1. An incomplete transfer of the requisite files.  Don’t insist that you’re certain that didn’t happen, even if it’s from a command like svn or cp that shouldn’t fail; you’re not certain until you’ve checked.
2. PHP has run out of some resource, typically RAM.
3. mod_security is set up brokenly

[digg-reddit-me]In both cases, you can figure out which by checking your apache logs.  On windows, go to the Windows Event Viewer.  On unix, this may live in a variety of places; most common is shared hosting by cpanel/plesk, where you can get it in your control panel, or to just look in /var/logs/ .

If it’s #1, you’re likely to see something like this in logs (this is from my site, which just suffered this problem and was quickly fixed) :

[Tue Jul 15 18:45:28 2008] [error] [client 24.117...]
PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function
force_ssl_admin() in /var/www/html/wp-settings.php on
line 390, referer: http://.../wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=55

Don’t worry if that undefined function has a different name or a different referrer, or whatever; that’s how you track down missing code, and missing code means some file didn’t get updated.

I’m already doing complex efficient randomization, API access, bulk posting, timed bulk posting, base autotagging, auto-categorization, a catalog widget, and I’m going to make sure that my stuff is compatible with the All In One SEO pack.  I’m going to provide integration points, and I’m going to provide an example integration with LightBox, or one of its relatives.  I’m going to provide voting, moderated tag suggestion and home-post permalinking.

I’ll also be writing strict, browser/version portable code without hacks.  Yay!

Please let me know what you’d want to see if there were a new image plugin coming out.

[youtube]OTEqR4zv4C0[/youtube]

[?php jal_democracy(3); ?]

That poll above is the fusion of two plugins – Democracy AJAX Poll, and Exec-PHP. The bulk of the work is just Democracy doing its thing. However, Democracy is intended to be embedded in the site’s theme, such as in a sidebar box; you embed it by calling a function using the poll index as an argument, or blindly, and it’ll use the currently “active” poll. Lord knows my sidebar box is cluttered enough as is, and polls make more sense for me inline to posts than they do other places. Active polls aren’t really my thing, though they may become so in the future (it’d be easy enough to permanently embed an active poll in the side while keeping these inlined ones too.)

In order to get them inlined, I just pulled Exec-PHP to call the Democracy plugin from within a post. It’s quite neat, really. I had to make a trivial batch of edits to Democracy, because Word Press runs nl2br() on the plugin’s output, which injects spurious breaks that I don’t want; really all I did was to remove the whitespace from the plugin’s original output, and everything else Just Worked™.

I continue to be impressed with Word Press.

It’d be cooler if it wasn’t on a Mac, but other than that, it’s pretty awesome.

Not so fast.

Now, I like to think of myself as hard to offend. I mean I’ve survived more than twenty minutes in #winprog; how bad could it be, right? And so, I go and do a foolish thing, and just ask what needs to be done. I’m just gonna learn on a plug-in which should exist anyway, and as long as I’m solving someone else’s problem, shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Except, the crapflood was unleashed. My god, the sanctimony in that place was just unreal. People telling me how awful it was for me to waste the channel’s time by asking to help them, how I needed to spend three weeks using it then invent my own problem, how I needed to understand Word Press at some fundamental and deep level. Lots of swearing.

Now, I’d already had a bad day, and at least outside of EfNet I try to keep my behavior in check. Sorta. A little. And I mean, don’t get me wrong; I let myself be ascerbic. But, if you’ve seen me on EfNet, you know that the truth is that I’m actually a son of a bitch. Meanwhile, I’ve got some self important nobody googling for like thirty seconds then telling me how the video game industry and the telecommunications industry work – coincidentally, the two places I’ve put in most of my professional life – and how if she couldn’t find a blatantly obvious rights sale on google in under the time it takes me to open a can of coke and proceed to laugh in her face, then it never ever happened. (Needless to say, I love that sort of person.) I’ve got three other people repeating the same damned “well you need to just spend the next six months of your life in a love huddle with the application before you dare consider making a plug-in,” one of whom tried to actually ask me how I dared sit in his channel and ask him what he’d like to have done for him for free. Good thing Uncle Fatty wears three sets of adult diapers, because he crapped himself laughing at that one. I’ve got two people giving genuine effort to help, but they’re novices, and the things they’re suggesting are things more appropriate for CSS skin modifications. I’ve even got some lunatic breathing down my neck about how I have to go download and install his template, because apparently in his mind that’s how I write a plugin, though of course he’s screaming and telling me I’m an idiot if I ask just what the hell interest I should have in his template, then insisting I’m a clueless noob for not knowing what good it would be, instead of just confused by the total lack of germanity.

