WordPress Community
18.Mar.06
2 Comments
Ya know? The WordPress community — all the volunteers, theme and plugin developers and folks who just want to help — are some great folks. I hang out at the WP Support forums frequently. Folks there were very helpful to me when I was learning this thing and, as a result, I try to “give a little back” and answer questions where I can (although I keep waiting for a moderator to tell me to go away, I’m hoping I provide some value). I’m even pondering building my own little “WordPress FAQ” type page just to give me a handy place to store links. The search is pretty borked there and a lot of folks aren’t comfortable with using “site:wordpress.org/support” type searching at their search engine of choice so the similar questions come up frequently.
(brings up a minor rant: I wish the folks that own/manage/run the wordpress.org site would give it a bit of attention. Stuff has been broken there for quite some time now and it grows a bit, shall we say, tedious working around it)
I’ve exchanged emails with several theme and plugin developers and found them to be very helpful and responsive. In fact, last night I was chatting with the developer of the Sitemap Generator plugin that I’m using. Super nice guy (assuming guy, but maybe gal? Like I care) and we spent several hours debugging and hacking at it to entice into doing something it wasn’t really intended to do — plop a sitemap directly on my 404 error page. We ended up with a bit of a work-around that works for now. I bet we dinked around on it for at least 2 hours via IM. It was after midnight before we called it good enough (and I have no clue what timezone they are in!).
This afternoon I received an email indicating that there’s good news and some changes in the works. How cool is that? I’ve had similar experiences with a few other folks just like that.
Another example of a flexible plugin author can be found in this older thread (scroll down a bit to the Notable section). Again, he went the extra mile to come up with something that we were both happy with. Now, as I write this, I’m not currently using his plugin, but I will have it going again. Was busy “simplifying” my theme pages a bit today to make sure I had a handle on how it all works…
Inbox Zero project
13.Mar.06
2 Comments
I’ve been following, with great interest, the Inbox Zero series over at 43 Folders. I’m starting to wonder if I’m just hopeless about email though. I think I’ll be re-reading these articles yet tonight. Gotta love something that starts like this:
Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.
Amen, brother.
The genesis of this series was his Email DMZ post from January of this year. Then, in February we had the Email Ninja article. Both interesting at the time, and both a bit overwhelming — for me, at least.
The rest of the site is nifty too, he really writes some interesting stuff on a variety of topics. And that all reminds me that I really need to pick up that Getting Things Done book soon (Rich or Peter — is it this one?).
Frankenputer!
11.Mar.06
One Comment
My wife and son(s) share a computer here in the home office. And they suffer greatly from the “who will shoe the cobbler’s family” syndrome (yeah, I paraphrased). Actually, my own home machine is getting a bit dated for that matter (barton 2500+). But they had it much worse — the mighty Duron 750. Sure, it had 512MB and was running a (recently) clean install of win2k Pro, but it was getting to be too gimpy. I felt guilty watching the wife work with photos, for example.
[side comment: Ghz don't matter. Want to surf the web and check email (like 90% of the world seems to do)? That 750, or my daughter's 500mhz PIII are MORE than adequate. Dated? Sure. Capable? Yep. Almost all of my home stuff is based off of things folks were looking to dump and I tend to find that just silly.]
Confession: that duron unit had one major issue — it would completely freeze at least once a day. I suspected the video card at first. GeForce 4200ti with some miles on it and a dead fan. However, I was starting to suspect the NIC, of all things, towards the end. Seemed like it would lock up most predictably when moving data to or from network shares. IRQ’s seemed fine. *shrug* In fact, I couldn’t back it up directly to the server today. Locked up hard 3 times in a row as soon as I’d start copying her “My Docs.” I had to access her machine and her share from my machine and act as the middle guy. Which worked fine. Weird, but worked.
A great friend was doing some upgrade work for some of his friends and donated some parts this past week. In other words, their old junk. An older ECS mobo with a AMD 1500+ CPU, 512MB and, the coup de grace, a GF4200ti 128MB card with a working fan. Well heck! We got ourselves an upgrade in the making. Today I picked up a new NIC for $14 at Walmart and, using the old (very old. like 7 years old) case/PSU and drives (20GB hd, 52x CD) cobbled together something that sure feels a helluva lot faster.
Assembly was a breeze. It all worked on the first power up. That’s always a great feeling! Got (licensed) XP Pro going and patched and we’re still looking pretty solid. Only snag I hit was when I grabbed the newer gforce drivers from Windows Update. I should’ve known better, but this isn’t a gaming rig so it seemed logical at the time. That set me back to 4bit color in 640×480 mode until I went and got proper drivers from nVidia.com. Back on track after those were installed.
Thanks Hans — you and your friends rock.
A Ride Around Mars — sci-fi authors
11.Mar.06
7 Comments
I watched the NASA TV coverage of the Mars Recon Orbiter’s orbital insertion yesterday while at work. It was so very very cool and even a bit emotional when the orbiter popped out from the other side of Mars and they confirmed it was right where it was supposed to be! So nice to see that Mars won’t eat every thing we throw at it. Speaking of which, hilarious comment at slashdot. Man, I can’t wait for some of the mission data from this one.
The New Horizons (Pluto) mission is going to be great too. In 9 years…
Which reminds me: I need help finding some “new” sci-fi authors. I grew up reading Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein (among quite a few others, but they were the faves) so I like a bit of hard sci-fi and a bit of social/speculative sci-fi. If you have any author ideas, leave a comment please.
Pardon the dust and saw noise
04.Mar.06
4 Comments
Might be a little flaky here for the rest of the weekend. Due to my fearless nature, I’m hacking a new theme into place live. Heh. Originally I was doing it on my local wampserver installation, but had some issues with some of my plugins functioning in that environment so… here we are.
It started out life as the Contempt theme and I’m just tweaking header graphic, colors and such. Granted, colors aren’t a strong suit of mine… so feel free to holler if something is just too hideous for words.
[update]
In general, I’m pretty happy with it. IE7beta seems to puke on the banner stuff up top so still trying to figure out why I get a big white box there… IE6 does well, in fact it handles the page menu below the banner better than Opera and Firefox (!). Guess I need to look at that too. But in general, we’re up and we’re validated and reasonably happy with what it became.
Phase 2 of this, someday in the distant future, will involve giving it some “liquid” aspects… I’m not overly enamored of fixed width layout.
[update 2]
Think I got the weird page menu thing sorted out. While making this thing validate (and it does!) I had to wrap the “list” of pages (implemented as a styled list) in an unordered list tag set. Which promptly threw off FF and Opera rendering. Added a bit of style lovin’ to the CSS for that guy and I think I’m in decent shape there. IE6 remains happy. Even looks decent in safari, as far as I can tell.
IE7beta remains aloof and sometimes works…
On the other hand…OSX is a...
