Schonhose

Today I managed to get to the root of a problem I have been trying to eliminate for some time now. It all has to do with the “use the EXIF coordinates” feature of the GoogleMap addon for Pixelpost. It seemed when using this feature the location magically shifted a few meters or even more.

When using reverse geocoding for latitude and longitude values Google Maps focuses on nearby (and sometimes not so near by) “points of interest” or the closest address it can find. This behavior can be changed by changing the following Javascript function function showLocationLatLng().

Change the code of that function to:
function showLocationLatLng() {
var latlng = new GLatLng(document.forms['view-latlng'].lat.value,document.forms['view-latlng'].lng.value);
editMap.addOverlay(new GMarker(latlng));
editMap.setCenter(latlng, 16);
}

This will force the addon to use the exact location of the image provided in the EXIF.

Much to my amazement the upgrade of WordPress 2.7 to WordPress 2.8 didn’t quite go as expected on my blog. Somehow after the upgrade all content of my posts, pages and comments on the output of my blog just disappeared into thin air.

The first thing I did was checking the database and I was relieved to see the content was actually still there. Then the debugging session began: deactivating all plugins and switching back to the default template showed no improvement. Hence, the conclusion it was not template or plugin related.

So there has to be something else happing with the core files. After some more debugging, with the help of the WordPress IRC channel, I found out which filter was responsible for the disappearance of my content, a WP filter called: convert_smilies. The obvious step to show the content again is to remove the filter in question by adding the following lines to your wp-config.php:
remove_filter('the_content', 'convert_smilies');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'convert_smilies');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'convert_smilies');
At least this will show the textual output again, but smilies are not translated to images. While I’m still debuging the issue I’ll continue to post my findings in this post. Read the rest of this entry »