ChapterZero

I’ve started working on a modification of the LatexRender WP plugin. My motivation is to increase the ease of certain tasks that I’ve found myself doing often, and add a little more functionality to the current plugin. Here’re a list of the changes I’m planning. Suggestions are welcome.

Support logically separate classes of LaTeX content: [...]

Wow. That was not fun– I had to rediscover how to do several sysadmin type things, and the whole while I was afraid I’d cause some irrevocable error. There still seems to be a problem with accessing external websites, which was present right from the pristine file-system, so I’m stumped on that one. On the [...]

Some time soon, the site’s going wayyy down for a while – hopefully it’ll be back up by Monday, but in the worst case scenario, I plan to have it up by the following Monday.
Apparently my host has not blocked port 80, and one of the tech people tried various approaches which didn’t work:

I [...]

In trying to figure out why Akismet suddenly broke, I isolated the part of the code that calls akismet.com, and ran that alone. The results showed that instead of contacting akismet.com, the server is trying to contact a search engine looking for akismet.com. So I logged in and tried using lynx and mozilla to pull [...]

Akismet has crapped out on me lately; consequently today alone I’ve waded through 700+ spam comments in moderation. In retaliation, I’m doing a summer cleaning of the site. I’ve upgraded WP from v2.0.1 to v2.2.1, mostly so I don’t fall so far behind that plugin compatibility is a major issue; along the way I’ve switched [...]

I’m trying out the Now Reading plugin, which helps you list the books you’re currently reading, planning on reading, or have already read. I won’t be listing any of the math or physics books that I’m currently ‘reading’, since those change from day to day. Instead expect a roster of sci-fi, fantasy, and general fiction [...]

I found the problem with LatexRender: somehow, when I was attempting to uninstall unused packages from the server, I deleted gs and imagemagick; my guess is that ‘apt-get prune’ is a lot more powerful than I thought it’d be. So now I have equations back, I’m back!
Possibly relevant posts:

Going down for a while (7/8/2005)
Plugin idea: [...]

The site is going to be down for the next week or so, for three reasons: I’m finally doing all those things I was to do this summer, but didn’t; a strange error is occuring with the LaTeXRender system that has rendered all the equations unreadable, and what can I post about, if it doesn’t [...]

I just tried three times to post a comment, and each time it disappeared— didn’t show up in the moderation queue or in the comment list. That explains why I’ve been having a remarkable dearth of spam of late.
I can’t think of anything that might be causing this. My blacklist is clear, and I [...]