as you might have noticed, musikwiese has its categories displayed as a tree. i did this using the wp-dtree plugin. this is pretty nice, and i thought that i might also be able to use it for spielwiese‘s archives list – after all, that list contains like 40 entries. so it would be nice to have a tree with the years as top-level nodes, which can be expanded to get a list of months. unfortunately, wp-dtree doesn’t do this. so i started programming myself, creating a small plugin which outputs the code wp-dtree should create to display such an archive. and, it seems to work fine! i also included a noscript fallback for people with disabled javascript; in that case, the “classical” archives will be displayed.
if you are interested in my plugin, ask me, and i will send it to you or maybe also upload it somewhere here.

arctica convinced me to take part in project 52 (and anmut also tried to convince me to do something like this, to give proper credit :-) ). every week, a topic will be released and everyone participating is supposed to shoot a photo with respect to this topic. the first topic is “snapshop”. expect something the next days…

when mary asked for more at the end of the music video series, i spent some time thinking about how to continue this. eventually, i got an idea: create another blog, the musikwiese. (isn’t it a perfect name for this?)

the aim of the musikwiese is to present another artist every few days. the beginnings were made with lacuna coil and capricorns, and my todo list features 89 more bands. this will be a rather long term project, and the todo list will probably not only shrink during that time.

this project is also not necessarily a one man project for all its lifetime. if someone is interested in contributing something, please contact me.

anyway, i hope you enjoy the musikwiese! :-)

today i had to shuffle the lines of a text file. the last time i tried to do this in the bash i only found the hint to use sort -R. this actually produced the somehow strange order of the music video series. today i found out that there’s another way to do this, namely by using the command shuf. it works the same way as sort. i just wanted to write this down so i won’t forget :-)

some people like me have the problem of having several wordpress installations at the same time; people like me and some others i know. i have one wordpress running for this blog, one for my math blog, one for a hidden, password protected project which might or might not ever see the light of the world, and anther one for another music related project showing up soon.
whenever a new wordpress version comes out, a question bugs me: how to update all of these installations without doing it manually for every one? of course, there’s the automatic update, but i don’t really trust it. and i don’t have an ftp server installed, so i’m not sure if it would work at all. so i need another solution.
a first idea was to use symbolic links. have one wordpress installation in a directory outside the web tree, and link these files into all wordpress directories in the web tree, so for updating i only need to change one directory, and i only have to touch the others when the configuration file has to be changed.
unfortunately, this doesn’t work, thanks to php and wordpress. wordpress determines the path to the config file by the path names of the files, and since the files are symbolic links, the paths of the files pointed to are used. but in that directory, no config file is available, and wordpress fails. too bad.
now i got another idea. namely, have a wordpress directory outside the web tree, and put it into subversion. then, in all other wordpress directories, drop in the files using subversion, except the configuration file, uploads, latex caches, etc. so to update an installation, i have to go into its directory and type svn up. that’s it. there’s one thing left to do: namely hide the .svn directories from the web server. i didn’t found the perfect method yet, but adding this to the apache configuration makes them forbidden:

<DirectoryMatch “^/.*/\.svn/”>
  Order deny,allow
  Deny from all
</DirectoryMatch>

then every access to something in an .svn directory results in an access denied error:

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /.svn/ on this server.

a happy new year to all of you!