Tag: site

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life thoughts

Poorly Written Terms

Orrin Hatch invited people to comment at his blog on an op-ed he wrote. I decided to go share my thoughts and saw on his comments form that I was required to accept “terms of usage” to leave a comment. That’s fine, but I’m not one to accept terms without looking at them. Here’s what I found:

terms

In case the image is not clear the terms read:

By submitting your comments we reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete your comments and portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice.

According to those terms, Hatch (or his election comittee) can put words into my mouth and there’s nothing I can do about it. I admit that I don’t think that is their real intent, but they could do a better job at drafting the terms to do what they want to do. I suspect that what they really want to do would be fully covered by terms such as the following:

By submitting your comments we reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to delete your comments and to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice.

There should be no reason for them to ever add to my comments and there is no reason why I should be at their editing mercy of changing or modifying my comments. Though I keep a very open comment policy on my sites I allow that others may choose to delete comments at their sites. I will no longer comment at Hatch’s blog so long as those terms remain unchanged – if I have anything to say I’ll say it at my site.

Update 5/8/09 @ 10:32 AM: I just got a message from Orrin’s staff that the terms of usage had been changed. I very much like the new terms:

By submitting your comments we reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to delete your comments, and modify these Terms of Use at any time without further notice. In addition, HatchForSenate.com uses an automated process that removes words from comments that may be offensive.

Categories
meta technology

OpenID Enabled

I have been using OpenID for quite a while to comment on various blogs at Blogger. I never really considered it necessary to use here since I don’t require registration of any kind here – totally anonymous comments are fine becauseof great spam protection. On the other hand, people often want to leave some information and if they have an OpenID they might as well be able to use it. Because of that I finally installed the plugin called OpenID which not only allows people to use their OpenID to leave comments, but also allows me to use my own site as my OpenID – no more third-party site. (It would also allow people to make user accounts here with their OpenID’s if I allowed outsiders to register accounts on my site.)

I don’t expect that this will have any major effect on anyone, but if anyone finds OpenID useful because of this then I am ahppy to have shared. For myself, I like the fact that I have full control over my online ID and that I only have to remember my own domain name at many other sites.

Categories
life meta

Cascading Changes

After splitting my political blogging onto another domain I realized that the change in focus here would necessitate some other changes such as a more appropriate set of features and a different theme. I realized that I had taken two years of experimenting to finally get the right setup to foster the dialog on political matters. I figure I have a headstart here since the purpose is a bit simpler and I have two years of experience that I did not have when I started Pursuit of Liberty. I don’t think this will take anywhere near two years to get the right setup to make this personal site operate like I want.

Today I unveil a new theme – it’s not complete, but it’s a start away from being a copy of what I had before splitting the sites.

Categories
life meta

New Domain

I have been wanting to get a more suitable domain name for Pursuit of Liberty for some time and I have been wanting to do some less political writing (family journal type) here. I finally took the plunge and purchased pursuitofliberty.net (I’m looking into getting pursuitofliberty.com, but while the current owner mulls multiple offers I decided to move ahead with something). Nothing is being removed here although anyone who actually visits the site will see that I have gone back to a previous theme. This will start to be updated less frequently and less politically and I will be developing a more personal theme that fits the different focus of my website. I have imported all the posts of any political nature at the new domain and will continue to write politically as I have been doing – minus the really non-political stuff. For those who are interested in my political writing, here is the new feed. I hope that everyone can make the transition smoothly with me so that all the great comments keep coming.

For those few people who have long wished that I would talk more about my family (Mom) your wish is granted, and you don’t even need to remember a new URL.

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meta

Two Years (By One Way of Reckoning)

Last year I recorded my first year back to blogging. I recorded the statistics at the time and set a goal to average one post per day. In the last year I have:

  • 365 posts
  • 1364 comments
  • ~20,000 spam comments (the spam count got reset when I upgraded to WP 2.5 so the count listed is 9100)

I have more posts this year than comments last year, more comments this year than spam comments last year, and obviously more spam comments (I’d hate to be ignored by the spammers). I have also imported posts and comments from before my 8 month blogging hiatus so my totals right now are 735 posts and 1749 comments (as a future point of reference).

I do not anticipate reporting statistics yearly, but anytime I do choose to do an anniversary post in the future I will mark the anniversary on June 23rd (the day I first started blogging in 2004) rather than August 14th. It’s been very rewarding to see more people commenting and helping to refine my thinking. Thanks.

Categories
meta pictures technology

Similarity

I have been using Darren’s Related Posts plugin (DRPP) for a long time. For my purposes it was the best plugin for showing related posts that I had encountered. After a while I decided that I was not completely satisfied with the way that it seemed to favor more recent posts. I developed a new algorithm that I felt would not give preference to newer posts unless they were actually more related.

When I learned that WordPress would be adding native tag support in version 2.3 I decided that I would create my plugin to work with tags after they arrived. Life got busy so I never worked on the plugin until version 2.5 came out (partly because I wanted to convert the post_meta “keywords” from DRPP to tags). I finally buckled down and created my Similarity plugin this week. I have tested it on version 2.3.3 and version 2.5 (I assume it will work with any version of 2.3). I will continue to test it on new versions of WordPress as they are made public. (Przeczytaj opis wtyczki po polsku)

Latest Version 2.13.1 (September 9, 2009)

New options make it possible to layout and style the php function generated lists (for sidebars) independent of the auto-generated list. – Version 2.13 was released with an incomplete development copy of the plugin so it did not have the promised functionality. (In other words, “Pay attention Miller.”)

