randomfrequency.net

Many people over the past month(s) have written in that the Search Pages does not work in the current WordPress release. At present, I do not have a fix for this. Other concerns have my attention at present.

When I find time to fix this, I’ll will post an update. Until then, it’s probably wise not to count on Search Pages for newer WordPress installations.

Thanks to everybody who has reported the problems, and especially to those people who have offered suggestions on how to fix it.

Since I searched for hours before finding the solution to this problem I ran into, I’m posting it so that maybe someone else can benefit.

I was having problems with Windows so I decided to reinstall. It’s a dual-boot system with Gentoo Linux and I had just put in a new graphics card and a new wireless card. I figured, good as time as any to reinstall and get a clean system. So in goes my Dell Windows install CD and I reboot. Everything looks peachy initially until I get to this screen:

Windows XP Home Edition Setup

Welcome to Setup.

This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft(R)
Windows(R) XP to run on your computer.

* To set up Windows XP now, press ENTER.

* To repair a Windows XP installation using
   Recovery Console, press R.

* To quite Setup without installing Windows XP, press F3.

Pressing ENTER did not work, nor did any other button. Several reboots, several different tries, nothing worked. It just sat there, frozen, not doing anything.

Having no clue what the problem might be, I tried a number of things: Windows Update to make sure things were clean before trying to reinstall; deleted the Windows and MBR partitions using Gentoo’s fdisk; tried booting from both the hard-drive based installer and the CD, using various boot orders; looked into restoring the system to using NTLDR instead of GRUB, only to find out that would require me to use the “press R for Repair” option that wasn’t working.

After a nice long nap, I did some more searching and FINALLY found something that seemed useful. Someone had a similar problem and it turned out Windows wasn’t recognizing the keyboard. I have a USB mouse and USB keyboard, and the mouse is one of those 5 button Kensington deals. I figured I’d try unplugging that to see if it worked. It did.

So, if you get to the “set up Windows” screen and no buttons get it going, try hitting Caps Lock or Num Lock to see if they do anything. If they don’t, then maybe your keyboard isn’t being recognized—and the mouse may just be the culprit.

As those of you who posted support requests may have noticed, I’ve not had much time over the last several months to do anything related to Qdig-WP. My schedule’s been to tight and other things have been taking priority. Since I’ve been asked a few times: I do not know if Qdig-WP works under WP 2.0. I have not tested it.

My lack of activity hasn’t prevented others from doing cool things, though. Ian Cheung has written up a very useful guide on integrating Qdig-WP more seamlessly into the Kubrick theme. He’s also got a demo site to show the results, and it looks quite good. If you’re having problems getting Qdig-WP to look right–and especially if you’re using Kubrick–you should check his site out.

I finally decided to switching hosting for the development for Qdig-WP to the WordPress Plugins Repository. I hadn’t bothered doing so before because I hadn’t been very familiar with Subversion, plus I didn’t see much benefit to hosting using someone else’s servers. However, I’ve been learning about Subversion recently (to decide whether to recommend using Subversion or CVS to host the development of a project at my internship) and realized that I had been ignoring a tremendous resource. So I decided to remedy that! Thanks to Matt and TextDrive for providing this resource to the community.

So, if you’re interested, check out Qdig-WP at its new repository home. At present, there’s nothing new there; I’ve only commited what’s already on my website. This doesn’t mean I plan to do any development in the immediate future, either, but I’m hoping it might more easily allow me to do some improvements after the end of this semester. (The appreciation of those who keep finding it useful is encouraging me to try to find time to improve it more.)

I figure that I’ll continue to document the plugin on my website, and will probably continue to provide hosting to the current release on my website (to ease downloads), but I will probably eventually link the old versions to their tagged locations in the repository.

Just a small update to Qdig-WP. Clint submitted a fix for a validation error for the permalink link and this update applies it.

If you’re not worried about your page validating to standards, you can probably get by without updating to the newest version. However, it’s probably a good idea to upgrade unless you have a good reason not to. :)

I’ve been curious as to the lyrics for Pixar’s Boundin’ (featured with the movie The Incredibles) for a while now. After searching the web and finding nothing, I decided to watch it carefully and note the lyrics. No guarantee they’re accurate, but I thought I’d share what I have.

