intuitive engineering

I revise writing, a lot. I’ll revise after I’ve posted something, if it doesn’t ring quite right to the ear, rereading and tweaking a word here or there. Usually simplifying and deleting. I highly recommend William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well”…

Having used Microsoft Word for DOS 6.2 in ancient times, and watched my work disappear in the flick of a monitor, I also save my work, by reflex. A lot. This created a problem in WordPress 2.6. WordPress 2.6 by default keeps revisions. As many revisions as you click “Save” to keep your edits.

I saved a couple of versions of up-sell: if you pay us more, we can fix that…. I went back to open and edit it again a bit later. I got a 30 second timeout error from “wp-includes/diff.php?etc”, and the edit window for that post would no longer load. I’m pretty sure that is the script that works through the revisionings for the post in the process of bringing up the editing window.

I tested further — no other post had an issue. Just this one. Which makes sense. It is longer than most posts, it went through extensive re-writing and adding to, and the revisions must have been, well, there must have been a lot of them. Apparently enough to hit a WordPress or server limit, and cause a timeout.

I could still bring up the post on the weblog site itself. I did, and went to “View Page Source”. I copied the html and text from the page source, deleted the existing post entry, recreated it, pasting the page source back in, thus keeping blockquote tags and paragraphs and all the stuff I would prefer not to do all over again. [1] It also changed all of my punctuation to ASCII/html code like ’ (apostrophe) and “ (double-quote, open).

I re-published the post, edited the “Published” time to match when it originally was placed, made sure the permalink was identical to the original, and the problem was gone. For that post. The problem of revisions accumulating was still present.

There is (I love WordPress) already a Revision Control plugin. It allows you to limit the number of revisions WordPress 2.6.x will keep on hand. It was written by Dion Hulse, and it gives much more, well, revision control.

You can delete all of the previous versions – by individual post or page, so far, saving it with the revisions set to the disable – if you want revisions (I like to keep 4 back), save with the default revision setting (for me, 4) for the page. You cannot (yet) globally delete all revisions: “Disabling Post revisions on a post deletes all revisions for that post. However, Disabling globally does not delete current Revisions,” from Dion’s notes on the plugin. Too bad – that would have kept me from having to recreate that post I lost, possibly.

I would expect that WordPress will incorporate this into basic function. It’s too easy to end up with version after version after version, endlessly, without this kind of configuration being available at the admin panel.

— dsm

NOTE: visual editor in WordPress

I write in html tags. I don’t use the visual editor in WordPress. I found that it kept changing the internal structure of the html code and breaking things. It could not cope with placing a link in the title of a lightbox.js image, for example. I disable it for users, so it can’t mess with page or post structure, accidentally.

Embedding a link in the title for lightbox.js – granted, that’s not simple structure – you have to use &number; references to get the code to come through. The visual editor would completely break it by “interpeting” it better. The fckeditor plug-in was better – but it kept adding additional “fckeditor” tags trying to keep track of the nesting of the link in the title, so I deactivated it as a plugin and only use it in specific situations. But – that said – fckeditor did not break the nested html code required to embed a link in the title for a lightbox.js-displayed image.

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Tags: plugins, WordPress.