Sandbox Blogger

UPDATE: I’ve manage to get in touch with the maintainer of the official WordPress plugin site and have since gain control of the Post Teaser plugin page and repository. The only thing now is to also get control of the old WP-Plugin wiki so that I can point users to the new release. BTW, here is the official Post Teaser plugin page.

After much debugging and sleepless nights, I’ve got to fix the Post Teaser plugin. Although if I’m an experienced PHP programmer, I would have manage the fix in a matter of hours but I’m still learning. I still can’t program PHP if my life depends on it (at least not in a timely fashion). Regardless I’ve fix the issue and I’m now happy with the result.

Over the weekend, I was looking at the new features available in WordPress 2.2.1 and I thought “Hey, I really like the widget feature and I don’t need to install anything extra to get it if I upgrade SandBoxBlogger.com to the latest WordPress version.” Boy, how wrong can I be. Once I’ve enabled all the plugins, SandBoxBlogger.com was dead. I mean really dead. No error, no partial site, just a blank page. I was staring at a completely white page. Checking the source reviews that nothing loaded.
The little thought cost me the weekend debugging my blog. By disabling all the plugins and re-enabling them one by one, I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem was because of the Post Teaser plugin.

Whenever I start a blog (my own or blogs I manages for others), comment spam problems are usually the last thing that cross my mind. After all, if a blog is unknown and have virtually no traffic (like SandboxBlogger.com at the current stage), the blog will be of little interest to spammers. Those new blogs may not even register as a tiny bleep under the spammers’ radar. One exception I have notice is that blogging or websites related blog like SandboxBlogger.com seems to get notice very quickly. I’ve seen spam coming in from the first month I’ve started this blog.

If you are those blogger, like me, who would always customize themes yourself, there is no way to escape learning up some of those technologies behind web pages. No HTML, No CSS, No PHP (or whatever web language your blogger software is based on), No custom theme.

Today, I’ve learn the difference between the DIV and the SPAN tag.

During my WTF moment with AdSense-Deluxe plugin, I was just eager to fix the unsightly misalignment that I have neglect to check the other aspect of the layout.

The post I’ve written yesterday about giving WordPress its own directory during installation, just so happened to be WordPress upgrade day. I was rather surprise at yet another upgrade because it was not too long ago that there was this emergency upgrade to address the issue where someone hacked into their distribution server and added malicious code in the WordPress 2.1.1 package. Oh great, here we go again. I thought what the hack, I could write a post about the upgrade and how easy it is now that files are kept more separated from the WordPress files. So, today is the first real test with this kind of layout.

Typically, when I install WordPress, I usually install it in the root directory of the website. That is because I prefer not to host too many things under one domain name and I really don’t like overly long URL. Simply put, I like my blogs accessible via URL like http://example.com/ rather than http://example.com/my-wonderful-blog.

Today, I had a WTF moment when I was adding AdSense code to SandboxBlogger.com theme. Naturally, I install Wayne’s AdSense-Deluxe Plugin for WordPress to make it easy on myself. I’ve made the choice simply because AdSense-Deluxe Plugin is the best plugin out in the WordPress plugin jungle (more about that in later post).

In the past, I have been avoiding ads in posts on my other blog that I either participate or have helped to setup. All for the name of unintrusive ads, in fact too unintrusive… This time around I wanted to be a little bit bolder in my ads arrangement. However, I did not want those post ads to show up in my home page, archive pages, or any non-single pages in the blog. Ahh… Good! AdSense-Deluxe allows me to turn them off with just a few clicks to unchecked the related check box.

Then I saw it.