So, WordPress 1.5.2 was released recently — good news, right? Normally, yes :). By the sounds of it, this was mostly a bugfix/security release, but it sounded like a good idea. I went through the upgrade process this afternoon and things seemed to be ok, at first. After uploading the new files, I loaded the home page and it seemed fine.

I should have tried something more involved than just loading the home page — as I discovered a bit later, any link within the blog would just show the home page’s entries again. Or, put another way, suppose that the home page hypothetically has three entries, “A”, “B”, and “C”. If I were to click on the permalink (the title) for “A”, I should see just that entry, plus the comments box and any existing comments. However, after doing so, I just saw the same entries as if I was on the home page (“A”, “B”, and “C”) even though the URL was that of entry A’s permalink (/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/).

Other pages within the site acted similarly — even a search query would return the same entries as the homepage. Interestingly enough, the sidebar did say “You have searched the archives for…”, as if I had done a search, so it wasn't literally showing me the home page again. Not sure what to do at this point, I took the Windows approach — a restart; I went through the upgrade process again, being careful to disable my plugins beforehand, delete the old files before uploading the new ones, and running the upgrade script afterwards. Still, I had the same result.

I was a bit cheesed off at that point and I wasn't sure what else I could try. As a last idea, I tried rebuilding my .htaccess file (in Options → Permalinks) but that had no effect. In the end, I just downgraded back to 1.5.1.3. And, everything is fine again. All that aside, I don't want to give the impression that I have anything less than complete respect for the WordPress team — their work is top-notch and they have a great product. For all I know, maybe this was a typo in the code somewhere or perhaps a small mistake on my part.

From the Delicious blog, I’ve learned that you can now apply a Creative Commons license to your del.ici.ous feed (it's under settings → license). Since I wanted to encourage other people to make use of my feed, I set mine to a Creative Commons Attribution license. In short, that means that you needs to give me credit, but that’s about it.

In case you’re new to Del.icio.us, it’s a social bookmarking site. You can add bookmarks to your de.lici.ous page, each with a set of “tags” (which are a bit like keywords). Then, you can look up sites based on a text search or the tags which you’ve used. And, that's just the start. In a previous post about del.icio.us, I go over several other features of the site.

I’ve been able to use more specific categories with my posts since installing the Cat2Tag plugin for WordPress. In short, it adds a text field below the textarea on the “Write Post” page where you can enter a comma-separated list of categories for the post. And, if a category doesn’t already exist, it’s automatically created for you.

One benefit to having more specific categories is more relevant categorization within Technorati. Each post in Technorati is listed by its tags and it assigns those tags based on the categories into which the post was placed. (Or, from the technical perspective, Technorati reads your RSS and extracts the categories from there.)

Anyhow, Cat2Tag has been working nicely; the only downside is that a regular list of categories could be a bit on the lengthy side. So, I’ve made use of Christoph Wimmer’s Heat Map Plugin for WordPress which you can see in the sidebar. The effect, also called a tag cloud, lists the categories sequentially but assigns font sizes based on the number of posts in each category.

I'm pleased with how the Heat Map Plugin worked out and Wimmer was thorough in his implementation. For one thing, rather than arbitrarily using pixel-based font-sizes, one of the function's parameters is a font-size unit — so, you can have it specify the sizing in ems, percentages, pts, or even inches.

And, as is common for WordPress plugins which “get data from the database and output it”, the function also allows you to specify code to insert before and after each link; so, if you set that to <li> and </li>, you can have a semantic unordered list (for those who aren't using a visual web browser).

I haven’t had a full-sugar soda in several years, but I still enjoy a few diet sodas a week. And, I've occasionally heard, off-handedly, that diet sodas can cause tooth decay just as their full-sugar cousins can. For what it’s worth, I switched to diet soda for the caloric savings, not specifically for the dental advantages (I almost typed “dental benefits” there, but that would have had an entirely different connotation than I intended.) However, as I like to have healthy teeth, I didn’t really want to drink beverages that might work against that (assuming that the notion was true).

A couple months back, I applied my Google-fu and though to get to the bottom of this. As it turns out, it was harder than I thought since some dental professionals said that diet soda doesn’t cause tooth decay while other dental folks said that diet soda does cause tooth decay. Yeesh. At the time, I just gave up on the question and made a mental note to revisit the issue later.

Well, I tried Googling again today and I came across a more definitive answer. One resource that looked promising was a pamphlet sent to parents from the Ohio Dental Association:

While excessive sugar is not healthy, it’s the acid in diet and regular soda that can damage tooth enamel and cause cavities and tooth decay. Acid can begin to harm tooth enamel in only 20 minutes.

That just about concluded my search, though I checked Google once more to see if I could find a national (or international) source in addition to this state-wide source. And, I came across this message from the Academy of General Dentistry about diet soda:

Drinking carbonated soft drinks regularly can contribute to the erosion of tooth enamel surfaces, according to the Academy of General Dentistry.

[…]

Because saliva helps neutralize acids and wash your teeth clean, the worst time to drink soda pop, ironically, is when you are very thirsty or dehydrated due to low levels of saliva. “The larger the volume of intake, the more impact soda pop has on your teeth,” says Gordon Isbell, III, DDS, MAGD, a spokesdentist for the Academy of General Dentistry. “Diet sodas are part of the problem. Women especially like to drink them throughout the day and between meals because they have no calories, yet the higher frequency and volume is putting their teeth at risk.” […]

You hadn’t heard of the “Academy of General Dentistry”? Well, neither had I — but they’re apparently “a non-profit organization of more than 37,000 general dentists”. I suppose that puts the question to rest, then; now I just need to figure out what I can drink instead of diet soda. (I probably won’t cut it out completely, but perhaps my teeth will thank me for drinking less of it.)

PS Is anyone else appalled — and, at the same time, amused — by the Academy’s unnecessary coinage of the term “spokesdentist”? ;)