Wordpress, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Dreamhost
Yesterday I set up a weblog for my wife, who is now in Bolivia. The good news is that I discovered that it’s very easy to install multiple versions of WordPress on Dreamhost. Along the way, though I realized that there are still fairly big differences in how Firefox and Internet Explorer render web pages. With some work, I found a template that works fairly well in both, at least on Windows, and am using that for both this site and the new one. The winner is called Desert Theme, and I heartily recommend Alex King’s theme browser for exploring themes.
In the future, a good strategy would probably be to start with Internet Explorer and find something that works with that, then check it out in Firefox.
I also re-ran into a minor WordPress/RSS annoyance. To get it to work with FeedDemon, you need to find the file wp-blog-header.php on your Wordpress installation, and change this line:
(false = strpos($_SERVER['PATH_INFO'], 'index.php'))
to this:
(false = strpos($_SERVER[‘PATH_INFO’], ‘.php’))
The change is documented here, but apparently isn’t in the Dreamhost WordPress installation.
I also learned why there was a problem with comments for the site. It’s easy to end up with a blank user for the site, which means that any non-logged in user will be treated as though they were logged in as blank, but unable to leave comments. Just delete that user and you’re all set.