It seems that using any kind of HTML entities, like accents, for example, causes WordPress to generate invalid RSS, causing my aggregator thingy to break. Of course, I’ve noticed for a lont time that using things like quotes or apostrophes causes bizarre things to happen in the RSS. Is this a problem with WordPress, or with my aggregator thingy? Dunno, but it’s irritating.

My wordpress coordinates plugin is doing mostly what I want it to now. If you put coordinates in a post that are in the correct format (xxdxx.xxx,-yydyy.yyy) it will convert them into a link to three things – a MapQuest map, and links to my CGI program for producing GPX and LOC files of the coordinates.

Example: 37d59.786,-84d32.252

Install by dropping the file into your wp-content/plugins directory and then enabling it in the “Plugins” menu.

The obvious shortcoming of this plugin is that it links to my copy of this cgi program. While I certainly don’t mind you using it, it is running on my machine at home, over my DSL line, and may be just a tiny bit slow. I will be interested, however, to see who, if anyone, starts using it.

Share and enjoy.

It appears, from IRC conversation yesterday, that there are a few other places where WordPress relies on register_globals. So I’m on a bit of a quest. And it’s a decent introduction to PHP, because the code is pretty good, but with enough room for improvement that there’s something useful that I can do.

The reason that I dislike register_globals, by the way, is twofold. One, it leads to code that is intrinsically harder to understand. Variables spring into existence with no warning, and nobody immediately knows where they came from. Second, it is potentially insecure, with malicious strangers creating variables in your namespace without your knowledge. I’m not aware of any actual exploit using this, but it just seems unpleasant.