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.

some time ago, i wrote a small plugin which logs the most recent user activity (for users having an account) and presents them sorted by their last access to the admins. the plugin only stores timestamps, and refrains from doing so while the user is in the admin area. users not logged in are ignored.
i’ve now polished it up, i.e. made the output a bit more fancy. in case someone else is interested in this as well, i decided to put it online. you can download it here if you are interested. to install it, just extract the zip archive into your wordpress plugin directory.
be warned: i don’t take any responsibility for the use of this plugin. do with it whatever you want. if it breaks your system, that’s your problem. especially if you have many user accounts, make sure you understand what the plugin is doing before trying it out.

this is the end of my project, the my favorite music video series. this series contained 35 videos from various bands in various genres. i hope you enjoyed it! and maybe even found something you like which you didn’t knew before!
anyway. feel free to post a short list of videos / tunes you liked most of these, and which surprised you most :)

as you might or might not have noticed, my project blackness moved to a new address and now requires to log on before showing anything. (the rss feed is still available without logging on, though.) the main reason for this is the german jugendmedienschutz-staatsvertrag; i do not want to risk any problems due to people interpreting things the wrong way. a new revision of that thing cased a lot of protest and shutdown of blogs; see for example here and here.
it is still not exactly clear what kind of implications this new revision will have. i still decided to move blackness, since i don’t want to endanger it in any way. in case you still want to see it, ask me for an account.

while watching a video on youtube, i got an idea for a new project. from now on, every day until (at least) december 24th, i will put a music video in my blog at 18:00. i went through the list of bands of whose i own music, and tried to choose one video per band which i really like, which has good quality (if possible) and which is available on youtube. not for every band i could find something, and for very, very few bands, i choose two videos.
sadly, most bands don’t have good videos of the songs i like most, so sometimes having no video for a band just means that i didn’t found anything i both like and which is an acceptable video :-)
well, i hope you enjoy it, or at least parts of it. i’ll add links to lyrics as well as a few comments, which in particular indicate what kind of song this is (i.e. if you want to listen to this if you don’t like strange music as i do).

i stumbled over a wordpress bug making my xhtml invalid. in fact, i noticed i stumbled about it the second time. i think the first time was when i installed wordpress 3.0, and the second time after upgrading to 3.0.1. the problem is, that shortcodes which appear in single lines should not be enclosed with <p>…</p> according to the manual. but my wordpress installation is doing exactly that what is claimed to be fixed for some time.
i started digging a bit, and quickly noticed that i already fixed it. since it seems to be a persistent problem i want to document it, just in case i have it again. internally, wordpress first runs the function wpautop on the content, which adds <p>…</p>, and then runs shortcode_unautop to remove <p>…</p> around shortcodes standing in a single line. (in previous wordpress versions, both was done in wpautop if i recall correctly.) now the problem is, that my wordpress installation calls these two functions in the wrong order. so shortcode_unautop is called first, finds nothing to remove, and then wpautop is called, which adds the faulty <p>…</p> code.
an easy fix is to change wp-include/default-filters.php by changing all lines add_filter(‘whatever‘, ‘shortcode_unautop’); to add_filter(‘whatever‘, ‘shortcode_unautop’, 11);. after that, everything is fine. i wonder whether this happens on every installation or just on some.
now that i fixed this a second time, i wanted to find out in more detail what’s going on. after some digging, i found out that the cause is a plugin i use: wp_unformatted. it removes wpautop from the filter list and adds it again later, hence moving it after shortcode_unautop if both have the same default priority. well, so the right thing is to fix that plugin.
in case you want to know how to fix that plugin, proceed as follows:

1. change the line in wp_sponge from return wpautop($pee); to return shortcode_unautop(wpautop($pee));;
2. add remove_filter(‘the_content’, ‘shortcode_unautop’); after remove_filter(‘the_content’, ‘wpautop’);.

