I have just turned on the newest feature at Reel Reviews in all its AJAX goodness: the DVD List. I am often asked whether or not I have a particular film, now people can check for themselves and request a Reel Review. We have created a catalog section that lists all the DVDs in my collection. It allows visitors to browse the collection, purchase via Amazon (thanks for the support) but most importantly it lets people request a review. The review requests are tabulated and displayed in the admin panel. Here are some screenshots and explanations.
WordPress 2.0 and Mod-rewrites
I discovered the hard way, that if you have built an audience subscribed to a custom rss extension, you might need to think twice before upgrading your WordPress install. WordPress has changed the way it handles the feeds from the site. The old /wp-rss2.php file is still there, but frankly that is an ugly extension. On this and my other sites I have always used a rewrite so that people could pull the RSS feed at mwgblog.com/rss.xml. Turns out WordPress 2.0 breaks this. Buried somewhere in the permalink building code it causes a 404 error to be posted to the header breaking aggregators. Interestingly it will display in the browser and only seems to effect rewrites to the feeds. All the other rewrites work just fine. A few other people have posted in detail about this problem. Of course, you find this out once you have already done the upgrade. I don’t know that it is a high priority fix; 2.0 is new and they have bigger fish to fry. If you are a php expert, feel free to dig into the classes.php file, my guess is that is where the problem lies.
So how did I fix it? It’s complicated. I have a script that scrapes the wp-rss2.php file and posts it to a static xml file. I then changed the rewrite to point /rss.xml to the static xml file. That is a pain the ass way of doing it, but it works.
I am still hopeful someone with PHP prowess will care enough to find the real fix.
Upgrade in Progress
Sorry for the mess – upgrade in progress.