Yet, there were some defects. The most annoying is the chinese character support. I should say this problem shouldn’t be ascribed to wordpress, but I would rather be a little harsh here :p . When displaying the_excerpt or something similar, there will be some unknown character like “,” at the end. That’s because the_excerpt tends/(is supposed to) to retrieve only part of the whole content, such as the first 150 characters. And then the problem comes out: the script will get the 150 bytes instead of characters (like substr in php), which is not a problem for English characters but a nightmare for Chinese. Usually it’s 2 bytes for Chinese character. So if fortunatelly, there are only Chinese character or mingled with even number English characters, it will not be a problem using 150 or any even number to get the short version. But if not, bad things will happen. It seems only a 50/50 chance, not that bad. The UTF-8 encoding then uses 3 bytes for a Chinese character, so a larger chance for bad things . Anyway, it’s multi-byte for Chinese characters. So I need to find a way to resolve this, as the most posts we are writing are composed of both Chinese and English characters.

After googling, this was the solution for PHP:

mb_internal_encoding(”UTF-8″);
$the_excerpt=mb_substr($the_content, 0, 16);

However, I was still not able to deal with the mysql command directly, though it is said SUBSTRING in mysql is multi-byte safe. My guess would be the setting for the mysql server is not utf8, but I was no luck only trying to use “SET NAMES ‘utf8′“. There always is something more for learning

The 2nd year, I began to be toying with linux and set up our own web server (with url as scorparies.princeton.edu at first, then www.ohehlium.com). Along with that, I was attracted to the multifuntional tiki system and used it on our site. However, it turned out too slow to visit even hosted on a P4/512Mb machine (I know just a pre-P3/128Mb machine can already do a pretty good job for some other system; and currently this blog powered by wordpress is hosted on a P3/256Mb PC). So I had to disable many functions and gradually I lost interest managing that system. During that period, I was also learning perl so that I played some scipts on the server, but the web page functioned more like a GUI to me and rigorously I was not using perl to develop our website. Meanwhile, I read or learned something about php, which is quite perl-like but designed specifically for web scripting. Adventous I was, I even spent weeks building a small site for my research projects by php when my boss was away travelling. However, that site sort of sank with the slow progess of my project.

Time flies quickly and now it’s the 3rd year. I am playing with the web again. As I settled down the blog with wordpress, the wiki with the mediawiki and the photo album with gallery2, instead of intergrating all the functions together, I am turning to individual functional component for solution (though I don’t have a forum candidate now). Interestingly, as to some simple scripting, instead of perl, this year, I am learning and using python. I hope this time everything will be settled and help build a better site:)

“If weblogs are monologs, and news-style forums are dialogues, a wiki is like a catalog of knowledge” However, I am almost the only one at wiki recently. And because of large volume of spams at the site, I had to hack into the php file and assign the editing right to specific users (Today, actually I saw an amusing sentence: ” if Pfizer is going to pay, I won’t get angry with these Viagra ads”). And actually I am just building the wiki as my own knowledge base so why not use this blog instead.

Yes, I am going to switch. I could build pages for trivial listings and if needed I can write something down in posts as in different categories. Now I also can post from email. Great, so I’ll go with it.

Meanwhile, I would still keep the wiki running as it is but would contribute little there.

Currently I am writing in an email client, and I know what I write here will be next minute in the post as you see here on the web. The feeling is so great.

Back last year, I already learned that mail2forum can be used to both post and receive posts to/from forums via email. I tried to make it work, however, I was daunted by setting the sendmail server and receiving spams and finally gave up.

This time, when helping scorp build her new blog, I find the wordpress also has this post-via-email function. I couldn’t help but play with it. With the help of plugin: postie , I made this function work properly with Gmail account now.

From now on, I can simply forward interesting emails to my secret gmail account and then I can have it here on the web. Nifty
Liang

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Note: with modification of the format after email posting, though

The wiki seems going to be my trash bin. Everything worthy of 2 cents will be deposited there I will try hard to classify the stuffs there in a decent manner, at least later, I still can find what I have there.

But already, I can use the image insert function of the g2image plugin to show one picture from our photo album .

Launched at 2.23, a good day