Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I didn’t think I’d have to do this, but recent battles on the comments pages of a couple of posts have forced me to spell out the rules of engagement if you want to comment on this blog:

Be civil. Your mother doesn’t accept that kind of language from you and I shouldn’t have to either.
Stay [...]

True to form for this year, I’m almost a week late with this anniversary observance, but June 11 marked the eighth year of Jarrett House North as a blog. My site, originally started as an occasionally updated static vanity page on March 14, 2000, morphed into a blog during my summer internship at Microsoft in [...]

Over the weekend, as previously noted, my hosting provider redirected two old versions of my blog to the new WordPress blog. When that change kicked in, it unleashed a storm of 404s as links pointing into the old site structure hit the new site structure.
There are a number of systematic changes from the old site [...]

Just a quick housekeeping note–over the weekend my hosting provider finally consolidated my www, discuss, and wp.jarretthousenorth.com sites onto one machine. You can go ahead and head over to www.jarretthousenorth.com now.
With this consolidation, my Manila blog is finally no more. I cut my blogging teeth on Edit This Page and the other features which at [...]

WordPress 2.5 and later have built-in support for Gravatars — site-independent avatars. They’re basically small pictures that can appear next to your comments across multiple sites, depending on the email address you registered with the main Gravatar site.
I hadn’t gotten around to hacking the theme I’m using–which apparently predates WP 2.5–for Gravatar support, but (per [...]

I just did the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 on my server and am getting to know it. My first impressions:

The upgrade was smoother this time, perhaps because I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even have to clear cookies to make it work.
The admin interface, which is the major focus of this release, UI [...]

I thought I had linked to Urban Giraffe’s great Redirection WordPress plug-in, but there was a glitch between Ubiquity and Delicious and the link didn’t get saved. Ah well. The point is that Redirection makes it dead simple to do two things: track 404s (dead links) that users hit on your site, and create redirects [...]

As one might gather from the week of linkblog posts, it’s been a little hard making the transition away from all-election, all the time blogging, though for different reasons than back in 2004. While then I couldn’t believe that half the country enjoyed George W. Bush’s regime enough to bring it back for four more [...]

A quick heads up for the publication of WordPress 2.6.3, which I missed yesterday thanks to my site’s slowness. This is a straightforward patch release with an update for one PHP class, snoopy, which has a now-patched command injection vulnerability. Mercifully, the patch files are available directly from the blog post, making this the easiest [...]

…are greatly exaggerated. However, I think I’ve fixed the inexplicable slowdowns that have plagued the site since sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. It looks like the issue was related to a plugin, Google XML Sitemaps. Although there had been a few posts since Tuesday, it hadn’t functioned correctly since Tuesday and I think it had [...]

A quick note to those who live and die by Akismet’s comment spam filtering: recent versions of Akismet appeared to have broken the ability to delete your spam comments, but version 2.1.8, released late yesterday, fixes the bug. Not a showstopping bug by any stretch of the imagination, since the plugin automatically flushes spam comments [...]

After the difficulty I had with the WordPress 2.6 upgrade, I was both hopeful that 2.6.1 would fix some of the bugs, and a little hesitant about the upgrade. Apparently both my anticipations were incorrect. WordPress 2.6.1 was released yesterday, and while there’s no explicit mention of the admin cookie bug that I hit on [...]

I may have been too hasty to condemn the WordPress for iPhone app. One of my criticisms was that it couldn’t upload a photo to my site. Well, I just discovered that I couldn’t either, even using the browser. This appears to be another issue with WordPress 2.6.
Fortunately the fix is simple: fill in the [...]

This blog is now running WordPress 2.6. This was the first WordPress update I had done since moving to the platform, and I thought I’d share a few pointers:

Follow the extended directions, particularly the ones about backing up your installation and deactivating plugins.
You may see references to a plugin for automatic updates. No offense to [...]

Sometimes I think I should title this after the first real post on the blog: Quarterly Update (XXVIII). I was so optimistic back then, June 11, 2001, that I never promised anything more than occasional updates. Fortunately, I kept writing, and somehow the habit stuck, through seven years.
Right now the seven years of this blog [...]