Tag: Software bugs

WordPress 5 bug that’s messing up my publish dates for newly published draft posts

Lynn

There’s an annoying bug in WordPress 5 that’s popped up a few times for me lately and I finally sat down this morning and decided to see if I could figure out what the heck is going on. I found mention of it at the WordPress site, but it’s an eight year old bug that appears to have been fixed at some point. Only it’s not fixed, because this is exactly what’s happening here.

I had a post that I never finished in draft, edited in bulk quick mode to close a bunch of posts to comments and pingbacks, and when I used the unfinished post for my Year in Review—2019 post, it set the date to December 28 when I published it on January 1. I had to update it to the correct post date last night when I realized what had happened. (I posted the December progress post, backdated, and it still showed up before the year in review post that I had posted on January 1st, and I knew that wasn’t right, so a quick check of the post showed me the date was off by 4 days.)

So, in case you’ve found this post while looking for info about a WordPress publish date bug, there you go. Maybe this will help you remember not to quick edit drafts. Better safe than sorry and easier to remember than to remember to check the publish date every time.

Happy New Year. :D

(My test post that confirmed this bug is actually the bug I’m dealing with.)

A test post that turned into a post about writing and trusting the process

Lynn

This is a test post that I’m posting before I make a fool of myself complaining about a WordPress bug. I’d like to see if it’s reproducible before I publish that draft! This post was already a draft that I made on January 1st, but never posted, so it fits the bill for what I need to test.

At the moment, the Publish date is set to “immediately” which means there’s no publish date set on it.

Now I’m going to quick edit the draft, by changing something minor like adding a new tag. Then I’m going to edit regularly and check the date.

:D

Be back soon with the answer.

Well, it definitely messed up my dates. The date is set to the time of the quick edit: 11:01 a.m. Now, if I publish this post, I’ll have to remember to change the date and time. Or not, since I’m just using this post as a test.

I’m going to publish this, just because it supports my post about the bug. :D

It’s not a bad example of how I use writing to help me think things through. I pretty much write down everything, else my thoughts just spin too fast to really make sense of and I get distracted. Writing helps me focus. :D

In a related tangent, and to make this about writing, that’s why I like being a discovery writer.

If I try to consciously think about what’s coming up or what to write next in the story, I can’t bring it all together. I try to follow too many branches of the story. Writing it down keeps me centered in the story and actually creating it. I do not do well trying to make up stories if I’m not writing it down. On the other hand, I do fight that same problem while writing, which probably accounts for 50% of the reason I’m just not a fast writer.

For example, two days ago, I was cycling back through my current scene in progress because something felt off, and I added a line. That line led to another line and another, and then before I knew it, I’d branched off the current path I was on and started on a new one.

The problem is that the paths are somewhat incompatible, and yet, the second path wants to be there.

Why, you ask? Why not just delete it all after that point where I diverged and keep going as I am? I don’t know. I do that sometimes. And sometimes I don’t. I can’t always say why my muse wants me to make something work even when it seems like it won’t. At the moment I’m thinking it just wants me to keep writing until I find a way to circle back to that bit and it fits.

In my last book, this same thing happened in a scene and the end result was that I ignored the frustrated part of myself that kept saying just give up and delete the damn thing and keep going—that I’d come up with something just as good if I did (I often do), but I didn’t listen. I’m glad I didn’t listen. When I read those parts of the book back, what’s there was really good for that book. It turned out to be a pivotal moment for one of my characters and set off some really fun action and great character moments for others too.

Anyway, on to the real work of the day. :D I have to complain a bit about WordPress and then work on finishing my current book. :D

(Yep. It published at 11:20 a.m. as 11:01 a.m. Definitely a reproducible bug in WordPress.)

Not so fast, a Joplin versus OneNote update

Lynn

Joplin, as much as I wanted to love it, just isn’t ready for me. I’ve been testing it pretty heavily to look for break points that could be a deal breaker for me, and I’ve had several issues crop up with the program that have made me finally decide I’m going to have to pass on this for a while and maybe check it out again in the future. Maybe.

It’s taken me a while to get to this point, but I’ve learned my lesson more times than I should have about jumping wholesale into something new if it’s not super easy to go back, and while there are things about OneNote that I don’t like, there are also a lot of things I do like.* So there was no reason to jump too fast and I’m glad I didn’t.

I suspected something was going on recently, and had finally committed to copying the notes and web clippings that I’d taken exclusively in Joplin out to OneNote, when I came across the biggest issue to date for me.

Joplin lost images from the web clippings I took. I was able to go back and reclip the pages into OneNote, but yeah, I really can’t have things go missing once I save them. The issue is a known issue that’s since been fixed, but the problem is that all the notes that lost the images can’t really be recovered, since I would have to go through them one by one and figure out which had lost images and then import from the backups. Definitely not worth the trouble, and not necessary, for me.

