Elijah Grey

I just now upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7 (”Coltrane”) and the new admin interface is amazing! This turned out much better than when I tried to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 Beta 1. It’s really suprising that every one of my plugins still work too.

Firefox 3.1 beta 2 recently added support for the standard drag and drop model (also with some extra Mozilla-only ones). I had an idea to automatically add citation info to text dragged from websites to plain and rich text editors using this newly supported API. I named the finished script CiteDrag, which requires no setup other than adding a single script tag anywhere in your website’s page. CiteDrag displays a enlarged gray (with black shadow) copy of the text you are dragging as the drag image instead of the default text drag image generated by Firefox. CiteDrag is licensed CC GNU LGPL and free to download in two flavors: CiteDrag and CiteDrag + Drag Image. CiteDrag + Drag Image is all of the normal CiteDrag code with some additional code to give a fancy canvas-generated drag image that shows the text content being dragged. You can customize this for your website if you want to. CiteDrag is mostly useful for when someone blogs about another person’s blog post. Having the text automatically go into a cited blockquote and having a link back is very useful. I have installed CiteDrag on this blog and I have a demo of it and a rich text area you can use to test out CiteDrag fully.

Here are some examples of what it does when you drag various data types to various input areas: (Note wherever it says title, it will be replaced with the host name of the source page if there is no page title)

• Drag a link or image (or linked image) to a normal text input: { [link URI] or [image URI] } via {source title} ( {source URI} )
  • Example:  http://example.com/ via Foobar ( http://foo.bar/post/example.com-ftw/ )
• Drag a link or image (or linked image) to a rich text input: { [clickable link to link URI] or [image URI] or [clickable image linked to link URI] } via {clickable link to source page with title as text}
  • Example:  Example Web Page via Elijah Grey
• Drag formatted or non-formatted text to a normal text input: “{Text dragged}” ― {source title} ( {source URI} )
  • Example:  “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” ― Elijah Grey ( http://www.eligrey.com/ )
• Drag formatted or non-formatted text into a rich text input: The dragged text goes into a <blockquote cite=”{source URI}”> and after the blockquote is ― {clickable link to source page with title as text}
  • Example:
    

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

    ― Elijah Grey

Just a few minutes ago I backed up every bit of my blog and tried upgrading my WordPress version from 2.6.3 to 2.7 beta 1. I was lucky I did backup all of this blog. When I upgraded it, nothing changed and most of the wp-admin pages wouldn’t work anyways. The editor interface wasn’t updated (cleared gears cache and browser cache) and I saw no ajaxy goodness promised by the 2.7 beta 1 update. I have reverted back to 2.6.3 and will be waiting for the final non-beta release of 2.7 before I try again.

I just changed my WordPress theme to Elegant Grunge. The theme adds an “Elegant Grundge” submenu to the WordPress Design menu. In this menu, you can change the copyright message (I changed it to Attribution + Noncommercial (cc) 2008 Elijah Grey). It also has a setting to add tags to fhe header, which I added OpenID tags to associate my elijah.grey.name OpenID with this site. All of this could be done by editing the php files, but it just seems much cleaner though a settings menu.

The Wordpress theme which I have been using up until now as the default theme, BlackSplat, seems to break my site for Technorati. I always wondered why Technorati didn’t index my blog posts but after changing the theme and pinging Technorati, it seemed to be all better. I can’t find exactly what in the BlackSplat theme breaks the site for Technorati