WordPress 2.7 First Impressions

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

  1. 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.
  2. The admin interface, which is the major focus of this release, UI wise, is going to take some getting used to. It’s busier than the old interface, which is rarely good. And I’ve already published my criticism of the left hand navigation. The good news is that for the most part it’s getting out of my way and letting me write.
  3. The posting interface is more cluttered too. I never had to bother about the autosave notices before, because they stayed out of the way and were discreet in white text against a dark background. The autosave notices now are very visible when they happen, and pretty distracting. And after the last interface the new screens seem a little washed out (I’m using the blue color scheme).
  4. It took me a few seconds to figure out that the “Edit” link in the Posts module would take me to a list of all my posts–that used to be the Manage Posts link. I understand the reason for the change, but Edit isn’t the first thing I think about when I’m searching through my old posts, my most frequent reason for visiting that part of the admin interface.

The only plugin issue I had was with Simple Tags. On the reboot a notice advised me that I should use “Simple Tagging” by the same author instead. This doesn’t appear to have been correct; all I needed to do was upgrade Simple Tags.

Grab bag: Security and meltdowns

The crack in the world

Three things entwine for me this morning: the beginning of the Christmas season, the 100th birthday of Olivier Messiaen, and the crack in the wall of Old South Church.

I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning in rehearsals for the upcoming Boston Pops holiday concerts at Symphony Hall (my performance schedule: 12/12 4 PM and 8 PM; 12/14 7 PM; 12/20 11 AM and 3 PM; 12/23 8 PM; 12/27 8 PM), marinating in the secular version of the holiday. It’s always a colorful but thin broth: reindeer and snowmen, with the occasional “Hallelujah Chorus” bobbing by to provide sustinance. This season we add a new arrangement of music from “Polar Express,” the culmination of which is a pop ballad exhorting us to “believe.” In what, it’s not quite clear: the train? Santa Claus?

Last week, a crack was found in the wall of Old South Church, a long standing Boston institution that is quite clear about what it believes and is growing as it continues to celebrate the inclusion of all God’s children, not just the straight ones, in God’s kingdom. The crack, potentially a disaster for the church, has been made an opportunity for reflection on the potential for cracks in any institution or relationship and for thanksgiving for the wisdom of the church’s leadership in ensuring that the MBTA and their contractor, not the church’s insurance, must pay in the event of damage. And yet, there it stands, an irrefutable proof of movements deep below that may at any moment cause a fundamental shift in our world.

That shift, that crack in time, is what pulses through the best of Messiaen’s work, his pieces for solo organ (Le banquet céleste, Apparition de l’église éternelle, L’Ascension, La Nativité du Seigneur, Livre du Saint Sacrement) and a solitary choral motet O sacrum convivium! For Messiaen Christmas is something entirely different: a meditation, an epiphany, on a fundamental shift in the world. Hearing Messiaen in a candlelit sanctuary awaiting an 11 PM Christmas Eve service, the apparition of the eternal church sinking into my blood and bones as the organ opened the doors to the miracle: a transformation out of history that continues to transform us two thousand years later.

(Update: As always, Nancy Taylor’s sermon the Sunday after the discovery of the crack is insightful, and echoes some of my own thoughts in a more coherent manner.)

Change: new Pulitzer rules, bye-bye Baltimore Opera

Grab bag: External links on NYTimes.com, and other signs of the apocalypse

Grab bag: Cracks in Old South and Facebook

Grab bag: UI is all around you

links for 2008-12-03

Obscure HTML element of the day: dfn

I’ve had an opportunity to do a little static HTML + CSS work recently, and have had a few educational and reeducational moments about the joys of doing basic web development–all the stuff that a good CMS like WordPress hides from you.

Today’s educational moment was a question of footnote treatments. My application had footnotes at the very bottom of its page, with nothing beneath them, and did inpage links to the footnotes. But it was linking to the footnotes from a part of the text that was close to the bottom of the page, so the footnote was already visible. As a result, when a user clicked a link to get to the footnotes, nothing happened–the footnote was already there, and there was no more page to scroll up.