Now some of you are saying “Well of course, it’s the internet, it’s full to overflowing of assholes and meat by-products, and half those fools have their think lock turned off” (stealing Drano phrases for the win, nooch.) But, Brion, RobChurch and Innocense and that lot over in MediaWiki had kind of spoiled me by not being total cockhogs, and responding like adults when I asked what remained to be done. Also in Mozilla, GCC, Apache, PHP, and the various other things I’ve worked on. ‘Cause, you know, when someone shows up like “how can I do my share,” usually people don’t act like you slapped their mother in the face with your dick, right?

And so, Rehan for the win. Rehan was some dude in #wordpress who didn’t suck. One of two I found in that mire of angry, angry anger. Don’t get me wrong, kids: Uncle Fatty has more anger in him than North America. But, it was sealed behind a wall of that weird green glass that seems to stop everything in Superman movies, and the twat brigade didn’t see any of it. (The funniest part is that they think they did; I get the impression that if any one of them were exposed to #winprog for more than a few seconds, they would dissolve in a way reminiscent of an Indiana Jokes Arking. This would be cathartic; I’m considering handing out invites. Hammy shall be my greatest weapon.)

And so, sure enough, Rehan opens his mouth, but dumb doesn’t come out. It took me a second to decide that I wasn’t being tricked, but lo and behold he had a reasonable idea. (Actually, I shouldn’t say that – there was one other quite reasonable idea – except that in my whole day of being a Word Press user I already knew about three plugins that did that, and I ended up having to give them the links. Man, are these people up to date.) Apparently there’s a problem with caching gravatars, which are globally unique avatars, something so faggy that only a blogger could want it. (I’m trying to pretend I don’t want one; it’ll probably be that dinosaur with the coke cans that Chris made for my wiki, but I’m not gonna admit to it right now.) Apparently the most common gravatar plugin has an issue where it polls the server before it attempts to draw the existing cached one, which results in a lag which would make DWANGO blush.

Will Uncle Fatty solve the problem? Maybe. The allure of plugins has faded ever since I’ve realized what cockbungalows I would be helping. On the other hand, plugins look fun to write, and on the gripping hand, maybe that’ll get me some track ping back flack rpc 2.0 whatever. You know, the random mish mash of acronyms that bloggers trot out to convince themselves they’re technorati, and that they’re not just exchanging XML handshakes over teh intarwebulator. (NOT JEALOUS AT ALL.)

But, let me be perfectly clear: once Rehan started speaking in a voice which was neither condescending nor stupid, the idiots parted like the Red Sea. In a sense, I suppose I could call him IRC Word Press Moses. Not, mind you, because it’s a particularly apt comparison; mostly just because it’s funny. But still. He’s a medical student in Pakistan, so imagining him wandering around in Jesus robes with a mask and gloves is significantly amusing.

Rehan: lo, for thou art mack, and thy convincing raye of loquaciousness hath driven back the mental Sodomites. Prithee wave as I say goodbye to that community, for thou art the only thing I should remember well of it.

(Well, no, Mark was pretty cool too. But pretending there’s only one makes it funnier. So whatever.)

Anyway, I now have mixed feelings about Word Press. As a technology base, it’s a pretty nice platform, reasonably well documented, and thoroughly painless. As a community, it makes me thermonuclear stabby. I have a fear that if I ever have to go in there again, that I’m going to have to pretend to be funny like Furan, which though patently untrue … I guess the best way to tell this is by allegory. My father used to tell me a story about how when he was in college, his professor got the class together, and thoroughly taped down the room, blocked off all the light, to the point where the kids’ eyes adjusted and they were able to see small clusters of light being given off by an electronic device. Several dozen photons, instead of tens of thousands.

By this hasty metaphor, Furan’s a candle, and I’m some half-baked spark generator. But you know what? #wordpress is a dark room, and if they try to put on the bastard again, I’m gonna teach them what bastard means.

Looks like I finally have some emo for my blog.