FFS WordPress

The famous five minute quick installation, my ass!

Firstly, I’ve just discovered FileZilla, and now I don’t have to upload my files one by one! When I didn’t know about FileZilla and FTP, I used my hosting provider’s web-based interface to upload HTML files to my web-site one-by-one. I’m glad those days are gone!

In the beginning days when I just wrote my own HTML files that was cool, because I only had about 10 files. But now that I’m learning to be a WordPress master I need FTP, and FileZilla rocks! (Thanks to jj5 for the recommendation!)

In the five minute install it said do you have a MySQL server, and I was like “yeah”, but then when I uploaded WordPress it said that my version of MySQL wasn’t high enough! They didn’t tell me *that* in the five minute install instructions!

And now on another one of my WordPress web-sites I have a random error with a stray < character in the wp-settings.php config file and the whole site is broken. I don’t even know who to blame for that!

In conclusion I take my hat off to people who have WordPress sites, because it’s not as easy to get it set up as it says in the manual. You still have to know computers to get it going I guess.

Free software licenses

I was doing some research about free software licenses as a part of developing ProgClub’s terms and conditions, and found this list of free software licenses from the FSF, and the same list of FSF approved software licenses on Wikipedia. I noticed the cool table sorting facility they have on the Wikipedia page, and wonder if that’s built in to MediaWiki..? It would be cool if it only required a class specification to have it work like that.

Python string formatting

I’m working through Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way, and I’m up to exercise 5. Doing the extra credit 3 involved searching online for Python format strings, and I found that there is the old way, which is presumably what Shaw wanted me to find, and also the new way in which a new scheme for string formatting is provided.

MediaWiki templates, revisited

After spending the afternoon investigating MediaWiki templates, I’ve decided that for the most part they are more trouble than they’re worth for any of my applications. I tried to create a ‘done’ template, that took username, user initials, date and ‘done note’ parameters, but really the code to call the template was just as long as not using the template, and the template broke when the ‘done note’ included a link that included an equals sign, which is just too shoddy. I’m giving up on templates until I find I actually have a use for them where the technology solves a problem that I actually have. At the moment that’s nothing.

MediaWiki templates

Today, after a long time, I am finally ready to learn about MediaWiki templates. After having put that off for weeks since I’d first heard of them, I found that it only took about five minutes to learn just about everything there is to know about them from the MediaWiki templates documentation. I think there are a few areas of the ProgClub wiki that could do with the use of templates, might go and see to that now.

Advice From An Old Programmer

Just recently I read Zed Shaw’s Advice From An Old Programmer, and in it he says:

I’ve been programming for a very long time. So long that it’s incredibly boring to me.

That’s been in the back of my mind for a few days, and something I’ve been thinking about as I hope for people to join ProgClub. It seems to me that the longer you program the less you are interested in programming. But, it takes time to be a good programmer, so the better you get, the less interested you become. ProgClub wants first and foremost people who are *interested* in programming, and secondly it wants people who are *good* at programming. Though it doesn’t seem like there are going to be that many good programmers out there who are going to have the time or the interest for ProgClub. Which means that ProgClub’s best bet is probably to encourage participation from enthusiastic beginners.