Chris Meller

I was playing with IETester, which lets you open Internet Explorer tabs using rendering engines from IE 5.5 up to IE 8 beta 1 for testing compatibility, and noticed for the first time that my blog was throwing a Javascript error only in IE.

Being the pain in the ass IE is, of course the line number it gives isn’t really valid. I looked and looked and couldn’t find the problem. As a last ditch effort, using the IE Developer Toolbar, I hit the menu option to validate the page. Thanks to the W3C Validator, I found that there were some duplicate ID attributes on elements.

After checking out the lines the validator referenced, I found that the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was improperly tearing apart href attributes for links created by the Footnotes plugin I use, causing it to include long strings of HTML in the onclick attribute for tracking outgoing links¹.

Thankfully, the Analytics plugin has an option to turn off outbound link tracking. I’ll miss those stats, but it’s not like I pay all that much attention to them (or care) anyway.

In the end, I don’t really have anything to test with IETester, it was just a fun toy for a few minutes. It also helped me notice a problem I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, so in the end it was time well spent.

1. Rather than just the link the user was headed for, as it should - and does for regular links. ↩

I had the opportunity to do some quick WordPress plugin hacking tonight¹ for Jim Whimpey. As a “payment” of sorts, he gave me a coupon code for the site he was working on: Panedia Desktop Wallpaper.

Being an Aussie company, obviously, most of their wallpapers are from Australia. Boy do they have some absolutely beautiful scenery down under. Check out the two I selected for my machines:

For my desktop, I got a huge 3200 x 1200 pixel version of Brisbane’s beautiful night skyline:

And for my MacBook Pro, I got a beautiful 1680 x 1050 pixel copy of the Robe Coastline:

Stunning wallpapers. Totally worth $25/year to constantly get new beautiful scenes in this kind of quality. I also love the interface that auto-picks the best format for your OS and resolution. Very well done.

1. I added an additional search option to the Search Everything plugin, enabling it to return all posts in a matching category. ↩

You’ve probably read it over on the Wordpress.com blog by now - they’ve taken a step up in password security by adding a meter that gauges the strength of a user’s password as they change it.

Well now you don’t have to use Wordpress.com to make sure your users are aware when their passwords stink - the Password Strength plugin provides the same functionality for stand-alone Wordpress 2.2+ blogs.

Password Strength is a stand-alone port of the Wordpress.com feature written by Donncha¹ and uses the same Password Strength Meter jQuery goodness, written by Phiras!

Download
Ready? Set. Goooooo! password_strength-1.0

Note that this plugin requires Wordpress 2.2, as it relies upon the bundled jQuery Javascript library.

1. Or is it that cat that does all the work? I never can tell… ↩

I was complaining about K2 in #wordpress earlier, when Shorty told me to try out the self-contained plugin that gives you the same functionality as K2 Modules.

I jumped at the idea, since anyone who’s ever used K2 Modules knows that they kick sooo much ass that Wordpress Widgets will never touch. A quick Google got me Nybble Labs’ Sidebar Modules. There are no instructions, so it was a bit of a gamble getting things working. Happily, I found that it wasn’t tough at all.

Sidebar Modules use the same hooks that the Automattic Widgets do, so there are no additional changes that need to be made to your theme for them to work. Just disable Automattic Widgets, enable Sidebar Modules, and you’re good to go. It even supports the custom widgets plugin I wrote for an enhanced search form. Now how cool is that?

Just one more plugin to add to the list of amazingly useful Wordpress addons!

Last night in #wordpress, someone asked for my URL, then reported that it didn’t work… I quickly verified that they were in fact correct. Trying to load my blog returned absolutely nothing. I was med’d up, so I really didn’t care at that point. This morning, however, I took a closer look at what was going on.

Looks like the Clutter-Free plugin went a little overboard. While trying to login, I got notifications about headers already being sent by the Clutter-Free plugin. After deleting the plugin (thereby deactivating it), it looks like everything’s working perfectly.

I’m going to assume something besides the mentioned DIV ID’s in the admin panel changes from 2.0.4 to 2.0.5, but somehow I don’t think anything that major would change in a simple bug-fix release. In any case, be on the lookout for weird behavior if you give Clutter-Free a try…