Herself's Webtools

As always I’m at the bleeding edge plowing along. I’ve been using the latest and greatest WordPress version 2.3.1, and the latest and greatest OSX. Over the last month WordPress edits, and new entries brought nothing but server timeouts.

GoDaddy insists all is well on their end talk to WordPress. WordPress says life is good, no troubles here, go bother GoDaddy. OSX Firefox pull down boxes are not working on WordPress but they are on Safari. And I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to figure out the server timeout problem that happens every time I edit or create a new post.

For now I disabled all plugins that are not critical. Service seems to have greatly improved since I disabled the Google Sitemap plugin. I notice they have a new version. I’m not sure it that fixes the problem or not. Disabling the plugin does make the server timeouts go away.

So if you too are bleeding edge and having server timeouts. Disable every plugin you might possibly be able to live without. Shut down your browser, wipe the cache and try again. Probably that will fix your trouble. Then you can enable plugins one at a time and fetch the newest copies of each and see how things go.

I’m also noticing paragraphs are not kept. I’m finding I must go into the code part of editing and put paragraph tags where ever I want a line break by hand.

And if you do not check the ‘Edit timestamp’ it will show the blog entry as the correct date in your Manage Posts but will post it on the date you wrote the entry.

Otherwise things go smoothly

How many times have you seen a cool sign somewhere, snapped a picture and come home to find one side is significantly smaller than the other? This is perspective. It tells us things are further away. Usually we only notice it when we look off into a long distance at a road or train tracks. If you take a picture off to the side instead of straight on this effect is magnified in your photo.

You can fix this in your digital photos using Gimp.  Open up a copy of your photo in Gimp. Click on the Perspective Tool.  It is a button that has a square that is stretched at the bottom with two arrows at the bottom. A dot will appear in the middle of your image.  Click on one of the corners you wish to stretch out, an arrow appears, drag it so the line is level.  

In this photo I began with the top left corner and dragged it up until the top line was horizontal.  Then I did the same for the bottom line.  You may have to go back and forth a couple of times.  Once you are happy click the ‘Transform’ button on the pop up perspective window. 

Now that the picture is straight I adjusted the color with Colors->Levels-Auto and then cropped it to size.