The Goldfish Chronicles

One feature from Roller that I really miss is the ability to have only the most recent entries open for comments. After dealing with lots of spam, I finally put together a solution. It’s very low tech; I run the following in a crontab for each blog:

echo "update wp_2_posts set comment_status = 'closed' where comment_status = 'open' and post_modified < date_sub(curdate(), interval 14 day) and post_status = 'publish' and post_type='post';" | mysql --user=xxxx --password=xxxx wordpress

• The Manage Entries page has a happy text search (I wrote that for Roller!), but it doesn’t tell you how many entries came back. The ‘Previous Entries’ bit seems to fail on that page too.
• Drafts are poorly managed, just a big long horizontal list of urls. If you’ve a lot of drafts, that’s irritating.

This is an odd one. My blog’s inline <img> tags lost their src attributes; however Carrie’s don’t seem to have done that. Very odd. So I’ll need to search for ‘img’ and see if I can fix the data. Apologies if that republishes things in the RSS.

Fortunately I don’t inline images often (while Carrie does a lot). Another migration woe that I fixed by hand was that my drafts were automatically published.

• You have to have a working email server (or go hack the database for your first user’s password).
• Ctrl-Z is dubious in the editor. I keep deleting text and finding I can’t undelete.
• The category widget is not as obvious as it was in Roller. I keep creating entries without a category.
• ‘Uncategorized’ is a category. So something can be in both a category and in uncategorized. Bad hack.

Ignoring the #0 parts in the previous post.

They default the blog to having a Hello World, a Blogroll of links, a Blogroll category that you can’t delete. All irritating and unnecessary. You have to start by deleting crap to get to a clean slate.

Roller has the same default Blogroll and default Categories, and I’m not a fan of that. One plus is that at least in Roller you can delete them all.