Sankofa

First things first, let me assure you that this is not me and my typical Microsoft fanboy-ism speaking. Secondly, let me tell you that this post is not a credible source for the “best offline editor for Wordpress”; I have only tried Windows Live Writer, there are hundreds of offline blog editors out there.

Even during the first months of this blog, I was already made aware of the shortcomings of the Wordpress’ default online editor. One of the said shortcomings is that you need to manually “hack” TinyMCE’s settings to achieve the perfect WYSIWYG effect that matches your blog’s font setting. Another shortcoming is that it doesn’t have a default spell check engine that helps grammar offenders like me (although you can download a spell check plug-in from Wordpress but it doesn’t work as nice as Microsoft Word’s spell checker). So I ended up composing my posts in Microsoft Word and painstakingly copy/pasting them to my site; and let me tell you know, it is not a pretty sight (and Wordpress does not recommend it). What kept me from abandoning Word is the ability to have an “offline” backup of my blog posts and that just about it.

When I learned of offline editors for blogs, I quickly downloaded the (then) latest copy of Live Writer and I was disappointed! There were a lot of XML RPC errors and Live Writer did not automatically match my blog’s font to the editor’s font and worst of all, you have to jump a lot of hoops to change the editor’s font especially if it’s a non-standard Microsoft font! So I ditched the idea and went back to Microsoft Word.

Not so long ago, I got tired of composing my posts in Word and manually copy/pasting them to my blog so I contented myself to just use the online Wordpress editor (since I was able to fix TinyMCE’s setting) and just perform manual backups of the database from time to time. It was okay for quite some time until I got a bad RAM stick and have my Firefox randomly crash while composing a blog post which eventually resulted in me trying to remember what I typed in the post for the third time in the last five hours. It was a sobering sight – a programmer without mastery of his own tools and a crappy memory stick.

Continue reading “Windows Live Writer: The best offline editor for Wordpress or A biased Live Writer review” »

BLOG.ianuy.com is now running Wordpress version 2.8! Remind me to never update Wordpress again! I also upgraded all of my plugins to the latest version.

Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade, Pain in the as*

A number of things had gone wrong during the upgrade:

1. During the automatic upgrade of my plugins, some of them didn’t restart succesfully on their own so I have to manually activate them agian.
2. Some widgets were removed. Needed to re-add it manually again (Most Viewed Widget).
3. My custom smiley was erased. Need to re-upload them again.
4. The Wordpress editor (TinyMCE Editor) font had defaulted back to its original font (Times New Roman, 12px). This is frustrating because I totally forgot how to set the editor font. You need to manually match the editor font to the blog font to have the WYSIWIG effect. (For my future reference, the settings are in wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/skins/wp_theme/content.css . You need to click “Save Draft” after making the css changes to see its effect!)
5. After upgrading to Wordpress 2.8, I checked to see if IE 8 will display the site properly (thankfully it did!). However, I noticed that my blog is now serving ads from specificclick.net! (I wasn’t able to notice the pop-up ad from Firefox because I’m using Ad Block Plus). At first, I thought that my friend’s hosting service / contract has changed and is now injecting ads into my blog (talked to him and he said that he hasn’t done anything). Then, I suspected that one of the plugin owners got broke and decided to sell ads thru their plugins… So I deactivated all plugin to no avail. So then I suspected that Wordpress 2.8 might be serving the ads (how pathetically stupid of me, Wordpress wouldn’t do that!). So after a few hours of searching, I found out that SiteMeter is the one who is serving unsolicited ads from my site! (Don’t worry kids, I already replaced the JS code with the HTML code to block the ads. More info about the scandal here.)

I have also added the Global Translator plugin (see footer) to boost traffic. (Hey, not everyone can read Engrish! )

I haven’t checked every function of the blog yet. So if you find something that looks broken, please hit the comments! Thanks!

PS (totally unrelated): Yuri is so freakin’ cute! New SNSD single out on June 25!

Democrats!

Just a quick note that I have re-upped our section site on my server! Everything looks crappy though since I haven’t touched/edited anything for historical sake (To sorta remind everyone how Web 1.0 looked like).

Visit the site @ http://ianuy.com/democrats/

BTW, you can also watch the Grad. Ball coverage there.

Oh sweet memories.

Migration Successful!

F*ck Multiply! How hard could it be to add an export function? It took me 4 hours just to manually migrate 9 posts and it does not *look* good.

Anyway, all of the 9 posts below are from my old blog at Multiply. Please forgive the tiny font size, I’m still trying to figure out how to change the font style of my posts. As of the moment, I’m using Windows Live Writer to publish my posts as it provides an easier way to change font styles.

All of my new blog posts will be posted here. I will still be maintaining my old blog over at Multiply but I will only post excerpts there that will link to the full post here.

By the way, if you have any HDR images of the Metro Manila skyline (Makati, Ayala, Taguig, Ortigas), please send me a high-resolution copy and I will turn that into a beautiful banner that I can use. Don’t worry, I’ll credit you.

How do you guys like my logo?

HELLO WORLD!

At last! After 8 hours of hard work, I’m now done setting up WordPress. The WordPress installation per se didn’t eat up much time, nor did the Themes and Plugins installation, but the personalization and setup did.

Continue reading “WordPress Setup Done!” »