This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.
My ISP – Thunderworx – is having some problems with the outbound connection. Because of this my site might not be accessible from far far away. Also, there are slow downs with Google Ads. Hopefully the issue will be resolved shortly.
In the meantime I can’t do much to help…
Most of my posts about WordPress were positive. Today I’ll mention one of the annoying features it has by default and how to fix it.
Escaping. By default, all text in the <pre>…</pre> block is passed through escaping subroutine. Most noticeble change happened to double quotes (“). They were escaped with the backslash (\). Needless to say that rendered many code bits useless.
The fix is very easy. One just have to install code-markup.php plugin. It has some additional functionality too, but for me all the value was in the unescaping routine.
I’ve installed the plugin for this site and the problem is gone now.
I’ve upgraded the WordPress installation to version 1.5.1.1. This is a minor upgrade and was done to fix a just a couple of bugs. I had it partially applied previously, but decided to finish it to have things nice and clean. You can look at Change Log if you are interested in what exactly was fixed.
Since there were some problems with RSS feeds afer upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1, I’ve updated the installation with this fix. I downloaded the revision 2600 of wp-blog-header.php and overwrote the original one with it.
Things should get better now…
I’ve been getting a lot of complains lately that my blog is very slow. I experienced it myself too, but I couldn’t recall which changes caused it. I checked all logs and configurations and everything looked just fine.
I asked Vladimir Ivaschenko to help me track down the problem. He is known as The Master of strace, so I was pretty sure that he would be help me. And I was right.
Within minutes, we found out that problems were caused by del.icio.us Smart Tagging plugin that I have installed not so long ago. With plugin activated, wget would take anywhere from 15 to 90 seconds to load the front page of the site. Deactivating the plugin, makes wget finish in less than 3 seconds. I consider the difference to be big enough for the functionality that this plugin brings in, so I disabled it. Maybe I will use it later again, when things get faster.
Thanks a lot Vladimir!