WordPress quirks and edits

There’s no secret I’ve had my share of gripes with WordPress and here comes two more:

I can’t upload images at the moment! I run the “plain” wordpress package in Debian testing and when I try to upload an image using the fancy new ajax way in 2.5, it just sits there for a while and it seems it receives the file but I don’t get the UI up that I believe I should get when the upload is completed… so I can’t confirm the upload etc so it instead it gets discarded!

I’m suffering a bit from trackback spam so I installed a plugin named Trackback Validator to help me reduce the manual work of denying them. It seems to work rather well so far in that I now no longer have to mark very many comments (trackbacks appear as comments within WordPress) at all, but the annoying part is that even though the validator unvalidates the trackbacks I still get information mails sent out to me about them! I’ve now also enabled the Akismet plugin so let’s see what happens. Of course simply disabling trackbacks is an option that I’ll use if this doesn’t work good enough.

A funny side-effect with installing and enabling Akismet was that all of a suddent I could access comments previously marked as spam, and thus I could undo the damages from my accidental mark-as-spam-hiccup the other day!

While playing around with plugins, I also installed a gravatar plugin that shows gravatar-images for users on comments, and I installed a plugin that will automatically set my timezone correctly even when DST changes – which WordPress can’t do by itself!

Then all of a sudden when I poked around (too much) I managed to somehow ruin the background image I use a the top of all pages on my blog. Somewhat I got a gradient there instead, which indeed is what the theme supports (the theme I use is of course a standard one but I have done some minor edits of it). Took me a while to manage to get rid of the gradient and get back image back… I had to resort to editing the PHP file for the theme!