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
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
I went through my posts and found that more than half of them were simply dumped in the “Uncategorized” category that comes with Wordpress. I realized that I didn’t like my categories and they were actually obstacles to me posting. I went through and added categories for what I had posted and want to post about in the future. I ditched a few and added catchall categories like “Life” and “Geek” to cover some of those miscellaneous posts. Also any post with a picture I took got stuck in “Photography”. I guess my New Year’s resolution for 2008 is to make my blog more interesting and cover more topics that I enjoy. For example, I love movies, but it seems I haven’t posted once about them. The Movies category is empty and having it there will encourage me to post on that specific topic.
Tagged with: blogging, categories, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I use the plugin Bad Behavior on top of Aksimet to stop spam on my blog and something went strange with the old version I have; a blacklist started coming back with false positives but it has been fixed. So if you couldn’t post a comment try again.
Tagged with: blogging, spam, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Just posted a comment and realized everything has been off an hour since the switch to daylight savings. Yeah for Wordpress not handling it but like for all WP annoyances there is a plugin, Time Zone. Activate and set timezone to “America/Los_Angeles” and all is good.
Tagged with: daylight savings, plugin, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
A new version of Wordpress (2.1 to be exact) is out and has a fair number of upgrades but if you have a lot of plugins then be careful that some of them might not be updated yet. Since I develop 3 plugins I have had 2.1 on a beta install and updated my plugins but I’m taking the plung right now. I’ll be posting new versions of my plugins right now too.
Test
Tagged with: wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
My blog isn’t terribly popular but I do have a good number of links to my plugins which has made me a more visible target for comment spammers. The built-in Wordpress spam filter does a pretty good job but it does nothing to stop bots from hammering my blog and eating up bandwith. One of my friends in my extended blog network had a post that tipped me off to a more active method of spam prevention, Bad Behavior.
Bad Behavior works by analyzing the HTTP requests made by clients and running them through a set of tests like checking the user agent description. Before installing the script I was receiving about 200 spam comments per day and maybe 1 or 2 would slip through per week. Now I’ll get maybe 1 a day in my spam queue. Not sure how much this affects the bandwith the spammers are using but it will definetely save a little on database.
Tagged with: blogging, spam, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
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