I have had a couple of strange experiences lately. I’ve written a few things that are more than a little critical of a couple of huge corporations. Since then, I have twice had my blog infected with malware or badware, so that Google have blocked people from going directly to my blog from Google search results.

I am not critical of Google. I think that they did the right thing, given the presence of malware on my blog.

But the thing is, I run several blogs. This is the only one that has had malware. And now this blog has had it twice. And this is the only blog where I’ve criticised huge corporations. I can’t prove anything, I have no idea who did it, it is just strange. But I am cynical. And I am don’t really believe in coincidences. Not all that much.

I run a WordPress installation. So, the first time Google told me I had malware, I was running WordPress 2.3.2. I looked through all my posts. Then I looked through my PHP-files. I found a JavaScript that looked strange in a theme file. So I did a clean upgrade to 2.3.3 and changed theme.

A few days later, the malware was back. This time I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and changed theme again. The theme is clean, the installation is clean, Aximet is there, only clean widgets and plugins. Just as the first time. I hope WordPress 2.5 makes this install more secure. This has cost me lots of time and work. I hate it.

Who knows. I am suspicious. I may be too suspicious. Have anybody else experienced anything similar?

I have previously written a very positive posting about using Windows Live Writer as desktop editor for Wordpress.

I have installed and used Live Writer on my WordPress installation. It works beautifully, but has created huge problems for me. As it turns out, the program for some reason uses ISO code representation of extended characters instead of “standard” HTML (I have the Norwegian version of the program, and I am not certain whether this is a problem in other versions - but it probably is in non-English versions).

That is, « is represented as & #171; (ISO Latin-1, with a blank space inserted after & to prevent from not displaying) instead of  & laquo; (HTML). And so on, for all the extended characters.

So why is this a huge problem: Because in WordPress, plugins like “Sensitive Tag Clouds” and the like assume standard HTML. And WordPress 2.3.x tags seem to be generated on this assumption as well. So my Wordpress installation generates tags that include these odd ISO-code numbers into my Google sitemap. But when that page comes up in a search, and the users wants to open my page, the page can not be found, and generates a 404-error.

So I am losing a traffic due to this program. I have gone through the documentation for Windows Live Writer, and as far as I can see, this is not at all documented. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to configure this. Also, you can only see the representation when you switch from normal to HTML view in Live Writer.

The only solution I have so far found is to write the text directly into the HTML-view instead of using the ordinary views. Then the characters will be correctly represented in WordPress.

So for me this has meant: (a) I have stopped using Live Writer, and (b) I have had to go back and correct all the post I had written using it before I detected the problem.

Be warned! This is not a good program to use with WordPress installations!

– Peter

Overall, I am very satisfied with WordPress as a blogging platform. The platform itself is relatively strict and stiff, even awkward to use, but all the plugins, widgets and improvements from the user community makes it great.

However, my relationship to WordPress is not unproblematic. Our relationship is not one of peaceful coexistence. In some regards, I am very dissatisfied. I have written before about lacking quality control with templates and plugins that are downloadable even from WordPress’ own site. Templates where columns drop down, widgets don’t work properly, and so forth, translates into grief and dissatisfaction with WordPress itself. I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way when I lose time and get annoyed because something is not working properly.

Lack of proper support for foreign languages is probably the one thing about WordPress that annoys me the most. I have a Norwegian language blog. Here is what happens: I publish a new post entitled “Nye bøker våren 2008″ (translated: New books spring 2008). Now, when this is saved using the title as URL, WordPress saves it as “Nye bker vren 2008″. In other words, it drops the Norwegian characters “ø” and “å”.

This may seem like a small thing. But then there is Google. Google supports foreign characters. Thus, when somebody searches for “bøker våren 2008″, they will not find my post, because my post (as far as Google is concerned) is about “bker vren 2008″.

Now, this really is annoying. How would American or English bloggers feel if their “books reviews” got listed as “bk rviws” or something similar? For a guy that takes search engine optimization seriously, this is so bad I can hardly even begin to describe it!

I really don’t know where the problem lies - in the code for the WordPress platform, the widgets, the plugins, the templates, or PHP itself. I am not enough of a programmer to know. But I do know that if WordPress wants to capture a part of the growing blog market, something needs to be done. WordPress ought to commit to supporting foreign languages, as well as doing something rapidly with respect to quality control.

