My calendar lists last Tuesday as “Election Patch Day.” (We had a state primary election, which fell on Microsoft’s second-Tuesday-of-the month schedule for releasing software updates.)

I guess you could consider elections to be patches keeping the government up to date.

Edit: On the other hand, there are usually two or more competing “patches” that disagree on how to fix the problems, and even what needs to be fixed.

I’ve been using Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition for a while to provide a mobile-friendly version of this blog, but haven’t really paid much attention to it since my last few phones were extremely limited in web browsing ability. Since I got the G1, I’ve been paying more attention to mobile access, including setting up WPTouch for a high-functioning iPhone– & Android–friendly version of the site. Last week I finally got around to testing the two plugins in combination, and determined that they do seem to work together with the right priorities.

I also ran the main page through the mobile-readiness evaluator at ready.mobi, and noticed that most of the issues it cited with the mobile edition of the site were really simple changes. Some were basics like fixing unbalanced HTML, and others were recommended practices like including a DOCTYPE and making sure that headings were nested properly. So I whipped together a patch for WordPress Mobile Edition 2.1a. (It’s labeled as 2.1.1 in the readme, but it shows up as 2.1a in the list of plugins.)

Changes:

  • Add XHTML Mobile 1.2 Doctype.
  • Fix unbalanced <small> tag.
  • Fix mising <ul> tags around list of recent posts.
  • Avoid empty class attribute on comments.
  • Add type attribute to style element.
  • Change non-standard value attribute on <meta> tag to content attribute.
  • Reassign headings so that h1, h2, h3 appear in order.

Download:

wp-mobile-validation.patch [removed, see below]

The patch should be applied to the wp-mobile folder that you place in your themes folder.

Update: This has been completely superseded by more recent versions of the plug-in, which use Carrington Mobile instead.

I suppose it’s best to release the security fixes when they’re ready, because any time you pick is going to be inconvenient for someone, but lately it seems like Friday is suddenly in style.

Last Friday saw the release of PHP 5.2.4, on the Friday before—in the US, anyway—a 3-day weekend. This morning Apache released security updates for all three supported branches of their webserver. And this evening—yes, Friday evening—WordPress 2.2.3 came out.

Which reminds me, I’m going to have to start looking at the betas for WordPress 2.3. I think it’ll be a good time for a redesign. Maybe pick a new theme and tweak that one, maybe try my hand at actually designing one. I wonder if the new tagging system can import Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

There are two main ways to handle software updates: provide an updated installer, or provide a smaller updater that only includes the changes. (Either method can be automated.) Incremental updates have advantages, especially if you’re dealing with something as massive as, say, World of Warcraft, or Microsoft Office. But they do make things more complicated for the publisher.

One problem is the upgrade path. It’s one thing to provide an updater that goes from version N to version N+1. But what if someone doesn’t run the updater until N+2 is available? Or worse, N+3? Continue reading