Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Upgraded to Textpattern 4.0.6 · 2008-03-17 23:09 by Wladimir Palant
Yet another Textpattern upgrade (yes, I am slow), and again I have to expect that it will break something. Textpattern developers don’t seem to have a concept of stable versions and change the already fragile markup module with every minor version. So if you notice something odd on this site, it is probably just broken because of this upgrade — please tell me then.
On the bright side, two of my source code patches are no longer necessary with this version. Also, I finally fixed the bugs page, and now it even caches the data shown in the sidebar (MozDev, sorry about all the automated Bugzilla queries before).
Comment [5]
Commenting is closed for this article.
Robert 'wet' Wetzlmayr · 2008-03-18 08:13 · #
Well, from my POV we do (try to) have a concept of stable versions and would be happy to hear which changes in 4.0.6 or prior versions you’d specifically address.
We live and learn, so please be frank.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Good to hear that, thanks. I love Textpattern, it is a great system and very extensible (currently I only have three patches applied to source code, everything else can run as plugins – but maybe some patches are avoidable, my PHP skills aren’t great). However, Textile is a constant pain. It is already bad enough that I have to work around its shortcoming e.g. by hiding <pre> blocks from it because there is apparently no way to get Textile to produce valid HTML code if there is an empty line inside the <pre> block. But Textile also had a major (and not exactly documented) rework in 4.0.4 – after this update some page markup would break every now and then after editing. Seeing “Textile improvements” on the change list for 4.0.5 (I skipped that upgrade and installed 4.0.6 directly) makes me fear that the same story will repeat.
I know that my Textpattern installation probably isn’t typical, I edit pages more often than I add new ones. Maybe I just need a plugin that will go through all pages, redo the markup and show me the pages where it changed. However, right now I always have to think twice before updating. On the bright side, I don’t think I ever had trouble with plugins after an update.
Robert 'wet' Wetzlmayr · 2008-03-18 09:20 · #
You are right, Textile 2.0 in 4.0.4 was a kind of interruption, but with good intentions especially on the field of multi-paragraph Textile source (so to speak).
If I understand your concerns correctly, you have probably missed the “extendend block” Textile modifiers, e.g. “bc..” and “pre..” (note the two consecutive dots).
Textile will build a <code> or <pre> element whenever it encounters these block modifiers which extend until it reaches another block modifier, e.g. “p.” for a <p> tag.
This is a behaviour which should cater for all your code formatting needs – at least it serves me well on my site (@see my gallery samples for some extended sequences of preformatted text.)
Alex has an in-depth manual on the extended block modifiers and such.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I think I tried that syntax before and it didn’t work – but that was probably before TextPattern 4.0.4. Thanks, I’ll try that – and maybe I won’t need to patch up TextPattern here next time I update.
DLeh · 2008-03-21 04:42 · #
Hey, I just wanted to drop in and mention something that’s happened to me since I’ve started using Adblock.
As we all know, the Internet used to be ridden with pop-ups and flashy, obnoxious ads until pop-up blockers, etc were developed. We all kind of got used to it, and got pretty good at just ignoring the ads cause we don’t care about them.
Anyway, I saw Adblock on a list of one of the must-have firefox extensions. “Meh,” I said to myself. Why not? So I installed it and have been using it for… who knows? Two years? How long has it even been around? Anyway, I was talking to a friend a week ago, and I said something about how it doesn’t seem like there are many ads online anymore, and it struck me as really weird (He didn’t agree with me, just kinda looked at me funny). So I came home for spring break earlier this week, and browsed the internet in my spare time at work. (They only had IE at first, but i instantly installed firefox) As I browsed my normal sites, I started to notice something strange… Ads! I don’t remember those ever being there before! They were everywhere! Facebook, digg, google searches, ytmnd, etc. Then i realized that I’ve had Adblock blocking all that crap for the past two years- adblock works so well that I had completely forgotten that ads even existed on the interenet! Awesome!
Just wanted to say I’ve never been more happy with a firefox extention until this moment, and just wanted to give my story, haha.
Peace, and thanks a lot for great software!
Ali · 2008-03-22 05:18 · #
Well said story, I would like to know what Wladimir thinks when he reads emails or comments that are praising ABP and giving thanks to him.
PS. that was off-topic :)
Oleg · 2009-10-07 03:45 · #
Nice posts there – thank’s for the interesting information.