Last night I wrote another wordpress plug-in … It’s called “Author Bio” and will add the authors biographical information (from their wordpress profile) to the bottom of the a post (only when the post is on a single page, not on the main page).

More information can be found on the plug-in page.

Hmmm … depending on the cost and schedule, I might be interested in attending Wordcamp Chicago.

I’m now running Wordpress 2.7 Release Candidate 1.

Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t screw things up completely.

Actually, I’m not especially worried … in my little playing around with the beta versions, it’s been pretty stable.

Ginny has been bugging me about the problem she’s been having posting to her blog from the iPhone and other third party tools that she uses.

The problem has been narrowed down to a bug in LIBXML2 that causes leading angle brackets “<” to be stripped off of posts when processed through the XMLRPC support in PHP.  I logged the issue in the Wordpress bug tracker, and the consensus is that the problem started manifesting after an automatic update applied by Fedora 8.

Well, to solve the problem I’ve moved Ginny’s blog to a temporary server running in a base Fedora 8 install in a VMWare instance.  Luckily Wordpress stores most of it’s content in the MySQL database (not the images, unfortunately).  A bit of NFS magic to mount the appropriate directory in the virtual system, and it’s working fine.  The server itself only has Apache, PHP, MySQL client, SSH, and a few other bits & pieces to keep it running.  No automatic updates, GUI, compilers, etc.

Once the bug is fixed (either Wordpress, using a different XML processing mechanism, or LIBXML2) I’ll move her server back to the main server.

In the mean time, her blog is going to run in the virtual machine ‘Hobbittown’ (named because it’s small).

I’ve encountered a weird error in Wordpress … for some reason, when a post is submitted using the XML-RPC api (which is used by the Wordpress iPhone app), any leading ‘<’ symbols on the HTML is being stripped out.

Ginny noticed this a few days ago and I just confirmed it on a test blog.

The content that is posted looks something like this …

p>a href="http://beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-
640-480-2fd9116d-5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg">img src="http://
beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-640-480-2fd9116d
--5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg" alt="" width="225" height="300"
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-364" />/a>/p>

I’ll have to do some digging to find if this has already been logged or not.

I wish I was more skilled at PHP … I’m sure it’s someething I could sink my teeth into.

Update: FWIW I’ve opened ticket 7771 on the Wordpress tracking system on this issue.