Extra Pepperoni

I’ve been reading The Register for years. The biggest draw for me is that their idea of what’s interesting matches my own pretty closely, so the relevance is very high, and I don’t know any other sites/publications that provide timely coverage in roughly the same space.

Unfortunately, they’re clowns. They obviously don’t edit, and don’t fix obvious mistakes when pointed out. For a while they had opposing columnists, one claiming Intel was crushing AMD and another claiming AMD was crushing Intel — posting supposedly authoritative articles on the same days. My interpretation was that The Register doesn’t care whether they print stuff that’s flat wrong (obviously at least one of those columnists was, even if they were both personally convinced it was the other guy), so long as it draws traffic. This is one thing if labeled as editorial, but they’re not that sophisticated.

Their articles are confused or simply wrong often enough that a couple friends refuse to read anything they publish. I prefer the current facts enough that I am willing to overlook the absurd editorial.

They use FeedBurner, and downloading their articles over EDGE on the iPhone is slow. To aggravate matters, their CSS is screwed up; I have to wait for the page to download, then it resizes, then it pauses and downloads some more, then it reflows. It can take over a minute to get a readable article. The AV Club is even slower to download and reflow, which is one reason I read it less.

But recently The Register has started doing full-page ads before the articles. This is aggravating on a desktop, but completely unacceptable on an iPhone. I’ve removed their feed from NetNewsWire/NewsGator.

Half because WordPress really needs to stay upgraded, and half in hopes of fixing the Admin-SSL bug which was blocking posting, I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, a compatible beta of Admin-SSL (now under new management), and a few other plug-ins.

Not knowing how well the upgrade would go, I did the safe thing — I installed WP 2.5 separately from the live Extra Pepperoni site, installed and configured all the plugins I use (with my personal patches), created a new MySQL database, and configured everything, including a couple test comments (not as myself). After I got it working, I brought down the old site, moved the new one in place, reconnected it to the old MySQL DB (with all posts and comments), clicked the button to upgrade, and we’re up.

Unfortunately, there’s still a problem with comments. When I log into a new account to comment, I get a link to https://secure.reppep.com/wp-admin/profile.php, which is bogus; it needs to be https://secure.reppep.com/ep/wp-admin/profile.php. If you have an existing account (Tony), you might be able to login through https://secure.reppep.com/ep/wp-admin/ and comment, but it seems that viewing an actual post (which must be non-SSL) still loses its association with the login session, so you can visit the HTTP site as an anonymous user, or use the HTTPS site as your registered user, but the plaintext side has no access to comment, and the encrypted side doesn’t show the posts you would want to comment on. Hopefully BCG will be able to fix the problem in Admin-SSL. He’s already fixed the Preview function.

Also freaky: When I log into EP as a brand-new user (to comment), I get the Dashboard, telling me I (the brand-new user) have 184 posts. I didn’t think Subscriber users saw the Dashboard, but the post count is definitely bogus.

I did the initial installation as a Subversion checkout, which is very cool. Now, though, I have to create my own private WP hacks repos (easy), and figure out how to set up externals to pick up my additions.

A tip: Don’t try to check out the WordPress source over AFP; the permissions weren’t right, and the checkout couldn’t complete; when I did it locally on the Linux server, there was no problem. I hadn’t even noticed I was running “svn co” on the Mac instead of the server, but it was easy to fix once I noticed the cause.

I found a couple pages of Outlook keyboard shortcuts (the online help lists shortcuts too):

• http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/80-keyboard-shortcuts-for-microsoft-outlook/
• http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/PublicWebsite/public_rnib003594.hcsp

Many of these are standard Windows shortcuts, but a few are useful and news to me.

Eudora stopped working on my home MBP recently, so I’m back to Thunderbird, and it strikes me how similar Thunderbird is to Outlook, even extending to some misfeatures (design flaws, not quite bugs), such as over-using the Esc key. Compared to Eudora, pine, and Apple Mail, Thunderbird is clearly much closer to Outlook. A few things are notable improvements, such as being able to mark messages Read and Unread with the M key, instead of Ctl-Q/Ctl-U, or S to flag messages (stored as an IMAP tag; this shows up in Eudora as Label 15). And with a mailbox selected, Ctl-Q doesn’t mark all its unread messages read, which it should.

In both Outlook and Thunderbird, Esc closes message windows; this is inconsistent with all other full windows, which are closed with Command-W, and makes messages feel particularly ephemeral. In Outlook, when I open a received message and hit the Space bar to scroll to the next page (which works in every other email client and browser I know), it instead inserts spaces at the beginning of the received message, which if course is not what I want.

I cannot find a good way to sort threads by date; I’d like every thread (perhaps every thread with new messages) grouped together, with the messages in each thread sorted internally by date, and the threads sorted by date (typically of the first message). In Outlook I can group “Conversations” by Subject: or group by From: line, but new messages keep showing up at the top of the mailbox, instead of the bottom (where they should sort, by date).

I have figured out more what’s wrong with Refresh. First, I have to hit F5 repeatedly to make Outlook clear more and more read messages from unread-only views; second, collapsed conversations are not cleared; I have to expand them out and then hit F5 again. This is particularly annoying because Outlook has such a strong tendency to always keep one message selected and thus read (although it’s not marked read, so I cannot simply mark it unread; I have to mark it read, then mark it unread, and then make sure Outlook doesn’t preview it again), so it’s quite difficult to reorganize a mailbox and get to a “clean” view (only new messages/threads) without losing some messages which Outlook insisted on selecting/previewing/marking read while rearranging.

And a little attention (not “love”) for IE: I still hit Ctl-L to select the URL for copying, and IE7 still fails to do it, bringing up a blank URL entry dialog, instead of selecting the URL in the current window as Safari & Firefox do. I shouldn’t need the mouse to copy the current URL.