Here’s a story on how strange is life with its changes
And it happened not long ago.
On a high mountain plain, where the sagebrush arranges
A playground south of the snow
Lived a lamb with a coat of remarkable sheen,
It would glint in the sunlight all sparkly and clean,
Such a source of great pride
that it caused him to preen.
And he’d break out in high stepp’n dance.
He would dance for his neighbors across the way.
I must say that they found his dancin’ enhancin’,
For they’d also join in the play.

Then one day…

Then a-boundin up the slope
Came a great American jackalope.
This sage of the sage, this rare hare of hope,
Caused to pause and check out the lamb.
“Hey kid, why the mope?”

“I used to be something all covered with fluff,
And I’d dance in the sunlight and show off my stuff,
Then they hauled me away in a manner quite rough
And sheared me and dropped me back here in the buff.
And if that’s not enough
Now my friends all laugh at me
Cause they think I look ridiculous, funny, and pink.”

“Pink? Pink? Well, what’s wrong with pink?
Seems you’ve got a pink kink in your think.
Does it matter what color? Well, that gets nope.
Be it pink purple or heliotrope.
Now sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down,
When you find that you’re down well just look around:
You still got a body, good legs and fine feet,
Get your head in the right place and hey, you’re complete!

“Now as for the dancin’, you can do more,
You can reach great heights, in fact you can soar.
You just get a leg up and ya slap it on down,
And you’ll find you’re up in what’s called a bound.
Bound, bound, and rebound.
Bound and you’re up right next to the sky,
And I think you can do it if you give it a try,
First get a leg up, slap it on down…”

So every year, along about May,
They’d load him up and they’d haul him away,
And they’d shave him and dump him all naked and bare.
He learned to live with it, he didn’t care,
He’d just bound, bound, bound, and rebound.

Now in this world of ups and downs…
So nice to know there are jackalopes around.

In response to a request, I made a WordPress 1.5 hack called Search Meta that causes searches to consider the custom fields’ values when executing. It’s basically the same as a Mingus hack provided on the old wiki, but updated for Strayhorn.

I would have made this as a plugin, but unfortunately I couldn’t find filters that would work to modify the queries appropriately.

Note that this is compatible with my Search Pages plugin, if you happen to be using it.

I recently released Qdig-WP 0.4 with instructions on how to use it when mod_rewrite is not in use. These instructions are now obsolete! A better way has been found!

The latest devel release (20050325) of Qdig has a $keep_params setting that will automatically detect the querystring and keep the parameters in it to maintain the page state. Setting $keep_params to TRUE enables this, and is much easier than the voodoo I suggested with $extra_param.

If you have it working with $extra_param, please be aware that the option may be deprecated in the next stable release of Qdig. You should strongly consider downloading the newest devel release and changing your settings.

Please see my latest entry about Qdig-WP without mod_rewrite for updated information that obsoletes some of the below.

I’ve made a few updates to Qdig-WP to fix a few bugs.

The most obvious change (0.4) is that the plugin will now work when mod_rewrite is not being used. See the information about $extra_param in the The Qdig File section. Note that you may have to upgrade to the latest release of Qdig for this feature — it’s only present starting with the 20050310 devel release.

A subtle but important change made in 0.3 makes sure that all of Qdig’s globals get properly loaded, even for future versions of Qdig. Previously, new settings introduced in future Qdig releases wouldn’t work.

If you run into problems or find bugs, please bring them up in my forums.

After getting several emails and blog entries with questions, bug reports, and other issues regarding my recent plugins, I decided it might be worthwhile to set up some forums quick to more easily facilitate discussion and resolution. Especially since lately I’ve been swamped after having been sick, plus having a lot of internship work and school work to do. Perhaps as some solutions get figured on the board, it may help people start solving their problems when I can’t respond immediately. (And maybe other people might even step in to help, who knows?)

Those of you who emailed me in the last week or two — I haven’t forgotten you! I’m just way behind with things, and unfortunately, my personal projects are lowest on my priorities list. :( But I’m hoping to get caught up this week, so maybe I can take a look at some of the questions that were sent later this week.