Well, this has been quite an interesting year… on a lot of levels. I bought some hosting and a domain a little over a year ago– it was a bit of a birthday present. Looking back on it now, I’ve learned a lot throughout this whole ordeal, I just wish that I could’ve had more time to dedicate to this. After the myblog software failed to run (after I had put so much work into myblog+WordPress integration), as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I virtually abandoned the blog.

With summer pretty much here, I’m starting to get my inventive itch again, but I’ll try to bridle my ambition this time around. Basically, you should expect more of the same as far as the software is concerned. I will be updating WordPress eventually (the new version has a ton of awesome new features!) and bringing the current production myblog dinosaur up to Rails 2.0. I would not expect these in full swing for about a month at least, but at least there’s something to look forward to that’s tangible!

In the meantime, I will be looking into some more flexible options for commenting without user accounts, so if you see something you’d like to discuss, drop a comment!

We’re at WordPress v2.3.2… and have a shiny new layout.

Edit: I forgot to add… after I did the update, WordBook (integration with Facebook) now works!

Almost immediately after I finished myblog+WordPress, WordPress released a new update– 2.3.2. Normally, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to the update, but this one was an “urgent security release”. Since I modified a number of my core WordPress files, I decided to go ahead and manually exact all of the necessary changes from their Trac changeset diffs. It worked, I syntax checked all of the files, and then uploaded the upgraded versions to the site. As always, I haven’t extensively tested it, so let me know if you experience any errors.
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Well, it’s taken a little while, but I’ve finally released the myblog+WordPress solution. Since there are already users signed up for myblog, many of which signed up within weeks of the Registration release, I decided that I owed them the opportunity to link their myblog account to an account on this (temporary) WordPress blog. If you already have a myblog account, then simply click the “myblog+WordPress” link on the login page to get a WordPress account. Enter your myblog password and your user information will be used to create a new user– it literally takes seconds. After that you can update your profile and begin commenting on the blog. If you have forgotten your password, e-mail me and I’ll take care of it for you (I will give you an arbitrary password and send you to one of those password scripts). In the future, I hope to be putting together a nice little action to do that for us (I can be a little slow on the reply sometimes).

For everyone who hasn’t registered, native WordPress registration will still be disabled indefinitely. This means that you will have to sign up for a myblog account anyway, validate it (click a link in your e-mail), and then link it through WordPress. The whole process should still only take 5 minutes.

Once anyone has registered, you now have the capability to change your password– and in two different ways. The preferred method, and probably the one to cause the least amount of problems, would be to do it through WordPress. In the same set of updates, I also wrote some WordPress functionality that allows it to securely communicate with myblog. myblog will authenticate your user, update your password, and then let WordPress know that it’s okay to change your WordPress password. If you want to juggle two different passwords (or just don’t want to use WordPress at all), you can visit this link to change your password directly with myblog.

I hope this encourages everyone to begin using WordPress– it’s been pretty dead.