So there you go. Consider this my update on Joplin. I’m not switching. It’s just not ready for me. I definitely prefer a set it and let it go solution for my notekeeping.

* I like that OneNote can export entire sections to a Word file. I do my backups of OneNote not as OneNote files (I have a backup of that but I don’t consider it my notes backup, if that makes sense) but as Word docs.

New text justification bug in GIMP is bugging me

Lynn

I think I’ve found a bug in GIMP’s text justification feature. I thought about reporting the bug, but I do not have an account and don’t want an account and don’t have a spare email address where I’d enjoy getting spammed even if I did. The create a new account page warns of that possibility and I chose to take that warning seriously. (Updates below.)

So I’m just putting it out here because I’m frustrated. I spent all day yesterday trying to fix an issue with an installed font that I used for a book cover that turns out isn’t usable in Word for my title page headings because of some bug. If I’d known at the time, I’d have never used the font in GIMP for the book cover.

Lesson learned: when using a new font I haven’t used in Word before, test it in Word. Save the file. Reopen. Is the font still there? If it isn’t, delete the font, because I don’t want to run into this problem again.

I’ve been buying more font licenses lately,  but I still have a pretty big selection of fonts from fontsquirrel and Google fonts on my system that had the right kind of licenses for what I do and I guess I should have expected to run into a problem like this eventually, but I didn’t. I honestly thought fonts just worked or they didn’t. I didn’t realize they could actually be buggy with only certain software. :o

But back to the GIMP bug. Here’s what’s happened. (Update: Definitely a bug. I’ve figured out why it’s happening and I am sure it’s a bug.)

Yesterday I noticed that some of my back cover copy was getting cut off on the right side when I justified the text. I scaled it down a bit from 12 pt to 11.7 pt and it fixed it. This was with Adobe Garamond Pro. Today I have a different book cover in the works and I’m using Adobe Caslon Pro. I tried the same trick when I noticed it was also getting cut off on the right side but scaling it down hasn’t worked to fix this one. I’ve tried every pixel/point size I can in the range I’d be comfortable having this text and it just won’t stop cutting off the very right edge of the fonts.

It’s very frustrating! I definitely haven’t noticed this previously and I updated a few weeks ago to the 2.8.20 version of GIMP. I’d go back to the older version but I truly don’t know if it would fix it, because I’m so behind on putting out my paperback books and I haven’t created one in more than a year until I started doing these.

I don’t know what version of GIMP this issue started in or if it’s been there all along and I just didn’t notice because I wasn’t using these fonts. :(

Maybe I should be doing my paperback covers in Scribus or Inkscape but I do a lot of tweaking of stuff and I don’t want to learn another program with a steep learning curve.

So I guess I’m going to be using a different font for this book cover’s back cover copy.

UGH!

FYI: I’d still recommend GIMP but this kind of thing does make me rethink whether or not it’s worth it to keep putting off converting to Photoshop. I just HATE subscription services. I’ll almost certainly deal and just find a way to work around this problem, but I have to ask myself why I’m being so damn stubborn about it. I do not know.

Update: I figured out why GIMP is cutting off a bit of the right edge of the fonts. It has to do with fonts that have edges that are supposed to fall outside of the margin, in the same way some punctuation is supposed to fall outside of the margins. For example, in my specific case for this text block I was trying to use, the first letter of the paragraph is a “J”. The scoop that makes the bottom of the letter should hang over the edge just a teeny tiny bit (it does in Word and in Scribus and in Photoshop elements. It doesn’t in GIMP. In GIMP, that little effect causes the entire block of text to shift a minute amount to the right, making all the edges of those final letters susceptible to being trimmed by that same minute amount because they’re falling outside the bounds of the text box. And because this is happening no matter the size of the text or the text box, there’s no way to counter it, other than using a different font.

For me, what it meant was that I created my cover in GIMP as usual, saved as a tiff file, opened it in Photoshop Elements 14 (which I had honestly nearly forgotten I had), and added the text for the back cover there. Saved as a PDF, and realized at that point that Elements saves the text as embedded instead of flattened, and decided I’d try that out.

(Scribus did the same. I did get it to work, finally, but it was a PITA, and I don’t like using it. That was when I remembered I had bought Elements last year when it was on sale and that it was on my computer, ready to be used if I wanted to.)

If embedding the fonts produces crisper text on the cover, I might do all future books this way even though it adds another program/step to my workflow.

On the other hand, I don’t know if Createspace will even accept this, because I’ve never submitted a completely non-flattened PDF before. I flatten everything in GIMP, text and all.

But the reason I decided to give this a shot was because I read a paragraph of a page today on the Createspace website that says to make sure your fonts are embedded in the pdf file for the cover. So obviously it’s an expected thing, right?

We shall see.