Category: blog

You Should Sign Up for the B12 Daily Email

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Taking a cue from Kottke1, I am reminding you that you should sign up for my daily email. Signing up should only take a minute or less if you are a fast typer, I absolutely promise to never send you unsolicited email2. Feedburner/Google has enabled the email to include items that don’t necessarily make it to my weblog, but that I still think are interesting, or are otherwise topics of note. Like news stories that I Digg, YouTube video I “favorite“, Flickr photos I upload, etc.

Plus you should subscribe to my daily email3 so that you have something fun to read as you drink your morning beverage. A dose of B12’s Solipsism can only enhance your day!

Hotel Visitor

Oh, and you should follow me on Twitter too, if you are so inclined. I have other social media accounts, but I don’t care if you friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Tumblr blog, for instance.

Footnotes:
  1. I hope Jason Kottke doesn’t mind being referred to by simply his last name, I’ve been reading his weblog for so long now, to me he is the blogosphere equivalent of single-named celebrities like Bono or Nenê [↩]
  2. unless you want me to, of course. Ahem [↩]
  3. usually gets released around 1 AM CST [↩]

WordPress Week 29 – plugin overview

Seth Anderson4 Comments

Used WordPress for over 6 months now, and am still pleased with it. There are so many plugins available for WordPress that tweaking minor nuances is a fun hobby.

Currently I have these plugins installed and active, in no particular order:

  1. WP-Footnotes – quite useful – adds a numbered footnote to a post. Good for my style of breezy, top of mind writing. Triggered by enclosing text in double parentheses.1
  2. WP Super Cache
     – supposedly speeds access to particular pages, and WordPress blogs in general. Haven’t tested it really, but who wouldn’t want a speedier rendered page?
  3. WP Ajax Edit Comments
     – some Ajax goodness, eases editing of comments for me, and from you. Registered users can edit their comments, non-registered can edit in a certain time frame.
  4. Smart Youtube
     – better YouTube embedding than the default from the YouTube site. Copy and paste a YouTube URL into a post and add the letter v to the URL right before the “://”. Simple, yet useful.
  5. SimplePie Core
    Load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it.
  6. Postalicious
     – creates the daily links page via delicious.com. Requires SimplePie Core these days, but other than that, seems more reliable than the links post option from delicious.com itself. I’ve started going back in and editing to add quirky images for some reason.
  7. Quotes Collection
     – fuels the Random Quote sidebar widget on the upper right margin. More for me than you probably. Love me some quotes…
  8. AJAXed WordPress
     – don’t use all the options this plugin enables, but some are useful.
  9. Akismet
     – spam comment filter. The last few days quite a number of spam comments have made it past the Akismet filter, but all in all, it does a great job. Occasionally, marks quasi-legitmate comments as spam, but no more than 5 times. According to its statistics, 4,872 spams caught, 18,972 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.849%. Umm, no, but we’ll keep you anyway.
  10. All in One SEO Pack
     – not so sure about the usefulness of this plugin, but have kept it so far.
  11. Around this date in the past… – Widget Edition
     – testing this (see the lower sidebar), a tip toe through this blog’s history. Of course, a year ago, I was using Movable Type, so only reposted items end up there currently.
  12. Blog Copyright (by BTE)
     – sure, why not. Preemptive move against the splogs.
  13. FD Feedburner Plugin
     – re-directs the default RSS feed over to FeedBurner which has a hell of a lot of more interesting features. FeedBurner also generates the “email of today’s posts” feature, which is pretty useful if you don’t use a newsreader or visit everyday, as it includes Flickr, Digg, and whatever else.
  14. Flickr Photo Album
     – haven’t really used this, might go away.
  15. Google Analyticator
     – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics.
  16. Google XML Sitemaps
     -generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Contributes to good search engine ranking presumedly.
  17. Lightbox 2
     – used to make uploaded images appear in their own “embiggened” window. Am using it less and just using Picasa’s bandwidth instead of my own, but will probably keep this too.
  18. MobilePress
     – just installed this – presumedly creates a mobile friendly version of the blog, suitable for iPhones and the like. Haven’t tested it yet.
  19. WordPress Automatic Upgrade
     – aids in painless upgrade to the WordPress software.
  20. WordPress Popular Posts
     – again, enables archive digging. Currently residing in the sidebar under “Hot Action”.
  21. WordPress.com Stats
     – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks.
  22. Twitter for WordPress
     – sometimes fails, but works better than a straight RSS feed. Haven’t given up on Twitter yet, come follow me
  23. Subscribe To Comments
     – useful addition to a comment feed, not that I get many comments, but in the rare instances.
  24. ShareThis
     – for posting to Digg, delicious, FaceBook and various other social media sites. Don’t know if it ever gets used, but its here anyway.
  25. Redirection
     – for those occasions where I make a typo in the URL of a post, and don’t notice until later, this plug-in smoothly re-directs to the proper page.
  26. Random Redirect
     – try it!!

Geez, didn’t realize this would turn out to be such a long list.
Do you have any plugins essential to your blog’s functioning and aesthetic?

Footnotes:
  1. like this, duh [↩]

Or Else What

swanksalot0 comment
It’s the Future

It’s the Future

Received an amusing email, spam presumedly, from a Hong Kong company re my domain name. Here it is in its entirety:

We are Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “b12partners” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Dec 25, 2008.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark, so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.

In order to avoid the law problems invovled,we need to confirm with you first.If you consider these domain names are not important,please don’t reply this email,we will cooperate with the third company Kind Regards, Andy.liu

Tel: +852-31757930(ext.8023)

Fax: +852-31757932

Email: Andy.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. Website: www.hknsc.hk

Yes, indeed, I’ll get right on that.

