I’ve heard reports from a very reliable source on trouble with the latest rendition of WordPress.com and Firefox 3.6.17 for Mac PowerPC.
The trouble concerned the Javascripty popups used to insert links and images.
Yesterday they didn’t work.
Today they do.
Problem solved, it appears.
WordPress.com is a very nice service. I haven’t been on here in many, many months.
So when I do get in the interface, I tend to want to change things for change’s sake. Hence the new theme.
Last time I looked, even though Mozilla didn’t seem totally in love with supporting Firefox 3.6.x, they still were. But it looks like WordPress.com, the Automattic-hosted mega-blogging service, was intent on leaving FF 3.x behind.
At least that’s the way it looks right now in Firefox 3.6.x for PowerPC Mac. Running TenFourFox — the Firefox 4.x code built for PowerPC Macintosh — seems to help.
Remember my last post about how Thunderbird didn’t have a proper import/export function? Since then I discovered, installed and used ImportExport Tools to allow me to import Mbox-formatted mail archives into my main Thunderbird installation.
I was able to easily bring all the messages from my Windows Thunderbird install into my OpenBSD Thunderbird, and now all of my e-mail is in one place.
The reason for this was switching over from IMAP to POP because I was (and am) not comfortable leaving my mail on the server and want to have it all on my local drive (and backed up to CDs/DVDs).
To consolidate my two Thunderbird archives into one, I took the whole local directory from one, burned it to a CD, moved it to the other PC and then used ImportExport Tools to bring the folders into my current Thunderbird local directory one by one. Once I had the new folders in my new Thunderbird install, I then distributed the messages to the appropriate folders and deleted the temporary folders I created to hold the transferred mail.
I continue to think that this import-export function should be done wholly in Thunderbird with Mozilla-maintained code, but having an add-on that works is better than nothing at all.
Using IMAP, as I did for a few years, allows for quite a bit of flexibility, since the mail stays on the server and I can use any number of clients to access it from any number of machines.
To give me some added flexibility now that I’m POP-ping the mail down to one computer, I have Thunderbird configured to keep the last 10 days’ worth of mail on the server so I can use my mail service’s Web interface at any time to see all the mail in the past 10 days.
The one problem with this 10-day solution is that any e-mail I write in Thunderbird goes into the Sent file on my local machine and is never on the server. To get around this, if I write an e-mail that I’d like to have access to via the Web address, I BCC it to myself so it goes on the server as well.
I do the same thing if I write an e-mail in the Web interface, copying myself so I have it both on the server and in my local directory.
Before I close, I should say that I chose Thunderbird as my mail client because I’d been using it for a few years (and was comfortable with it) and because it’s a cross-platform app that runs in Windows, Linux, Mac OS and every BSD. I really like any app I can easily get in every OS I run (or might run).
I believe that it’s fairly easy to turn just about any Linux server into a WordPress installation. There is even a port of WordPress for OpenBSD. I thought that I’d try to run Movable Type on OpenBSD, but getting PHP and Perl working with the Web server looks incredibly difficult. If somebody else did this and laid out how they managed it (like How to Forge), I could probably follow along, but the difficulty of dealing with the chroot environment in OpenBSD’s default Apache Web server — which isolates the Web server’s files from the rest of the computer for security purposes — makes it extremely difficult for mortals to set up services in the Web server environment.
For a normal Web server with nothing but HTML pages (and no PHP, Perl/CGI), OpenBSD couldn’t be an easier system to use. It’s when things get more complicated that this that the non-OpenBSD geek is especially challenged.
But as I say, there is a WordPress port for OpenBSD, as well as WordPress packages for GNU/Linux systems such as Debian. I also seem to remember talk about a Movable Type package for Debian Lenny, and if it made the installation and configuration of the blogging system easier, I’d be all for it.
As it is now, between installing and configuring MySQL (or PostgreSQL), making sure PHP and Perl are running and getting all the directory permissions correctly set, putting together one of these blogging systems, even on Linux, is no trivial matter. The last time I set up Movable Type, all the MySQL issues I was having prompted me to dump it and use SQLite as my database software. At least MT gives you some options in this regard.
I had no idea what the “tag surfer” was. I clicked and found out.
What it does is take you to other WordPress blog posts on topics that match your own. It’s a great way, from their standpoint, to get you to link to other WordPress blogs, and it’s equally great for you because … you find stuff that’s good to link to.
The CTRL freak 