– Peter

I am a big fan of WordPress. I like its versatility and power. Also, I love the fact that there is a big and lively community of people using it, with great discussion sites. Furthermore, there is a huge number of people that develops templates (or “themes”), plugins, and widgets. A lot of the stuff people produce is marvelous!

What I don’t like is the near total lack of quality control on the WordPress site. There’s a lot of stuff being published that simply does not work they way it should. Plugins that don’t work, themes that may look alright, but have severe flaws. I run several blogs, and have tested out a number of themes. I have encountered a number of different types of bugs and problems. Sometimes I report these, sometimes not. When I do, they are usually not fixed anyway, so it doesn’t much matter one way or the other.

The most annoying to me is themes where columns simply drop down. This happens with a lot of the templates. I’ve tested them using IE 6, IE 7, Opera, and Firefox. Some produce the same errors in all of these, so it simply isn’t possible for the authors and WordPress to not know about the errors. The only guy that I have found so far, that seems to be able to shore those columns properly up in his designs, is Brian Gardner.

So, that leaves me - grumpily, I admit - wondering why? To me it would seem that a little bit of quality control would benefit all of us. For developers, it can’t be all that good for their reputations to publish flawed designs. For WordPress it can’t be advantageous to be competing for users with stuff that doesn’t work right. And for users, a little quality control would save a lot of time. Finally, for readers of the blogs, columns that drop down look annoying and displeasing.

Does anybody else know of stable, reliable and good WordPress themes? And have links?

Another good way to get around the poor editors in some of the blog platforms, is to use Flock.

Flock is available for free downloads at www.flock.com. You can easily chose to set up a new blog with Flock, or log in to a number of different blog services, such as Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress or Xanga. Or, if you already have a blog up and running, you can just click the option for Self-Hosted Blog, give your login info, and you’ll be up and running in a couple of minutes.

It has a nice, online manual that gives you the basics for activating and managing blogs in two-three more minutes! This is how it looks:

2.6 Activate and Manage Blogs

Once you set up a blog in Flock, you can copy text, pictures and videos from anywhere on the web and instantly post them into Flock’s Blog Editor or directly into your own blog. You can also monitor, manage and post to different blogs.

Easy as pie. You’ll be a pro blogger in no time at all!

– Peter

WordPress is, in my humble opinion, a great blogging platform. With all the various plugins available, it is extremely adaptable. And it is pretty easy to install as well. On the other hand, unfortunately the power of WordPress is somewhat counter balanced by the fact that it is pretty unfriendly in a number of ways.

One problem, which many people have commented on in blogs and discussions, is how slow and bad the editor in WordPress is. Even after installing a number of plugins designed to reduce the problem, editing with WordPress is still bad (at best). If, like me, you are used to the ease of Dreamweaver, or some similar program, when you are editing web pages, you will be extremely annoyed. The amount of control you have over the look of your pages is pretty small, and the HTML you can use is limited. So editing with WordPress is really annoying.

However, browsing the online discussions about this, I got lucky. Deep down in a thread, I found a reference to Live Writer, a little known Microsoft Windows program. This program is a gold mine for people that write blogs. It solves most of the problems in WordPress editing, and makes it much less annoying. The program downloads the CSS from the blog you use, and allows you to write, edit, insert pictures, videos and other stuff more or less with the same ease as you are used to from ordinary word processing. And you can insert and edit tables, work with layout, and spell check as well! Then, when you are done, you can preview to see how it will look online in your blog, you can save locally and come back to it later, or publish on-line. You can even download already published stuff and revise it!

This is a marvelous tool You can download it from the Windows Live site for free! However, it will not eliminate all your problems with WordPress, as the interface for adding such stuff as Google Adsense ads, Amazon-content, and other special things you will want in your blog, does not work well enough (at least not yet). So I use LiveWriter for my drafts, and then I post them, and afterwards I do a little markup using HMTL from within my WordPress blog. But even if it’s not perfect, it certainly has made writing my blog a breeze compared to earlier. You should check it out!

Do any of my readers have other great tips for making then editing of WordPress blogs easier?