For quite a while I have had a problem with the readme files that get uploaded with my plugins. Whether the plugin repository read it and used it or not seemed to be random. Which left my most popular plugin, Fun with Sidebar Tabs, without the basic information on the download page.

To try and resolve the problem I wrote and rewrote the document, downloaded ones that worked and rewrote them, tried Unix, Windows and Mac line delimiters and nothing seemed to work.

A few days ago I finally solved the problem. It was the file encoding.

I am using Aptana Studio for my development work, and it is great. But it saves text files as UTF8. When I opened my readme file in notepad and saved it as ANSI it all started to work. Simple as anything.

I wont pretend to understand it but it works.

The next episode of WordPress Weekly is now available and this one’s extra special: It’s a two hour interview with Lorelle.

I spent the duration (and the two hours of aftershow) in the chat room and really enjoyed it. I thoroughly recommend you find time to check it out.

I have been using an experimental anti-spam plugin since this blog was set up. Until now it has been a bit of a hack, but I have been working hard to make it much simpler and now I think, hope, I have achieved that. Before I release it though I would like to get a few people testing it to get their comments.

The first test will be to see if this post gets any comments. If you read this please drop by and write something, anything, to see if you can. If it fails you can use the contact form to let me know, or drop me a note on twitter to @arickmann

Assuming you can leave a comment and are interested in testing the plugin on your own blog let me know and I will mail you a copy.

To give you an idea of its apparent effectiveness, my blog has had 15,000 visits, 122 posts, 513 comments, and to date 658 spams, 200 (ish) of which have come in the past two weeks when I upgraded to 2.5 and had to turn the plugin off for a bit.

It looks like it hasn’t worked and is actually stopping all comments.

Fingers Crossed Everybody! I think it is working this time.

Do you often go back to look at work you abandoned and find yourself amazed at just how good it was? That has just happened to me.

Before I got back into WordPress I was looking for a CMS to use as a platform for a web design business; i.e. the back end that would come with all the sights I produced. I tried Drupal, Joomla, and pretty much every other open source system out there and found them all to be very poor.

What I wanted was a CMS that was really, actually, easy and intuitive to use, and didn’t just slap those words on a massively overcomplicated pile of jargon. I didn’t consider WordPress to be CMSy enough. I had experience but discounted it.

Long story short, I decided to write my own CMS using superficially similar processes to WordPress but handmade and, as part of that, I decided to revolutionise WYSIWYG editors. Not small task for one man. You can see why I never finished it right?

My plan was to create a What You Mean Is What You Get editor, a semantic authoring tool that didn’t rely on any browsers in built design mode. I build my own replacement document object model that could be simply and easily expanded to use blocks of semantic code. To enforce the semantic nature of the editor I intended to save the content twice. Once as JSON that could be loaded back into the editor, and once as HTML that would be used as part of the output.

You can see the working example I came up with here

There is some (very) initial documentation here for the more code minded amongst you.

Seeing this again makes me consider whether I should start to develop it again, possibly even as a WordPress plugin; although, I image then I would remember why I dropped it in the first place.