Tag: site

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meta

No Working Title

Following the wise lead of Laura I am changing the title here to be more reflective of my focus. I have been at this long enough to recognize the kinds of things that I write about here. For some time I have felt that “Recovering Technophile” was not a very good fit. I tend to write about political and social issues more than technology, or even anti-technology. The only problem is that I haven’t thought of an acceptable title yet. Suggestions are more than welcome for both the Title and the Subtitle.

Categories
meta technology

The Way Things Work

I spent a great deal of time working on a post that I thought might become a classic on my blog. The day after I posted it I got comments (real comments, not spam) on another post that was not even on my front page anymore. The comments quickly built to the point that it was obvious that the older post was a classic. I found myself wondering why the old post had suddenly been discovered. Then I noticed that the old post was listed as a related post to the one I had just posted. Obviously people were reading the post and got interested enough to look at the related posts. Apparently this helped some readers discover the post that would become the classic.

This just goes to validate the effort that I went to in adding plugins to show related posts. Hopefully the classic-posts plugin will help to assure that those posts which are of interest to my readers will never be lost in the archives. This all just goes to prove that Joshua Porter was right in his lessons for would-be bloggers about the value of linking to other posts and displaying your best work even after it is off the front page.

Categories
technology

Posting Rich Text Email

I have created a hack for wp-mail.php that allows rich text emails to be processed. I call it wp-mail-rich. To use it you simply copy the wp-mail-rich.php file in the folder where WordPress is installed (where the wp-mail.php
file is) and use wp-mail-rich.php in place of wp-mail.php. If you have a cron job, just point it to the new file. To rollback just point it back to the old file.

I have also included some files that I used to test and develop this – in case anyone wanted to make further modifications. Instructions are in the readme.txt file.

Download wp-mail-rich.

I have only tested this with Gmail so it is possible that other rich text emails might not be exactly right coming from Yahoo, Hotmail, or your company mail server. Let me know if this is the case.

Categories
meta technology

Classic Posts

I have been wanting to implement a “greatest hits” section in my sidebar ever since I read the lessons for would-be bloggers. Yesterday I discovered the classic posts plugin from Chris vs Chris which displays posts which you have designated as “classic.” That sounded like the kind of thing I wanted, except that I was looking for a sidebar list. I added a function to their plugin which returns a list of posts rather than the posts themselves. I also discovered that their plugin does not successfully handle selecting and deselecting posts as being “classic” if you are on anything except the default list of posts – in other words it only works on the last 15 posts. (I went into the database so that I cold manually select some older posts)

I have no particular desire to own this plugin so if Chris and Chris want to adopt my modification into their official plugin they are welcome to it. If they do I will link to their version of the file, but until then here is my version: Classic Posts plugin with List Option.

UPDATE: I found the error on the plugin (I had to add two characters to the code) and I have the working version up now (same link as before).

UPDATE 2: Chris has added my modification and the bug fix so I will include a link to the official version.

Categories
technology

Twitter

It seems that I can’t help but hear about Twitter. I’ve been hearing about it for a while from a number of people who’s technology opinions I respect. Again today I read more from Alan about Twitter. Twitter is one of those things I have not picked up but eventually I have to ask myself “why not?” Thankfully Alan’s post pointed me to an analysis of Twitter that explained why I have not touched it yet. Besides talking about what Twitter is (which I knew, and it’s fine even though I have not touched it) there is a comparison of what it’s like. It is compared to instant messaging, which is also fine, but I don’t use it much – it does not suit me as well as other tools. (By the way, someone ought to make a Web 2.0 version of Twitter, they could call it Warblr – I can’t believe the audacity of people who would leave all the vowels intact 😉 )

After reading the analysis I thought I should see if Twitter does have some use for me, even if it never consumes me. I decided that it might suit for the many articles that I come across which are worthy of a blog post but which I often never get back to posting about. I created a Twitter profile an then thought about what I was doing. I remembered del.icio.us which is for bookmarking pages like I was thinking. When I first heard about del.icio.us my thoughts were much like Twitter – fine, but it does not suit my patterns. Now my patterns have changed enough that it might be a good fit. I created an account and I am starting to mark pages that I might want to post about later. When I get time I will get that list displayed in my sidebar in case anyone out there cares to read the things that I’d like to post about but never do.

Categories
meta technology

Post by Email

I finally have the Post-by-Email working in WordPress. There is one catch – the body of the post only shows up if the message is sent in plain text. No “rich formatting” or other high-and-mighty “My email client is better than what was available 15 years ago” shenanigans.

Add this to the fact that I have to go edit the post later if I want it anywhere but the default category, or if I want to add tags or anything else besides text, and you can be sure that I will only use email as a place to compose posts that are still in the formative stages. I will also be looking at other plugins with more versatility in this department.

Enough griping, it’s still a new feature for me so this may be a small step, but it’s a forward step.

Update: There is another catch – extra line breaks show up when posting this way – definitely not for regular use.

Categories
life technology

Technology and Gardening

So I could be posting about national news items, but instead I spent my spare time today working on a gardening wiki. Laura wanted to keep notes on the plants that we have planted with some of the more vital statistics such as when to prune them and how well they thrive for us. I decided that a TiddlyWiki was a very good format to keep such notes because these wikis are very portable, the entire site is in a single file, and they allow you to cross reference notes and link between notes so that it becomes a very versatile note-taking system. I have actually started using TiddlyWikis for a variety of note-taking projects at home and at work.

After I got started on the project I thought it would be fun to put it on my website so that I could access it and update it from anywhere. To do that I used MiniTiddlyServer (MTS) which allows makes a server environment for TiddlyWikis. Normally they are displayable on the web but not they can’t be updated online without some help. I think that MTS is the best tool to give that help that I have seen. Admittedly I work with Sean Hess, who created MTS, but even if I didn’t know him I would consider this to be a fine piece of work. The first version of MTS that I used was only 9 files zipped up to less than 100Kb. The version I am using now is much bigger (over 500Kb – still very small) and much more powerful.

This opens up a world of future possibilities. For the present, anyone can see what I am planting in my gardens (flower and vegetable). Later I may choose to allow others to contribute to the wiki by invitation. Eventually I could choose to open parts of it up for general comment and contribution. MTS can do that kind of thing, the question is, “will I want to try it?” The answer is, “time will tell.”

Categories
meta

Site Feeds

I learned a new thing about the feeds on my site today. I thought it was worth sharing. If anyone is interested in only reading the posts from a specific category they can subscribe to that category. The URL for the feed would be http://www.davidjmiller.org/category/categoryname/feed/

This or something like it should get you category-specific feeds from any WordPress blog (depending on the settings of the blog).

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meta

Cleaning House

I love finding new resources from the people I read. Today that led me to Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog. The result is that I am rethinking what I am doing here. My focus has been fairly vague and I have felt it in my writing. Also, between this post and the Lessons for Would-Be Bloggers I have a couple of changes I would like to make to the presentation of my site.

I am rethinking my categories and hoping that I can clean things up so that there is less clutter and more clarity. Wish me luck.

Categories
meta

Moving Details

There are always so many little things to making a move complete. Yesterday I took the time to move all my self-referenced links. When I revisit a topic I have previously covered I try to link to my previous post(s). When I moved from blogger all those links still pointed to the posts on blogger. Once i moved the links they were added to the comments for the posts they pointed to, but the dates were all “March 7th” so I had to go through those new comments and change the timestamp to match the time of the posts they were coming from. With less than a year of posts to cover it was not too long a task, but I’m glad to have that done.