WordPress Troubles Persist
Comments (0) At the proposal of one person, I’ve reverted to the “default” WordPress blog theme.
That’s why the site looks, well, boring now.
I’m going to see if that has a significant impact on the troubles I’ve had.
Comments (0) 
New Site Layout
By Rick Smith (a), August 16, 2009
My apologies if anyone was having trouble visiting the site over the past few days. I updated to a more recent WordPress version, and it broke the site.
After poking at the problem a while, I decided to try upgrading the site’s “theme” file, which specifies the stylistic details of the site’s appearance: fonts, column layout, colors, backgrounds, and so on. The problem apparently disappeared when I replaced the theme. (I say “apparently” because the problem seems to appear, or disappear, depending on cookies and other saved state – until I’ve tried this in a few different places I’m not convinced everything is working).
Changes to Logging In
By Dr. Rick Smith, August 4, 2009
This isn’t a major change – it’s something I’ve been adjusting for a while – but I am again trying SSL on logins. This is supposed to work in WordPress, but I’ve had trouble making it work with OpenID. In my own experiments, it now works for both.
If you have any trouble logging in, drop me an e-mail.
The only bad part is that all admin activities are SSL protected. That makes it a bit slower to actually post or update a page. The WordPress implementation is supposed to allow me to only protect passwords, but that doesn’t seem to work with OpenID.
Logging In and RPX
By Rick Smith (a), August 4, 2009
Logging in is optional for this site – you don’t see anything logging in that you don’t see otherwise. You only have to log in to leave comments.
Like most sites, you can create your own user name and password to leave a comment. You may also use “OpenID” – a standard way of logging in to many sites. Several sites, including Yahoo and WordPress, provide OpenIDs for their users.
I recently tried integrating RPX – this allegedly lets people log in using their IDs from most major web sites: Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and so on. I mostly wanted it for the Facebook login. But I couldn’t get Facebook to work. It sort of “logged you in” but it didn’t seem to really let you post comments. [see update below: this is an undocumented shortcoming of the "free" or "try before you buy" service]
Themocracy