Dexter: Up and running

By Shamus Posted Saturday Nov 3, 2007

Filed under: Notices 16 comments

So Dexter, the latest version of WordPress, is up and running here on Twenty Sided. I managed to break the site for an hour or so this morning but I think I have it all ironed out now. Let me know if you see anything screwy. I’ve also modified the CSS so that when people post huge URLs in the comments it won’t break the formatting. This is only tested in IE and Firefox. If the right side of comments are getting chopped off, please let me know.

I got a decent start on tagging some of my old posts. I worked my way backwards through the videogame archives, adding tags. I have noticed some things about this process:

1. It is very easy.
2. It makes the site more useful, even for me.
3. It is a gigantic task that would take forever.

That last item worries me a little. I’ll try to do it in bite-sized bits. Ideally, I’d like to have all of the videogame and anime posts tagged at some point. In any case, at least I won’t be adding any more un-tagged stuff to the site.

EDIT: DEV NULL Below points out there aren’t any tags visible. I guess I should have mentioned that. Tags should appear at the end of posts… but only for ones where I’vbe manually added tags. The most recent posts in videogames are mostly tagged. All other posts are withouttags at the moment.

LATER: Thanks to those who pointed out that wordpress is puking SQL errors all over the DMotR entries. Turns out that Dexter has a totally different way of sorting posts into categories. The First / Last navigation links need to query SQL to find the first and last posts in a given category. This would be easy if the category was stored with the post data in the same table but instead this information is in another table. Sigh. It was already a crazy process to find out this simple bit of information, requiring an INNER JOIN and some other hocus-pocus that goes beyond my limited SQL-fu. I couldn’t even understand the new system, much less figure out how to query it.

About an hour in I realized I was re-inventing the wheel for nothing: DMotR is done. I don’t need fancy queries or anything else. The first post is #612 and the closing credits are #1306. I just hard-coded them to always point to these posts and called it a day. The downside is that if I ever added a comic the navigation links would ignore it, but I don’t think it’s worth the hassle right now.

Okay, problem “solved”.

 


From The Archives:
 

16 thoughts on “Dexter: Up and running

  1. Dev Null says:

    Hey, I’ve got no problems with exposing my ignorance in public: how do we _see_ the tags?

  2. James says:

    Nothing appears chopped off to me… good luck getting everything tagged though Shamus.

  3. SteveDJ says:

    It seems that the DMotR pages now all sport a lovely “WordPress Database Error” at the top of the page — actually, two such errors are there. I’m using IE6 on WinXP.

  4. Katy says:

    Just a little suggestion… It’s odd that the title has “Twenty-Sided” written twice. If you’d like to go for something in between each letter, try dots or dice or a graphic of some sort. The smaller letters are actually a little distracting. f^_^;;

  5. SteveDJ says:

    Actually, I’m guessing that you aren’t getting the error — so I’ll paste the text of one of them here:

    WordPress database error: [Table ‘shamusyo_dnd.wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist]
    SELECT ID,post_title FROM wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_post2cat ON wp_posts.ID= wp_post2cat.post_id AND (category_id = 14) WHERE post_date < ‘2006-09-18 11:03:40’ AND post_date < ‘2007-11-03 12:16:02’ AND post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER BY post_date ASC LIMIT 1

    The other error looks similar, but has DESC near the end.

  6. Stubby says:

    Am getting the same error as SteveDJ on the DMotR pages (using IE and Firefox:

    WordPress database error: [Table ‘shamusyo_dnd.wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist]
    SELECT ID,post_title FROM wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_post2cat ON wp_posts.ID= wp_post2cat.post_id AND (category_id = 14) WHERE post_date < ‘2006-10-18 11:03:33’ AND post_date ‘2006-10-18 11:03:33’ AND post_date < ‘2007-11-03 12:04:47’ AND post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 1

  7. Katy says:

    Maybe like this? It’s only a suggestion, of course! It’s your site.

    http://www.rubyduvall.com/misc/twentysided-revised.gif

  8. agreed, I think the best route is to use tags for specific topics (individual anime and games by name) and cats for the broad categories (anime, games). unfortunately not everything falls so cleanly into one holon or the other of the hierarchy. I think that it takes more time to decide on a post by post basis just what that post should be tagged/catted than it does to actually tag/cat it!

  9. Davesnot says:

    I’m guessing that right now Shamus is smashing a keyboard over some silly database error that shouldn’t be popping up.. but is.. .. and he’s probably wondering why the .. um.. heck.. why the heck he dicided to mess with it in the first place.. Then again.. he did say he was bored the other day… nothin’ like asking for trouble.

    I’m sure he’s very pleased that Katy has stepped in with the graphical assistance.

    In all seriousness.. Thanks for all your work Shamus!

  10. Phlux says:

    Yay tags!

  11. Mari says:

    The tags that are there look good, Shamus. I know this is a huge undertaking but if you break it down into smaller goals like doing, say, ten posts per day it should be a lot less daunting. Not saying you need to do that many. Or that few. Whatever works for you. I was just pulling a random number out of the hat.

    BTW, I have to say that I so love the dice. I sit here typing and looking at those shiny dice and it makes me warm and fuzzy inside.

  12. Davesnot says:

    Say.. that’s a good idea Mari.. fuzzy d20s!!!

  13. shadyz says:

    i thought it’s dzo?
    woah..retagging is a lot of work..
    mine needs too but i’m too lazy

  14. Viktor says:

    Just the way I’ve seen it done at other webcomic sites, they upload the latest comic twice, once to the next page numerically, and once to a page with the adddress as “latest” instead of a number. Then the “last comic” hyperlinks point to the “latest” page, and they just replace the comic on the “latest” page each week/day/blue moon. Just in case you ever decide to start DMotR up again.

    Also, the anti-spam word still looks like “dz0” to me. Just throwing that out there.

  15. Andre (xero) says:

    Inappropriate ad alert: Shamus, I’m seeing an ad right now for Michelle Malkin, “America’s most influential conservative blogger”. The domain is http://www.michellemalkin.com

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