Archive for November, 2008

A WordPress “Turbo” Gears ‘Error: Download … failed, status code 404′ Bug Fix & Workaround

Friday, November 7th, 2008

When we were enabling the new Turbo feature in WordPress 2.7-beta2 GoogleGear returned the following error:

Error: Download of 'http://weblog.ieuc.org/wp-admin/css/press-this-ie-rtl.css?ver=20080915' failed, status code 404

Further investigation revealed that the press-this-ie-rtl.css file in question was delivered with 0 bytes of content causing Gears to hang.

To fix the problem, just insert the following CSS Comment at the top of that file and upload the edited version to your server:

/* nothing here */

It should weigh in at 43 bytes. At that point, disable Gears for your site, reload the Turbo admin page and re-enable the feature. This time all of the files in the Gears manifest should download smoothly.

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Posted in Technology, Webmaster's Log | No Comments »

Election Day

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Today, those of us in the US get to choose a new direction for our nation. It is one of those big choices that one hopes no one will take lightly.

But every day, we, as End Users, make countless little choices that in aggregate resonate far into the future. What operating system will we choose? What programs? Which websites and traditional publishers will we trust to inform us? Which vendors do we want to see grow and prosper? What user groups will we join and support?

It is so easy to dismiss the impact of these little choices but they give us far more leverage to steer the coarse of history.

At the IEUC we do a lot with very little, indeed for the cost of a single major network TV ad we could run our annual operations or pay down a big chunk of our startup debt.

So after you cast your vote in the political area, consider lending us a hand in the financial arena.

We will put your hard earned dollars to productive use.

Posted in The Institute Log | No Comments »

A Website Relaunch Update

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

We have just completed a first pass at integrating our various online subsystems (Calender, Citations, Surveys, and Weblog) with our main site-wide navigational infrastructure and visual theme.

We have our Archives back online and we will be restoring more of our legacy content in the next week or so.

There may still be some glitches and some of our non-critical user interface functionality (i.e. the animated in-page visual transitions) won’t be available in Internet Explorer for technical reasons outside our control.

We are inviting in Volunteer Website Testers to help us ferret out any problems that still need work.

In the meantime, bear with us, and drop us a note if you run into any serious problems.

Posted in Webmaster's Log | No Comments »