To install it simply unzip the file linked above and save it in your plugins directory under wp-content. In the plugin manager activate the plugin. Settings for the plugin may be altered under the Similarity page of the Options menu (version 2.3) or Settings menu (version 2.5 or later).

Options include:

  • Number of posts to show – this is a maximum, it won’t invent connections that don’t exist, set it to 0 (or less) and it will display all matches.
  • Minimum match strength – enter a number between zero and one (one being a perfect match) and items related weaker than the number indicated will not be included – this limit is ignored for the one extra if that option is used.
  • Default Display if no matches – if there are no matches this is what will be displayed, this is not displayed if there are matches, but fewer than the set maximum.
  • Text and Codes before the list – assuming you want to do a list this is where you would place the <ul> or <ol> You may also place any other code you would like to have preceeding the list. (There are two boxes here – one for function calls in your template and one for auto-generated lists.)
  • Text and Codes after the list – this would be the place for </ul> or </ol> You may also place any other code you would like to have following the list.(There are two boxes here – one for function calls in your template and one for auto-generated lists.)
  • Output template – this would be where you place the <li> tags. (There are two boxes here – one for function calls in your template and one for auto-generated lists.) There are also 4 template tags you may use (in any configuration you can imagine) to define how the results are displayed
    • {link} – provides a link – equivelent to <a href=”{url}”>{title}</a>
    • {strength} – outputs the calculated degree of relatedness
    • {url} is the permalink for the related post
    • {title} is the title for the related post
  • Display format for similarity strength – Value displays the {strength} in a decimal format (0.873), Percent displays the {strength} in a percentage format (87.3%), Text displays {strength} as a word (Strong, Mild, Weak, and Tenuous are the defaults), and Visual displays a color block (Green for 100% fading to Yellow and then to Red for weak connections)
  • Relative mixing weights – these values determine the ratio given to the weight of tags vs categories when using the sim_by_mix function. Invalid ratios are treated as a 1 to 1 balance.
  • Custom text for strength – allows you to insert custom text (including markup) for the strength indicator when using the text display format. (Hint: using markup allows for the possibility of showing custom images.)
  • Show one more random related post – dig deeper into the related post list with one random selection (you can set a minimum strength for these random items).
  • Auto-display a Similarity list at the end of a single post – without modifying any templates.

The plugin allows for three function calls anywhere in your page templates or their shortcodes in text widgets (all use the same options):

  • <?php sim_by_tag(); ?> – determines similarity based on the tags applied to the posts (shortcode: SIM-BY-TAG)
  • <?php sim_by_cat(); ?> – determines similarity based on the categories assigned to the posts (shortcode: SIM-BY-CAT)
  • <?php sim_by_mix(); ?> – determines similarity based on the tags and the categories with the relative weights determined by the relative mixing weights setting (shortcode: SIM-BY-MIX)

Alternately you may choose to auto-display any of the similarity lists at the end of posts on single-post pages without getting into the php by selecting the function you wish to auto-display on the Similarity options page.

Categories
meta technology

Archive Menu

I have created a new theme for my site (more like what I was unable to create before) which should render correctly in any browser. I know that the old theme was quirky in Internet Explorer. As part of creating this new theme I had to make a new plugin for WordPress. It’s called Archive Menu and it displays the archives as a two layer list of years and months. I took most of the code from Compact Archive by Rob Marsh (http://rmarsh.com/plugins/compact-archives/). I loved that plugin in my last theme, but it displayed in a very abbreviated format which would not work for the menu I was trying to create. This plugin displays the menus more like the standard monthly archive function of WordPress broken up in to years.

Once I have fully polished my theme I will release the code I used to implement the Archive Menu but I want to make the plugin available before then. Download the plugin here.

Categories
life

Expectations

I am discovering that I rarely find time to post on the weekends lately. Part of that is a result of having put off so many things around the house and the yard, combined with the sheer effort of scout camp, youth conference, DevCon, and the marathon. Things are getting better, but I have concluded after this weekend that I need to lower my expectations for weekend posting. I don’t know if this will be temporary or permanent. I’ll be trying to post daily during the week, but I have no exectations for the weekends. It will depend on how I feel and what I have going on.

This week I am looking forward to going to Education Week classes in the evenings at BYU. I will be among those blogging about Education Week for LDS Newsline. Here is the RSS feed for that. It will be interesting to see the results of this effort (mine effort and the efforts of all the other people blogging about Education Week).

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meta

One Year

Today marks one year since I started this blog. Considering that I had done significant blogging in the three years before that you would have thought it would be stable, but I have been through 2 blogging platforms, 3 name changes, and a variety of styles. In that year this blog has had:

  • 311 posts
  • 360 comments
  • 1355 spam comments caught

That’s an average of 6 posts per week. I’m hoping for one per day in the future. I don’t anticipate any name changes or platform changes in the future, but I am working on making a new style that will not have the major bugs with Internet Explorer that this one has. Hopefully it will have all the functionality of my current style when I get it up but I expect it to have a nicer layout and improved navigation. I look forward to an even better second year than this first year was.

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meta

Stable Title

Feeling that “No Working Title” was a disservice to my blog I implemented “Cause of Liberty” for a short period of time. I wasn’t totally satisfied with that and while playing around with words and fielding suggestions, I came to “Pursuing Liberty” and “Pursuit of Liberty.” Based on feedback from my best adviser (Laura) I went with “Pursuit of Liberty.” After letting it stew at the top of my blog for a while I have decided to keep it.