Kirb’s Musings

Kirby Witmer’s ponderings, ruminations, and meditations of… anything.

There’s been a number of changes on this blog the last while.

• My blog now resides at blog.kirb.com. I always disliked the fact that my old blog url had a capital letter in it, and when I figured out that it wouldn’t be that hard to move the blog I decided to go with a new sub-domain.
• There is a new theme. For some reason I always get tired of a theme after awhile so I change it.
• I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 RC1. And its just plain awesome. Lots of cool new features, and a whole lot more responsive.
• My photos now reside at photos.kirb.com. Don’t you just love my short domain name?

I just downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. One of my favorite features is how IE 8.0 highlights the domain that you are currently browsing. You can view an example in screenshot #5. One big negative at this point however is that a lot of web sites don’t display properly unless you have the Emulate IE7 mode turned on. For example, G-mail and Google Reader have some display issues. You can read more on this issue here. In time this problem should disappear.

Check out these screenshots:

      Microsoft has finally released the much anticipated Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. Although its not “publicly” available for download from Microsoft yet, it can be found online at various other places. I’ve installed the service pack on both a desktop and a laptop now and I’m well pleased with it. Its worth installing simply for the annoying “slow file copy” bug fix which is included. Hurray!! Of course, there is a whole lot of other fixes included as well.

Check out these screenshots.

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As I mentioned before, I upgraded my Blog to the latest version of Wordpress, which includes a new feature called tagging*. I also noticed they had a cool utility to convert your categories to tags, which I proceeded to do. Big mistake. Not only did it convert all my categories into tags, it removed the categories, and categorized all my posts with the default category. And I couldn’t find an undo feature anywhere**. Hmm… now what? So what I did for now is added the following lines to my .htaccess file.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /category/ http://blog.kirb.com [R]

So now what happens is that when someone accesses one of my now non-existant categories it redirects them to the home page instead of giving them a Not Found page. Ideally it should redirect them to the tag instead, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. If anyone knows how to do that, let me know.

*Tagging is not a new idea, in fact it has become hugely popular. This is just the first time Wordpress includes it by default.
**You say its called backups? What’s that?

UPDATE: I’m now getting an error “mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached” I’m not sure if its related to this change or not, but I have disabled it in the meantime.

I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3 and upgraded a bunch of plugins. My theme wasn’t compatible with the new version of Wordpress therefore I have a ugly temporary one up until I find one that I like. I know, you are thinking that… “this blog is always under construction, and why doesn’t this idiot just leave good enough alone?” Ummm… you have a point.