Get it All
Together

Just as I start this new blog, boom! There’s the latest WordPress release. It’s supposed to have a bunch of security holes patched along with a few other bugs fixed, but I haven’t had a chance to look at the update manifest yet. I’m hoping as always that they will fix the header errors when posting, but we shall see about that. Also, I get another header error when trying to delete draft posts, but I haven’t had a chance to look into that too deeply.

Over at the DFE development site, I’ve managed to make quite a bit of progress this week on the new site. It’s not looking like the site’s really going to be released before I leave for my honeymoon, but stranger things have happened. The big thing is: I finally have an RSS feed for the site not built by WP that actually validates. What a chore that was! In fact, there’s still a bit of griping from FeedValidator about illegal characters, but in truth, there is little I can do about that except moving forward with new articles.

Word to the wise, folks: MSWord might seem like a good option for writing your articles in, and indeed the spelling and grammar checks far surpass anything that’s available for web plugins, but freakin’ Microsoft has a habit of using odd characters that don’t fit into the UTF-8 character set. Those characters help make a Word document look more like a professionally printed paper document or book, so you can’t really blame MS for using them. At the same time, they don’t make it easy to get rid of them, either. There is an option to “Save as. . . ” a plain text document, but it is limited in it’s effectiveness.

So, I just need to make sure that any new articles I write from now on are saved as TXT files in UTF-8 encoding, and this problem will slowly disappear.

Other than that, the article viewer code is complete, the home page layout is complete and I only need to layout the sectional home pages and the RSS home page to complete the work. Come to think on it, I might actually be closer to done than I thought!