Day: December 19, 2020

How To Search for/in Comments

Just spotted a funny with WordPress.

I had a look in my Spam Comments folder. I do that once or twice a week, just to keep tabs on Akismet.

This week, I found five comments! Usually, there are zero or one. The comments were all from the same, bona fide person.

The trouble is, as soon as I hit “approve”, the comment disappeared. So I’d had the chance to approve it, but not to Like or Reply to them. I could remember some of the posts, but not all. And, my posts can sometimes attract 20-odd comments, so just looking in WP’s list of Approved Comments would have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The solution?

Well, this is once again an area where the wp-admin site wins out. The normal site, at wordpress.com/… might be slicker, but mrbump.uk/wp-admin, is a darned site more powerful. If you’re interested, wp-admin comes from the core WordPress offering at wp.org. Wp.com give slicker management in some areas, but in the process, they dumb it down.

wp-admin gave me the ability to sift through every comment ever made by that particular user, regardless of date, so their five recent comments, I was straight there. From there, I could easily Like and Reply.

Incidentally, this was a general-purpose search box, so I could search for any comment, by anybody at any time, containing a specific word, even.

The Art of Deception

inspired by Fandango’s One Word Challenge (FOWC) of 19 December 2020, guile.

To set about her day’s work,
the fox put on disguise,
You’d never think she meant no good,
By looking in her eyes.

She dressed herself in pink dress,
She wore disarming smile,
She topped herself in pinnie
Still smiling all the while.

While dressed as sweet old lady,
A duckling happened past,
“Oh, would you like to sit down,
And have yourself a rest?“

“I’d better not”, said duckling,
“Of bad things I’ve been told.
“I’d better keep on going,
Or else my mum will scold.”

“Oh, that’s a shame”, says Grannie,
“It’s such a comfy chair.
The kettle has just boiled,
I have some cake to share.”

“Oh, that all sounds delicious,
It can’t do any harm”.
With such delights on offer,
The duck begins to calm.

“I’ve even a spare bedroom.
If tired, can rest your head.”
The duck comes off the pathway,
And steps inside instead.

The duck sits in the armchair,
Most comfy of her life.
As gran steps up behind her,
She’s sharpening her knife.

Artistic Achievements

The challenge over on Weekly Prompts this week is to write about art.

I had it drummed into me from an early age that I was not artistic.

I suppose it was driven by the obvious manifestation of art, drawing. I was, and am, hopeless. But even when I went to university… my friends studied “art” subjects such as English, where I stuck with a boring old science.

It went on into my professional life. I got into computers. If this then that. There’s not really much room for art there, although I understood at the time that I was creating things – I was being creative. I just never called them works of art.

As I got more and more into designing systems, however, I realised that there are good ways to design systems, and bad ways. I happened to come up with good, elegant, understandable ways. That’s not just me being a bighead, other people thought so, too, and paid me good money to do so.

The trick was building firewalls. Often, a system would bring half-a-dozen or a dozen things together. And just as often, one or two of these things would behave quite nastily. The trick was to isolate the nasty bit with a firewall, so that the rest of the parts could talk nicely together.

It sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But a lot of people couldn’t do that. I can. And so I came to realise that not only was I creating things, but there was an art to it. Because, surely that’s what art is? Something that one person can do well, but another can’t?

It’s funny, because once I was happy to accept that definition of art, I realised that there had been art throughout my whole career. There are good ways to write a computer program, and bad. The good way, primarily, is making things obvious. So someone else can come along and understand what you did. That’s more important, even, than writing something that works! Even if what you did doesn’t work properly, if someone can understand it, they can fix it. Otherwise, they have to start from scratch. So, you see, there is an art to that, too.