Especially since they are so serious about their claims

Installed WordPress 2.7 Coltrane

Seth Anderson0 comment

A fairly simple upgrade, took less than a few minutes.

The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.

Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)

[From WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane”]

Ask me in a week if I noticed anything major. I’ve almost spit out 1,000 entries1 in WordPress since installing it last May, certainly is much less frustrating an experience than using MoveableType ever was. Let me know if you see anything odd, will ya?

www.flickr.com

swanksalot's Your favorites photoset swanksalot’s Your favorites photoset

Footnotes:
  1. this will be number 967, if you want precision [↩]

WordPress Week 9 update

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sometimes just publicly complaining is enough to fix problems. I haven’t noticed errors recently. So culprit was probably LibraryThing, Amazon, LastFM, or a combination of the three, or something else unrelated. I know you were just dying to know…

I have a bad problem with cluttering up my sidebars – I want my blog to resemble my office, which is nearly always thick with piles of papers, notebooks, newspapers, magazine, books, CDs, DVDs, coffee cups, half-eaten food, and cat toys. Perhaps the error was warning to clean my act up! Or not, I’m sure in a week or two, I’ll have a bunch of crap everywhere.

Oh, and while I’m bloviating about non-important topics,1 there is a new option: subscription by email, courtesy of FeedBurner. If you click the link in the upper right column (appropriately enough: subscribe to B12 Solipsism by Email), and follow the simple directions, you’ll receive a fairly nicely formatted HTML email theoretically every morning between 7 AM and 9 AM containing all the new content for the day. If it doesn’t work for whatever reason, I’ll be happy to help (if I can, of course).

Footnotes:
  1. unless you are me, then every topic is the most important topic, at that moment [↩]

Word Press Week 9

Seth Anderson2 Comments

First real problem with WordPress. Avert your eyes if technical talk hurts your brain.

Friday night (I believe), I made some changes, installed a couple of plugins, and generally futzed around. Saturday I noticed pages never finished loading. Glancing at the error console in Safari, I see reams of errors that read something like:

SyntaxError: Parse error

http://www.b12partners.net/wp/2008/06/29/the-best-god-joke-ever/function%20(iterator,%20context)%20{%20%20var%20index%20=%200;%20%20iterator%20=%20iterator.bind(context);%20%20try%20%20%20{%20%20%20%20this._each(function%20(value)%20%20%20%20{%20%20%20%20%20%20iterator(value,%20index++);%20%20%20%20});%20%20}%20%20catch%20(e)%20%20{%20%20%20%20if%20(e%20!=%20$break)%20%20%20%20%20%20throw%20e;%20%20}%20%20return%20this;} (line 1)

and:

Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /wp/function (object) { if (Object.isFunction(this.indexOf)) if (this.indexOf(object) != -1) return true; var found = false; this.each(function (value) { if (value == object) { found = true; throw $break; } }); return found;} on this server.

Goes on forever, hundreds of these. This can’t be good, I thought, so have tried these fixes:

turn off all plugins (no change).

turn off all recently addeded plugins (no change)

remove widgets (the sidebar column elements). This is sort of a pain if a widget is hand-created (such as the Google ad widget), once you remove it, it isn’t available to be put back. Moveable Type is superior in this instance – every widget was saved individually, and you can mix and match at your leisure.

Switching to different themes

Replacing the templates from originals for the theme I had been using, in case some garbage code got introducedToggled:

WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically

because I did change this recently.

Crap. What next?

WordPress usage notes

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Loneliness of the Parking Marker

WP notes from day 1.3 of use. 

  • No javascript-based widgets, meaning some of my sidebar elements will have to die (like the one I wanted most, additions to my librarything catalog. Oh well, less clutter is probably good for everyone.
  • Would like to be able to customize elements of individual pages/entries. The sidebar for the main page seems like it could contain more items than the individual pages, but as far as I can tell, they are required to be identical. Point for MT.
  • There are seemingly a gazillion plugins for WP. I’ve added a few, and am on the lookout for more. Installation is a breeze -upload a folder to /wp-content/plugins/, activate, and you are set. 
  • Speaking of, installed a Flickr gallery plugin that I wanted to try for a long time. If you want to see how it looks, go to http://www.b12partners.net/wp/photos/. For some reason, the ending slash in the URL is required (photos/). Just click it, and wait a second for the images to load. I haven’t yet figured out how to embed images directly in a post, probably because I’m running on fumes today (only 4 hours of sleep, don’t ask me why)
  • I don’t like the faint grey text on some sidebar elements, I will fix this once I have time to find the right CSS code.
  • I want to add a random image generator in the header (up at the top), but this will happen over some rainy weekend.

Blog Change

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I installed WordPress 2.5 last night, and have been playing around with it for a few hours. Seems so much more responsive than Movable Type, at least at the moment. I don’t know if that is because I have over 4,000 entries in MT, or because WP uses PHP, or if WP just is faster. MT gives one more control over the layout (templates for every page, archive, index), but this control also makes MT much more complicated to configure. I never did get the category archive to work properly, and gave up after struggling with the formatting for hours. Also, about every 3rd post made in MT doesn’t complete the first time, I have to repost up to five times to get a proper response (though, this could be webhost-related, but then doesn’t happen in WP).

Not sure what will happen in the near future, but for now, new content will be found here more likely than here. The only change is “/mt” to “/wp” at the end (http://www.b12partners.net/mt/ to http://www.b12partners.net/wp/ )
Please adjust your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly. (I’d suggest keeping both active at least for a moment: a bit wishy-washy of me, but I have a lot of time invested in Movable Type.)

publishing failure
case in point – even publishing this entry took 4 attempts in MT, and 4 seconds in WP.

Also – if you notice anything weird, please let me know (comments not being accepted, page loading oddly, Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! anything)