as once announced, i worked on spielwiese‘s gallery system. it is now featured by a c++ backend which generates the galleries as well as the thumbnails (if they aren’t already there), both in grayscale and color! so far, the galleries are shown as before (with some exceptions, mostly in the beginning of the blog though), but on every page you can find a clickable text in the footer, on the very bottom of the page, called “change colors!”: this toggles the thumbnails between grayscale and colors! unfortunately, this currently does not remembers the value (by setting a cookie), so if you reload the page everything will be grayscale again. but the most important part, namely the backend, is there! and maybe it will remember the state before the end of this day :)

i programmed a bit to create a mechanism which feeds the photos to the user without giving direct access to the files; now, all photos are stored outside the range of the web server, and retrieved by a php script. this brings me one step closer to my goal of making parts of this blog really private. before, photos appearing in hidden posts were somewhat public in case you knew their url. now, you can only access these photos if you are logged in and have the rights to see the corresponding post. the current authentication solution is kind of a hack, but it works. if you just use the blog, you will note no difference – except that photos in old posts which your feed reader did not update are broken. i’m sorry for that. google reader, for instance, should update at least the more current posts sooner or later.

inspired by a similar activity my girlfriend is doing, i started to create a layout for my homepage. this time, it is less minimalistic from a design point of view, and this time, it features more white than black. i’m not completely satisfied with the header, but i didn’t found a photo in my collection allowing me to make it as i really wanted it.

as you may have noticed, i use wikipedia a lot – both for linking to descriptions of terms i use in this blog, and for looking up stuff myself which i encounter somewhere, may it be offline or online. usually, chances are good that wikipedia offers at least some kind of description which answers my questions, or at least helps me getting an idea. but from time to time, it happens that you try to look something up on wikipedia, only to find out that such an article existed but was deleted – for example, because it was “not relevant”. i can understand that people do not want to see wikipedia flooded by biographies of john doe and jane roe – only a handful people are interested in these, probably most notably john doe and jane roe themselves.
but there are cases where i simply can’t understand the decision. for example, there is the chilenian doom metal band mar de grises, which i discovered by chance in zurich’s now deceased knochenhaus. according to the wikipedia deletion log, it is “not noteable” and failes some guidelines. so, who decides what is noteable and what is not? and, after all, the simplified ruleset explicitly mentiones

ignore all rules – rules on wikipedia are not fixed in stone. the spirit of the rule trumps the letter of the rule. the common purpose of building an encyclopedia trumps both.

i can pretty well understand that not every small band hobby band project should be mentioned – in particular the ones which sound bad and dissolve quickly with none or almost no productions. but that’s not the case for mar de grises. besides that, the deletion log also mentiones other problems with the article (namely, being badly written and failling to provide references for some claims), but why not throw these parts out or reduce the article to a stub?
two other examples, this time from the german wikipedia, are sinnlos im weltraum and lord of the weed, two fandubs. according to the english wikipedia, sinnlos im weltraum (a redub of a star trek series), dating back to 1994, is one of the first such projects, essentially starting the whole genre of fandubs. i don’t know how many people know it, probably a huge number. lord of the weed (a redub of the beginning of 2001′s lord of the rings) is also rather well-known; i don’t remember how often i saw it – at least ten times. well, it is obviously true that these movies haven’t been shown in movie theaters or on television – as they contain copyrighted material (i.e. the original movie), used without permission. for the same reason, they haven’t been shown on film festivals, you can’t buy them on dvd. they are also not listed on the imdb. but – so what? does that make them not noteable? irrelevant?
on the other hand, a lot of totally trashy movies – which, compared to sinnlos im weltraum and lord of the weed, are really crappy and lame – are featured on media, two good examples are a music video by grup tekkan and the infamous star wars kid, making a fool out of himself. these are pushed by media as “youtube movies you have to see” or are even shown on tv. and they can be found on wikipedia. even though they are real crap. in the case of star wars kid, the really embarrassing movie was uploaded by “friends” of its actor and will probably haunt him for a very long time. to make this even better, a lot of online versions of famous newspapers or magazines feature this video as well, showing it to an even wider audience. and i thought the use of a pillories are outlawed in modern countries.
anyway. i’m still using wikipedia, even though of these reasons. and i even created an account at the english wikipedia and started writing an article about infrastructures (number theory). as so far, nobody else dared to write something on this subject, and a google search only gives documents featuring other kinds of infrastructures, or scientific articles about this subject, i thought it would be time to add something to the web. i’ve started a series of posts on my math blog on infrastructures, but as google usually ranks wikipedia articles higher, i decided to also add something to wikipedia. so far, it is more a stub and far from being a complete article, but at least provides some information and several references to literature.