Yesterday WordPress 2.6 came out which is pretty unbelievable because it feels like WP 2.5 just came out last month. Anyway, a new version of WordPress comes with the necessity to upgrade and the hair-pulling that comes with it.

My upgrades went fairly smoothly, but I did notice an issue with .swf files not being installed. I saw that a couple of other people had the same problem.

It got me thinking about what might be causing the problem. The obvious candidate was that the Flashblock Firefox extension wasn’t playing nice with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Flashblock, incidentally, is a must-have Firefox extension for me as it allows you to have complete control over Flash files. No more stupid adverts or autoplay or any of that other nonsense that comes with Flash. Meanwhile, WordPress Automatic Upgrade is slightly flaky, but at the end of the day it makes upgrading WordPress much less painful and much faster than it would be otherwise.

Anyway, I have three blogs. I had the problem with the .swf files on the first two blogs. So that gave me a perfect opportunity to see if my theory about Flashblock was right on my third blog. So I disabled Flashblock and ran WPAU. The upgrade went well, with all the files uploading.

If you already ran WPAU while using Flashblock, your WordPress upgrade may be incomplete. Check to see if the following files are missing and upload them manually.

• wp-includes/js/swfupload/swfupload_f9.swf
• wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/media/img/flv_player.swf

I’ve emailed the author of WPAU to let him know. He says he’ll work on a fix, but I thought I’d post it here to give people a heads-up.

I am usually a defender of Facebook. But this time I think they have overstepped the line and have introduced a ‘feature’ that makes me personally uncomfortable. From The Facebook Blog:

Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well.

News Feed created a huge privacy concern when it was introduced last year. But I didn’t buy the complaints then. News Feed amounted to Facebook displaying things you did on Facebook. If you don’t want your Facebook friends to know something, perhaps you shouldn’t do the action on Facebook. Just a suggestion.

However, Project Beacon is on a completely new level. Now Facebook friends may know about things that I do on sites that aren’t Facebook. There is no way of knowing whether or not a website is going to report to Facebook what you are doing. As this blog post points out:

It’s a little bit creepy to know that if I visit the Internet Porn Emporium, this store might attempt to tell Facebook that I’m a patron.

And although you can select for the information not to appear on your News Feed, Facebook will apparently still have the data.

It just feels a little bit like it’s too much of my private information getting into the hands of too many people without me necessarily knowing. There is a brilliant comment at Mashable which makes another good point about this:

Letting my friends know that I ordered x, y, and z from Amazon doesn’t sound very appealing. Could also totally spoil the surprise of a birthday gift or something.

So I will be blocking Facebook Beacon.

Via Tom’s View of the World’s Delicious account.

I have never blocked adverts in my life. I accept that this web malarkey has to be paid for somehow, so I don’t mind websites with adverts on them.

As long as they don’t get in the way of what I’m trying to read!

Adverts are getting more and more annoying, and it’s all down to the web’s worst-ever invention — Flash. Flash is only good for Weebl and Bob. All other Flash is either annoying navigation systems or stupendously annoying adverts.

Increasingly, adverts are obscuring the site’s content, taking a massive dump on an interesting article, then making you fish around for a little X which doesn’t even work when you click it. And they want me to buy their products??

Two particular culprits are Guardian Unlimited and ITV’s F1 website.

Well I’ve decided to block all Flash from now on. There is a wonderful Firefox extension called Flashblock (via Cynical Chatter From The Underworld). Instead of playing Flash movies straight away it displays a little play button so that you can choose if you want to see the Flash file. Hopefully this is the end of annoying Flash adverts.

No real news there, except that I’ve just found out about a nifty Firefox plugin for smelly students like me who use the Athens authentication system, via Spontaneous Monotony.

It is an official Athens toolbar which lets you log in and log out easily, which is a godsend really because there have been many times when I have been left ripping my hair off in frustration because I’ve forgotten the convoluted log in system. It also shows you a list of the resources you can access through Athens. I didn’t know we could access the Oxford English Dictionary or The Scotsman Digital Archive. And I bet there’s loads of other dead important stuff in that list that I don’t understand yet.

While we’re talking about Firefox, I may as well mention that two thirds of visitors to this blog still use Internet Explorer. And the new design of this blog probably looks like absolute gash on Internet Exploder. It doesn’t look to great in Opera either, but I suppose that’s what you get for designing the whole thing in Firefox with the assistance of the Web Developer Toolbar.

Here’s how it looks on Firefox:

The moral of the story? Use Firefox, or at least Browse Happy.