The Realm of MasterPi

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, Google Docs now has a large directory of templates for Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. I think this is an excellent idea for them because it gives non-technical users who aren’t otherwise interested in using an online office suite an incentive to do so. They’ve also opened it up so that others can contribute, which means free content for them, and a level of sharing templates that hasn’t quite been achieved yet by any office suite. They’ve already taken advantage of it’s ease-of-use to partner with Avery and have mailing label templates available in the directory.

I think Spreadsheets template directory holds a lot of promise for great innovations, since you can include a lot of functionality in a spreadsheet, especially with the extensibility Google has already provided it’s spreadsheets.

I do wonder about one thing about though: The documents directory contains a lot of résumé templates; would Google be impressed if you applied to them with one of their own templates? They promote them quite elegantly in the descriptions, and they are certainly very attractive résumés, but sometimes just using a template can come off as lazy. Not to mention that if everyone uses them, they lose any quality they had of being eye-catching and memorable.

Well, it turns out that the problem with OpenID was mainly a buggy math library. Apparently the GMP module is not compiled correctly on my BlueHost server, which causes signatures to be calculated incorrectly by the PHP OpenID library, resulting in a ‘Bad signature’ error code. If you have similar problems, try switching on the constant Auth_OpenID_Buggy_GMP like so in (wordpress root)/wp-config.php:

After you do that, make sure there are no entries left in the table (prefix)_openid_associations. I think rebuilding the tables from the preferences page might do this, but if that doesn’t work you’ll have to do what I did and remove it from the table by hand.

Once I had that fixed, I had to update the interface for adding OpenIDs to accounts, I guess because of an incompatibility with WordPress 2.6. It seems what was happening was that the hook function for the return wasn’t getting called because it wasn’t being redirected back to the plugin page. To fix it I had to change the $return_to parameter passed to start_login to point back to the plugin page’s address. I then had to modify start_login to check for a “?” in the URL and pick “?” or “&” appropriately for appending the action parameter. (The ternary operator is a beautiful thing in PHP).

I’m not sure if this change will create a problem when adding more than one URL at once, because the form is set to call the URL it’s retrieved from, which includes all of the OpenID information. I’m fairly sure it won’t because the handler for that form uses POST data, so it shouldn’t be bothered by the GET data in the URL.

If anyone else is having similar problems with the plugin and my explanations aren’t adequate, please comment and I’ll see what I can do to help. Another thing to try is downloading the most current version of the PHP OpenID library (2.x.x) and copying the Auth directory into the plugin’s root directory.

Now, on to my next task: comment threading.

I’ve finally got the admin side almost to my liking.  See the “Red & Black Admin” page for more info.

I think I’ve got everything appropriately colored except TinyMCE.  I found plugins for using OpenID but they seem to be broken at the moment.  So I guess my next goal will be to get those working again, then I can move on to implementing some privacy settings.  I couldn’t find any plugins to have selective privacy similar LiveJournal.  If I have to implement it myself (as I was attempting to do in my last installation of WordPress) I see three ways of designing it:

1. Use the Categories system
2. Use the Tag System
3. Add an extension to the post editing page for visibility

It might be easier to implement 1 or 2, but it wouldn’t be as flexible.  I’m not sure what the difference between tags and categories is supposed to be yet, and that might be the determining factor in which one of those two I would use.  I’m pretty sure tags weren’t around yet in the last version of WordPress I used, or if they were they were very primitive.  If I were to use tags it would be very LiveJournal-esque, most of my LJ-using friends use tags to manage permissions on their posts.  Using tags or categories would make it easy to have predefined groups of people set up, without much coding on my part.

I think the ideal interface that I’d like, however, would be a separate option on the post page (3) that has configurable groups with a Select/Deselect All.  It’d be really nice if I could integrate it with OpenID and the Links/Blogroll section so that I could pick from the LiveJournal users already in my links when setting it up.  The other thing that I’m concerned about which makes me consider this is if users can see that tags exist which they cannot view.  If I’m going to make something private, I want it to be completely invisible to those who cannot see it.

Once I get privacy settings working, then I can work on cross-posting to LiveJournal, Facebook, and possibly Xanga.  There is a plugin for LiveJournal cross-posting, but I’ll have to get it to work with my privacy settings.  The other two I’ll just have public posts cross-posted.  Facebook is easy to cross-post, I just have to import the RSS feed.  I’ll probably do that soon.

Hopefully once I get all this set up, I will still be interested enough to actually blog.  This kind of happened on my last install, though I didn’t actually get privacy settings working well so I think if I actually get them working this time I will feel more comfortable posting and make it more of a habit.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.6; it may be a little while before everything is working again.

It goes well with my RMS w/Katanas background on my laptop

Gotta show this off ’cause it looks soo cool.

Yeah, I’m bored.