I love tools

Yesterday was an interesting day, gentle reader.

First, thank you to everyone who clicked through to Jack Bog’s Blog for Buck-A-Hit Day. $9,920 was raised for very deserving local groups. Thank you, thank you!

It was also interesting because it was the day that I decided, rather early in the morning, to upgrade to WordPress 2.7. I’d been playing around with 2.7 on my local computer, and everything looked OK. But, when I moved it up to the web server where y’all can see it… it was not a happy experience. 😳

I’m really sorry to anyone using IE who started getting can’t load this site messages. I know it was awhile before I noticed. There were some things not playing well together. I got out all of the tools at my disposal and fixed it as fast as I could.

You might have also noticed a few things coming and going, appearing and disappearing. That was caused by the need to upgrade a few plugins that I thought were OK. It should all be back in place now.

I think it’s done. If you find anything that’s broken, please let me know.

I love yarn, too

Because of all of that, I think it’s time for a contest. I haven’t had one for a really long time, and I’ve been meaning to. And now it’s the holidays and I’m snowed in and all. So it’s time.

I have three skeins of yarn to give away, so that means I will have three lucky winners.

Left-to-right, Zen Yarn Garden Bamboolicious in Creamsicle; Blue Moon Socks That Rock Medium in Calico; Schaefer Anne in Toni Morrison.

I’d forgotten all about that Calico when I was searching for yarn to make fingerless gloves from. My forgetfulness will be your gain!

Here’s the contest: the first picture in this post is a bunch of tools. Name all of them – every single one – in the comments. I will draw from amongst those who name all of them to select the winner. If nobody names all, I will draw from those who have the most correct. Be sure to click on the picture to see the biggie size.

The rules: Tell me how many tools there are and name them. You can’t say something like a collection of widgets of varying sizes. You may say 9 widgets of various sizes.

All of the tools are in plain sight – none are hidden. There’s one there that may be obscure. But why should I make this too easy?

Contest will close Sunday night at midnight Pacific Time. Decision of the judge (that would be this intrepid reporter) are final. Blah, blah, blah.

Have fun!

The title of this post reminds me that I still have a pair of socks that needs darning: the Rooster Feather Socks. I managed to blow out the heel on one of them. But I think I have some of that yarn left somewhere, so they won’t end up like the poor Snake River Socks with non-matching patches on the bottoms.

The socks I am working on now – toe-up Monkeys in the Knitters Without Borders colorway – have heels reinforced on the bottom. I can be taught, although I need to be whacked with a 2×4 for it to take it sometimes takes multiple repetitions.

I’ve been sick most of this week, but mending there as well now. Enforced inactivity has afforded some knitting time but, alas, no bloggage or photography or inventions. The garden is coming alive, though, and we’ve actually had a day of hot weather. We are promised another day or two of sun before the rot sets in again. I will snap some knitting and garden shots. My wisteria is really lovely this spring.

For today, I can only offer you this link, shamelessly stolen from Sam Klein at The ZehnKatzen Times: The 50 Worst Album Covers, as determined by Newsday. Some of these are so incredibly bad that they really defy description and it’s hard to believe they were ever published. (Some may be are offensive. You have been warned.) You can vote for your fav. I got a good chuckle out of the cover showing the sneering sleazeoid who looks like he’s about to deliver some particularly bad pick-up line. The title: Can I Borrow A Feeling.

This post is just for WordPress users who have found this blog by following a link from a more, shall we say, technically themed blog, and have been surprised (and even dismayed) to find a WP hack in amongst a discussion about stuff like hand-knit socks and yarn. This is a knitting blog. That’s what I talk about, more or less. But sometimes other things creep in. WordPress, for example. You can get the link to the hack here, without having to search through knitting stuff.

Although there is much to like about WP 2.5, the write panels suck. A great deal of scrolling up and down is required, disrupting the once smooth workflow. The width of the write area is limited, even on wide-screen monitors. The notification of pending posts and drafts has been removed. Usability is way, way down.

So I took matters into my own hands and fixed what I thought were the most egregious faults.

You can see a picture of the new panel here. If you are a self-hosted WP 2.5 user and would like to incorporate these changes, you can download them here. The files all go in /wp-admin/, except for global.css, which goes in /wp-admin/css/. Back up your files first. Use at your own risk. No implied warranty. Etc.

A ticket was opened in Trac requesting that this be made an enhancement in a future WP release. The ticket has been closed by TPTB as not being valid.

An idea has been posted in the WP Ideas Forum. Please go over and vote for it. This is the only way that we will get the developers to fix the write panel workflow. You will have to register in order to vote, but it’s easy and painless and you need not give away any personal information. Your email is used only to send your password.

Sorry, I can’t help you directly if you are on WordPress.com. But you can still go over and vote for the idea. Whatever changes are in the next release will impact you as much as me.

Yes, I know that’s bad grammar, but we seem to be stuck with it culturally. Don’t you ever wonder who the person is who recorded that little sound bite for AOL, and why they couldn’t say you have mail? But I digress.

Sometimes (usually) I’ve got mail, and sometimes I don’t.

Last Friday my mail was moved from one server to another. Although I’ve been promised that no mail would ever, ever, ever be lost… well… I don’t have a lot of confidence since the last time such a move occurred mail was lost.

So, if you sent me any email last Friday or after and have not heard back from me, please resend. I would hate to think that anyone would feel ignored.

I also pulled the plug on something that I think was causing the blog to load slowly. Hopefully it will be peppier now.

The 20,000th visit to PI occurred this morning. Someone from right here in Portland popped in for an early-morning look-see.

I know… I’m easily amused.

It’s always amusing to see what googlizing brings visitors to PI. Usually they’re looking for vaguely fiberish writing combined with whatever, and hopefully they find it here. But sometimes I have no clue what they’re looking for.

Jack Bog and I share the top 10 on this search, for example.

I don’t think that either of us have exactly what this person was seeking. It’s hard to tell, though.