You might be wondering what these “Shared” posts are. Most of my web surfing consists of reading my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, all 146 of them. On a given day I might find one or two things that I think other people would want to read. Google Reader lets you share items with your “friends”, but there’s no way to have a discussion about the content.
A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those “shared” items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have Wordpress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.
Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn’t an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.
So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I’d love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.
Tagged with: blogging, google reader, internet, plugin, rss, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Just realized you don’t have to subscribe to a feed in Google Reader to share something you find on the Internet. Under “Your Stuff” they added “Notes” a while back. On that page there’s a bookmark you can drag to the bookmark toolbar, click it, add a note and share the note in your Shared items. Highlight text on the page and it will prepopulate the description field with it. If you can’t see my shared items, send me a chat invitation in Gmail; pretty sure that’s the only way to become “friends” in Google Reader. Added a test note of a chart from Ross Perot’s perotcharts.com.
Tagged with: gmail, google reader, internet, rss
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Firefox 2 added spell checking in text areas, but I just found a little tweak that extends spell checking to inline text boxes. Big help for keeping blog titles and such spelled correctly. Here’s how:
- Type about:config in the address bar, hit enter
- Filter on spellcheckDefault
- Double click the entry and change the value to 2
Also if you haven’t upgraded to Firefox 3 go grab it right now. Lots of memory leaks have been fixed and overall things are much more responsive.
Tagged with: firefox, internet, software
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Finished moving myself, The Blarg and Mike over to the new host. We’ve got lots of space and bandwidth so just have to find something to do with it. If anyone is getting tired of their Blogger or Wordpress.com blogs and wants more flexibility I can hook you up. Blogger’s commenting system sucks so I would be happy to help migrate any converts.
Tagged with: blogging, web hosting, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I got fed up with the poor performance and stability of ResellerZoom’s server so I’m jumping ship over to Lunarpages. $2 less a month for a much better environment. I’m transfering my domain registration over to them since they’ll renew it for free for life. This might lead to some downtime but fear not I’ll be back.
Tagged with: domain, web hosting, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Tags have become a big part of Wordpress. Back in the day we had categories and that’s it. A user could search the site for keywords, but categorizing a post couldn’t be accomplished without a ton of categories. Recently I added a bunch of categories, reassigned my posts into them and ended up with a lot of categories with only a few posts in them. I had been resisting the movement towards tagging and wanted to hold onto my categories. In WP 2.5 tags have been integrated into the core and it is clear there is a role for tagging.
The main issue I was having with categories is that I was using them to say what a post is about. For example, if I had a post about our wedding, it went in the Wedding category. But once our wedding was over I had like 10 posts sitting in a category that would never be added to. With tags I can place those posts into “Life Stuff” and tag it with wedding. The category becomes a general bucket and the tags describe exactly what the post is about.
I’ve made some theme changes and added a list of tags on each post. I went back through all my posts, recategorized them into my core categories and added tags. Now I have 8 categories and over 100 tags which will be much easier to manage and will keep me from trying to stuff my posts into overly specific categories.
Tagged with: blogging, categories, tagging, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
You might have noticed links look different on my site. I had them styled without an underline for a long time and I realized I need to practice what I preach. Some usability issues came up at work recently and articles I read made me reevaluate my own site. The most glaring usability infraction were my link styles. I had removed the underline and bolded links because it looked good. Bold text is normally used to add emphasis, but I changed that to represent links to other content. When it comes to usability, changing an accepted and widely understood standard is simply unforgivable. End users might not pick up on things like this, but it can impact their experience in a very negative way.
Tagged with: internet, usability, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
There’s a ton of headphone/earphone/canalphone/earbud options out on the market and it can be hard to filter through the crap and find headphones that perform well while keeping aesthetics in mind. The white earbuds that come with Ipods have become a staple on college campuses where they help complete that all important hipster look, but they don’t do much for the music you’re listening to.
A few years ago I came across the Koss SportaPro headphones and was very impressed with their sound and comfort level. I handed those down to the wife to work out with and looked for another pair to use at work (programming requires good tunes). My requirements weren’t too strict:
- Reasonably priced (under $50)
- Good sound quality
- On ear pads to allow in ambient noise (to avoid startling taps on the shoulder)
- Comfortable and easy to put on and remove
These few parameters helped eliminate a lot of products. I eventually ended up looking at the Sennheiser PX 100’s, another pair of SportaPro’s, and Grado SR60’s (pricier and bulkier than I wanted). This review at Dan’s Data finally sold me on the Sennheisers and I couldn’t be happier.
In the 2-3 years I’ve had the PX 100’s I estimate I’ve put 1500-2000 hours of music through them. The best way to describe how they sound is that they don’t sound like headphones. They’re clear and fairly detailed without being fatiguing in the high end and quite possibly pump out the perfect amount of bass. I highly recommend the Sennheiser PX 100’s if you are looking for a good moderately priced pair of cans.
Sennheiser PX 100 (black)
Sennheiser PX 100 (white)
Tagged with: audio, gear, music, review
Posted under: Geek Stuff
The Blarg announced his number of visits a while back and I thought I’d take a look at some of my stats. I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while and I’ve got data back to Sept 2006. I started my blog in Oct 2005, but traffic would have been negligible that first year, maybe add 5% onto these numbers. So where do I stand?
- Unique Visitors: 47,295
- Visits: 61,400
- Pageviews: 102,244
Not bad. My Wordpress plugins make up the majority of my traffic, about 55% of the page views. A lot of those are single visit bounces, probably because I don’t have my sidebar up on individual pages; might be a good thing to change. A couple other interesting factoids:
- About 98% of visitors have a screen resolution larger than 800×600
- 58.5% were using Firefox vs 31% for IE
I’ve been wanting to do a redesign and it might be safe to finally push out towards 900-1000 pixel wide layouts. Still have to take into account that people don’t run their browsers maximized all the time.
Tagged with: google, traffic
Posted under: Geek Stuff
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