should get rid of them. To fix it easily, I made first name a required field – any objections? It’s also using Capabilities now, instead of Levels, so you should visit Options to make sure you like the capability I chose.

Download it: contactz.zip

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Photopress 1.0.1

Watermarking is back, but as a plugin now! I’m pretty surprised it works, and I think it’s going to be a great way to add features without cluttering up the options and whatnot . If you’re interested in writing your own sub-plugin, take a look at watermark.php.

I think I fixed the query_posts error.

There’s now an option to replace the built-in upload tool with the Photopress upload/browse tool. I don’t love how it works, but it does seem to work.

Download it: photopress.tar.gz or photopress.zip

Update: To clarify about compatibility, I’m currently using this version with WP 2.1.2. It probably works with 2.1, but I wouldn’t expect it to work with anything earlier than that.

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Upgrading WordPress using rsync

After the recent flurry of WordPress upgrades I started looking for an easier way to upgrade. This post at techites.com was a good start, but this comment on the post, using rsync, sounded much easier. Here’s the workflow I figured out:

  • wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip (download the latest version)
  • unzip wordpress-XXX.zip (extract it)
  • mv wordpress [your-site's-folder-name] (rename the wordpress folder to the name of the folder your blog lives in on the server)
  • rsync -avrz [your-site's-folder-name] [username@server]:[path-to-blog-folder] (update the remote folder with the local folder)

Repeat the last two steps for each install you want to update. I’m sure it’s possible to write a script to do this for a whole bunch of installs at once if desired. You may want to test all this out on your local testing server beforehand.

Update: Jonathan’s right, Subversion is a VERY easy way to update WordPress…once you’ve got it set up. This Codex page describes the process. It’s easiest to do if you’re either just setting up your blog or if you only have a couple of plugins or themes installed. There are other benefits to using Subversion. You can easily switch from using the current release version to using the bleeding edge version, for instance to test out a release candidate. The WP Subversion repository also wasn’t affected by the recent security exploit, so there may be a security advantage.