Archive for May, 2008
Why does this release of Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts and Recent Comments get a clean new number instead of being called a beta? I guess it’s arbitrary! I can’t stop tinkering so in a sense the plugins are perpetually in beta but on the other hand bug reports are drying up (apart from the ones I keep introducing!).
I want to concentrate some more on Similar Posts for a while and try out some ideas that have emerged from reading on the subject. It is a challenge to find good matching algorithms that can be made speedy enough in PHP and not too demanding in memory usage. A few months ago I had a great system running but had to drop it when I moved from my local development server to my live hosted server which immediately froze from lack of memory.
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May 16th, 2008
Edel McClean offers these reflections:
Readings: James 1:1-11, Psalm 118, Mark 8:11-13
The liturgical title for today is Monday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time. A quick look at ordinary in the dictionary tells us ‘unexceptional, plain, uninteresting’. It seems a little like what the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of in our gospel today. They seem to think he’s a little too ordinary and they come demanding a sign. Prove to us that you’re exceptional. Give us something remarkable. Do something out of the ordinary. And then we’ll believe you.
Of course, what the Pharisees were getting was anything but ordinary. They were getting a sign. They had Jesus. Standing slap bang in front of them. Not just any old preacher, but, if we follow Mark’s gospel, a man who had just healed a young child, made a deaf man hear, and fed four thousand people. And still the Pharisees say, we want more. They’re unable to see the sign right there in front of them.
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May 12th, 2008
Similar Posts v.2.5b28 has just been posted.
Working on Similar Posts I have learned more than I care to know about the vagaries of MySQL, PHP, and Unicode. One particular issue that has so far resisted my attempts has been the satisfactory handling of content in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese (CJK).
Similar Posts uses the full-text indexes provided by MySQL to compare one post with another and the MySQL index is word-based. The CJK languages (I am told) are not based on discrete words — at least not words delimited by ‘white space’ — so they pose a big problem to full-text indexing.
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May 11th, 2008
Since bug reports for the post plugins have dwindled to a slow drip I thought I ought to make some substantial changes in the latest version (2.5b25) and get the flow going again…
In previous versions the {image} tag did its resizing just by changing the <img> tag’s width and height attributes. Now, in addition, it serves properly resized thumbnails.
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May 7th, 2008