Another tweak to the blog

WordPress can be frustrating. It’s the software that I run my blog on, and while the fact that it’s open source gives me the option to tweak it, I would rather that I didn’t constantly need to tweak it.

They have an impressive release cycle: in the last two years there have been three major releases and twelve minor releases. Any of those releases has the potential to break things, or at least render things obsolete.

While having a WordPress plugin of my own means that I have knowingly signed up to this sort of pain, it also applies to my ordinary usage of WordPress which I host myself, as any of the plugins I use may break upon an “upgrade” or my theme may need some editing to keep it in sync with the now-available features.

I picked up my current theme in 2006 – I think it actually dates from 2005 – and it predates a number of WordPress features that are useful to me. Over time, I have added into it: widget support, compatibility with the new image editor, avatars, favicon, and OpenID.

Ever since I criticised Facebook for not being able to reply to specify comments (also known as “threaded comments”), I’ve meant to enable this WordPress feature on my blog. This weekend, I finally got around to implementing it, thanks to others who have previously documented clearly how to do it. It was relatively straightforward, but did require changes in a number of places across several files.

So, if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to write a comment on the blog, then helping test drive this new tweak could just be it!