There are ways around this. Daring Fireball has a lot of empty space on its pages below its footnotes, meaning that the page can scroll to place the footnote at the top. But the bug got me thinking again about why I was doing the footnotes and how I could change the user experience. What if I moved the footnote text–which was generally some sort of quick definition–into a mouseover? I knew I could do it with acronym, but the text I was footnoting wasn’t an acronym so it wouldn’t have been semantically correct. Was there a semantic way to mark up the word or phrase being footnoted so that when moused over, a definition would show?

Enter dfn. See what that does? The dfn tag is basically tailor made for what I wanted to do, and is even reasonably well supported. FF3 and IE7 even automatically italicize the term.

I made one more change to my stylesheet to make it really explicit that more information was there for the mouseover, and applied the same rule that I had for abbreviations:

dfn {
   border-bottom: 1px dotted #333;
   cursor: help;
}

With that, the user got a dotted underline on the term, and a help cursor when they moused over.

I would probably make one more change if the application was expected to be printed, which would be to introduce some styles or JavaScript in the print stylesheet that would do an inline expansion of the definition. But for what I needed to do, dfn worked pretty well by itself. Yay obscure HTML elements!

Grab bag: Agile all the time

Web birthday#8

This is my eighth birthday… since starting my blog in 2001.

Seems like it was an eternity ago. I didn’t even bother to blog on my birthday then–of course it was close to the end of my third semester of business school and I was going nuts. But then, I didn’t realize that I was starting a tradition.

I went back and looked at past birthday posts. 2001, as I mentioned before, wasn’t blogged. In 2002 I turned 30 and reflected on Bilbo Baggins’ birthday benediction (more on that in a minute). 2003 was gearing up for what turned out to be my last Microsoft Christmas party. 2004 was a reflection on over ten years of no one knowing you’re a dog on the Internet. 2005 was my quotation in Business Week over the Sony BMG boycott. 2006, a dinner with friends and reflection on mortality. And in 2007, turning Presidential and lining up my new iPhone.

This past year is definitely a year of change — new website, a shift to linkblogging, killer new job. But my birthday this year feels more like a homecoming. As my sister says, this is pretty much my first Facebook birthday, and the people I’ve reunited with over there are making it a very nice happy birthday indeed. In some ways, I think this is the first birthday in a long time where I’ve felt something like contentment. Probably a sign that vast upheaving changes are right around the corner.

Grab bag: BSO downloads

Thanksgiving 2008: Big ass turkey

It’s time for the Thanksgiving menu, and not a moment too soon. I managed to get to Wilson Farms today in the nick of time to pick up my turkey, came home early, and boiled my customary Alton Brown brine (1 gallon vegetable broth, a cup of salt, a half-cup mixed brown and white sugar since we were low on brown, and peppercorns) and iced it down and put it on the porch to cool. After cooking a pre-Feast of the Beast (biftek a la Lyonnaise with a quick sauce Robert) and taking care of a few other odds and ends, I wrangled the turkey into the brine.

That’s not a small task. We have five adults and a small child at the dinner table this year, which means a slightly bigger turkey. Like, 19 pounds. This year I remembered to fish the neck and liver out of the cavity AND to get the paper bag with the other organs out of the neck cavity (very good progress!) before the turkey went into the cooler on a bag’s worth of ice, breast down; the brine went over the turkey; and another half bag of ice went on top. The cooler is now on the porch (mercifully, it’ll be between 30° and 34° tonight) and I’m catching my breath while I think about the rest of the menu.

My mother-in-law, mercifully, has already taken care of dessert—a homemade apple pie. That leaves us with:

What’s up with all the duplications? Well, I made the classic product manager error: I didn’t socialize my plans in advance and got blowback. We’ll see how it goes.

Grab bag: Pre-Thanksgiving light blogging