I upgraded the WordPress installation that runs this weblog to version 2.6 today from my new iPhone while waiting for an iced tea at Starbucks! I used the InstantUpgrade plugin for WordPress that I installed to upgrade to version 2.5 a while ago and it seems to work very well.
Tag: Weblog
Bad Blogger
Posted by – September 22, 2007
I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. I haven’t written a post in ages! Well, what better way to remedy this situation than by starting up a new blog, one for my wife and I. It can be found at Melissa & Shane.
More from this blog will be coming shortly.
FeedBurner
Posted by – June 4, 2007
I have just now signed up for FeedBurner. I have been remiss in my studies of what is going on with this blog. In an attempt to remedy that, I have switched the feeds over to FeedBurner and I have included this site in my Google Analytics account.
FeedBurner takes care of tracking who is reading my weblog with a number of the vast variety of feed readers. I am using the plugin “FeedSmith” that was recently acquired by FeedBurner from Steve Smith of Ordered List.
Google Analytics tracks who, what, when and where people are viewing this weblog from. In the early days of everday I used Google Anayltics and had a few people view this site from every continent, except Antarctica.
Hopefully these tools will help stoke the newly ignited flames of blogging within me.
WordPress 2.2
Posted by – May 16, 2007
I just upgraded this weblog to use WordPress 2.2. I have been rather pleased with WordPress, it is fully functional and seems very mature. The upgrade process went smoothly and I didn’t run into any problems (yet!).
Consuming RSS Feeds in WordPress
Posted by – April 2, 2007
The problem:
I wanted to display a list of the most recent articles from the various weblogs I read frequently. I used to use Google Reader, and it’s ability to share a group of “tagged”. This feature worked well when I was using my own weblog engine as I could re-format Google’s RSS feed anyway I wanted. Well, since moving over to a WordPress (WP) blog, I have lost some of that capability (it is actually there, I am just not familiar enough with WP yet). Not to worry, as a solution always exists if you ask Google nicely!
The solution
The details:
- Install FeedList
- Create a Yahoo! Pipe
- Get your pipe’s feed address
- Put the pipe’s feed address in the FeedList code
- Refresh your browser!
Pretty simple huh? I intially tried doing all of this with the WP Widget plugin and the RSS Widget. The problem with this solution is that I didn’t like the way that the Google feed was displayed with the RSS Widget. Google’s feed points back to Google Reader, and I didn’t want that to show up on my weblog, I just wanted a plain aggregation of the various feeds I read on a daily basis. So after deciding to scrap that approach, I searched Google for an RSS feed consumer for WP. Once I had installed the FeedList plugin, I had to figure out a way to get all the various feeds into the plugin! The FeedList plugin will aggregate a number of feeds into one list, but again the control issue reared it’s ugly head. In order to better control what was displayed I had to use a different tool to combine the feeds, then use FeedList to display them. Enter Yahoo! Pipes. This is an odd little tool, but it proved extremely useful in this situation. With Yahoo! Pipes, you can combine, sort, analyze and generally smoosh around data from many different sources. I was able to, rather easily, wire up a little feed combinator and pass the URL for that to FeedList. The results are a nice little list of properly formatted weblog entries from the various weblogs I read, right there in the sidebar for your viewing pleasure.
Comments
Posted by – March 21, 2007
Alright people… Listen up! I received a few requests to enable comments on this blog. Well, I did, a while ago, and guess what… No comments!!! Please leave me comments, I beg you. It is the only reason to continue my pitiful online existence.
Moving Day…
Posted by – March 2, 2007
This is my second major move, and this one was WAY less painful. I decided to change my web hosting company from Textdrive to DreamHost. Textdrive has been good to me, but in the recent past the server that I was on required entirely too many reboots from the administrators at Textdrive. As a result of this, my websites were going down for anywhere from a few minutes to as long as a number of hours. While I don’t run any Fortune 500 companies on Textdrive, I do think the server crashes are unacceptable. I think Textdrive may do a better job of handling large websites that aren’t sitting on “shared” servers, but the nature of the openess of their servers meant that any one of the people doing development on the server could bring it down. I don’t require that sort of configurability, so DreamHost should work beautifully for me.
That being said, I will be working to customize the look and fell of this WordPress powered weblog of mine. Now with commenting! My previous “roll your own” approach to weblogging left me wanting for a few features, and while I could have programmed those features, I really never could find/make the time. Hopefully this new weblog engine will reinvigorate my enthusiasm for writing.
Validation
Posted by – October 13, 2006
I have been writing in this weblog (and it’s various previous incarnations) for a while now, and it has been very satisfying. That satisfaction grew exponentially today when I was looking through Google Reader at my favourite blogs and noticed that one of the more inspirational blogs for me, Signal vs. Noise, had their own an entry referring to a previous entry of mine that I wrote a while ago about a little feature of eBay’s signup process. I feel completely validated. While I don’t write anything here for fame or fortune (although the latter would be most welcome), it is nice to see my name and an entry that I wrote referred to on a weblog from a comapny that I truly admire.
Striking It Rich!
Posted by – September 22, 2005
According to an article by Adam L. Penenberg on Wired News, striking it rich from blogging isn’t all that difficult. All I need is to learn how to write about 5 compelling entries per day, create brand recognition, increase my traffic exponentially and find some blue-chip companies willing to pay me to advertise their products or services. Easy right?
