OK, go!

Finally got around to set up the Eng­lish ver­sion of my blog. It shan’t be exact copy of the Rus­sian ver­sion, but most of my posts would be repub­lished here. Moreover, I’ll trans­late not­able back­dated posts.

In the year since I set up Word­Press on my site, some pos­it­ive devel­op­ment occured both in the core soft­ware and plug-ins. Firstly, WP now (com­par­ing ver­sions 2.1 I had then and 2.3.2) prop­erly sup­ports UTF encod­ing — data­base dir­ect­ive “SET NAMES” now included in wp-db.php file. Also, in wp-config.php there is now a way to set up encod­ing and col­la­tion for DB. That and the fact that my hoster star­ted to offer 5^th ver­sion of MySQL made install­a­tion a breeze.

Now I have to fig­ure out how to migrate my ori­ginal set-up (WP still doesn’t sup­port multi-lingual sites out of the box, so I have to run sep­ar­ate cop­ies of it off of sep­ar­ate data­bases) from v. 2.1 and v. 4.0 of MySQL, wich I took great pains to get to work prop­erly, to the new, more robust combination.

Next thing is RC 4 of the K2 framework/theme I use on top of the core soft­ware. It looks like many kinks were worked out since I installed it last. AJAX fea­tures are more solid, albeit search is still act­ing up sometimes.

The Side­bar Mod­ules Man­ager (reverts to WP wid­gets if dis­abled) now looks real neat, although all that fan­ci­ness slows it down even on my rather power­ful machine (to be fair, I have some 50 win­dows open in Opera now, so that has to do some­thing with some­thing). Sup­ports 3-column page lay­out. Quite a few use­ful mod­ules avail­able, includ­ing “Latest Com­ments”, “Cal­en­dar”, “Tag Cloud” et cet­era. Although, when it comes to recent com­ments I prefer sep­ar­ate “Brian’s Latest Com­ments” plug-in for I like its real­isa­tion (N recent posts com­men­ted, show­ing latest com­ment authors and total num­ber of com­ments, all cus­tom­iz­able, versus just N recent com­ments with one-line teas­ers of) better.

In the plug-in realm it seems like v. 1.5 of “Raven’s Anti­s­pam” finally works with AJAX com­ments (The only appar­ent reason that I see is that I have updated ver­sion of DB now). Can’t wait to see if it’ll pro­tect the site from most of spam without using Akismet and the like. Also, “Sub­scribe to Com­ments” plug-in appears to work properly.

Import­ant thing to note is that “Ulti­mate Tag War­rior” plug-in doesn’t offi­cially sup­port WP v. 2.3 per se (pos­sibly because of the tax­onomy scheme newly intro­duced in the WP core), but author is work­ing on some tag-related things for WP 2.3 (some really nice things, like embed­ded tags, tag man­age­ment etc. Will try some of them). How­ever, K2/WP now has built-in tag sup­port with the same func­tion­al­ity as an orginal UTW.