Blog Software

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Information Diet

January 24, 2012 in Facebook, Twitter by Ezra S F |

Do we consume too much information? I might. Lately I have thought about reducing the amount of following I do. Typically I hit this point when I realize it takes me all weekend to catch up. To be fair I reach this point by getting all caught up over a long weekend and seeking out new stuff.

  • 40% the blog or news feeds (over 100),
  • 40% Facebook friends (remove over 250),
  • 40% Tumblr following, (remove 45),
  • 40% Twitter following (remove 100),

Then there are the potential stoppages:

  • Stop following tags on WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogspot, Flickr.
  • Stop using some social media sites entirely like Google+ or Diaspora.

Given my social preferences, I have lots of time to spend online.

WordPress+Facebook

February 17, 2011 in Blog Software, Facebook by Big Eazy |

Since I cannot use Facebook Apps over HTTPS, that put a wrinkle over using the NetworkedBlogs app. Because one had to go to their apps.facebook.com to do more than look at a post (goes to networkedblogs.com which shows my site in a frame) or view the app profile, I decided to ditch it. I decided to look for another way to facilitate the integration. I’m used to Twitter Tools which just posts to Twitter. I thought there should be an equivalent for my blog posts to end up as a Facebook link post (not as a Note).

So I started searching on WordPress for possible plugins. Many were out of date. Many were for functionality not useful to me. Eventually I started searching through Google which muddied the waters even more by giving me much older plugins.

  • Simple Facebook Connect required me to publish to WordPress then go back and hit a button to publish to Facebook. Lame.
  • Facebook Comments for WordPress pretty cool if all I wanted was comments. Really I wanted the posts to show up in my profile more.
  • WPBook sets the URL for each post to go through apps.facebook.com.

Wordbooker finally did what I want… It creates a post in my newsfeed for my blog which uses a link to my blog. I manage it through WordPress not Facebook apps.

I could be happy now. (Until I next get annoyed.)

Fix WP Numeric Broken Permalinks

January 23, 2011 in Blog Software by Big Eazy |

In the early days of my using WordPress, I set the permalinks setting (the URL format style) to Numeric. They looked like http://ezrasf.com/wplog/archives/3. On 2008-SEP-27 I changed the permalinks setting to the Day and Name. According to my broken links post each time WP autosaved a draft it incremented the number so the names were no longer sequential. The gaps annoyed me. The new setting hid those gaps. (No, I do not have OCD.) However, it meant

  1. all those links in posts to old permalinks no longer worked and
  2. anyone incoming from search engines hit permalinks who no longer worked.

The search engine problem worked itself out without any effort on my part. They recognized the 404 HTTP error code, dropped the bad page from the index on the next crawl. They also picked up the new posts.

I occasionally spent some time working on fixing broken links. However, the process of determining where the link should go took so much effort I rarely fixed more than a few links at a time. So I did not make the progress I would have liked.

Then I discovered the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress last weekend. It has been sending me notices about all my broken links. In desiring to shut it up, I had to spend time trying to fix those Numeric permalinks again. I noticed the format of a link in “Get Shortlink” buttons when I edit a post is the same as the Default permalink which look like http://ezrasf.com/wplog/?p=3. It seemed logical I could just replace “archives/” with “?p=” and fix the internal links. Sure enough, it worked. So I’ve cleared up the remaining internal broken links much more easily than I ever expected. It could only be easier if the broken link checker automatically did it.

The WordPress Codex says,

Find a post’s ID number and type the following (with your information) in your browser and you should be redirected to your post:

http://yourdomain.example.com/post/(the ID #)

Well, no matter what id number I use here, they go to the same post on 9/12. Weird. This would have been an even easier fix as I could double clicking on archives does not get the slash. Maybe it means I need something in the .htaccess to make it work correctly?

Meh. I am glad to have an easy solution. Annoyed it seems undocumented. Hope this helps someone else who has the same problem.

WordPress vs. Old Templates

December 9, 2010 in Blog Software by Ezra S F |

WordPress has neat new functionality to notify about and easily update templates. Apparently some of mine are so old they can no longer be updated? The result of trying was not removing the “.maintenance” file resulting an inaccessible blog. Easy enough to remove it once I looked up the problem. However, annoying that I was not given an error notice or anything useful.

Upgraded to WP3.0

June 20, 2010 in Blog Software by Big Eazy |

The upgrade to WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to have broken anything? Good.

It pointed out my Tarski theme was a point revision behind. That has also been upgraded. No apparent problems.

No need to go mess with code. That makes me verrrry happy.

Protected Post Password

January 10, 2010 in Blog Software by Big Eazy |

I imported all my LiveJournal posts here. Other than posting pictures to there from Flickr, I don’t really use LJ anymore. I rarely even read my friends’ blogs there. Too bad. I still have the teeshirt.

Most of my LJ posts are protected. For this site, I’d rather have them set to private. So the section of WordPress (Tools > Import > LiveJournal) saying this seemed relevant:

If you have any entries on LiveJournal which are marked as private, they will be password-protected when they are imported so that only people who know the password can see them.

If you don’t enter a password, ALL ENTRIES from your LiveJournal will be imported as public posts in WordPress.

Password protected seemed better than not, so I set a 30 character long password, and the form accepted all 30. When the password didn’t work, I logged in as the administrator user and looked at Publish > Visibility >

In my opinion, web forms in general should prevent the user from entering more characters than the application or database will take. Passwords are very exact, so forms for creating them definitely should not allow extraneous characters.

DDoS of Social Media

August 8, 2009 in Internet, Social, Social / IM / Chat by Ezra S F |

Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and other sites all admitted to suffering from a DDoS attack. It seem to me the purpose of a Denial-of-Service attack (DoS) against a web site is to flood it with so much traffic the site becomes unusable. The DDoS is where multiple other computers are coordinated into launching the attack.

All three of the above mentioned sites have had recent issues keeping up with growing usage. The USA inauguration and Iran demonstrations peaked traffic so much the sites seemed like they suffered from a DoS. Already at the edge, an attack tipped the barely making it social media sites over it. Some users abandon them for less popular (so more stable sites). Those who stick around suffer from learned helplessness.

Causing all this hullabaloo over a single user seems odd to me. I don’t speak Russian, so I don’t know if this guy from Georgia (the country) deserved it. Also, it is almost the one year anniversary since Russia invaded Georgia. During the invasion, DDoS attacks disabled Georgian web sites. So, maybe this is to show Georgia the Russians are still capable of causing problems? This is why security evangelists want us to be able to deal with threats.

Various computer viruses over the years have turned millions of computers into zombies for botnets. So… If you are upset about your favorite social media site getting taken down, then maybe you should act on ensuring your computer and others in your social network were not enlisted into a botnet?

Movies A-Z

July 28, 2009 in Movies / Films / TV by Ezra S F |

Some friends, Britt and Adrianne, are watching their ~480 item movie collection from Π to Zoolander and blogging about it at A to Z Movie Watching Adventure. This may not be ideal for any of you readers think almost all movies suck.
:)

Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk

July 19, 2009 in Athens GA, Photography by Ezra S F |

Playing with trains

Originally uploaded by Ezra F

A while ago, I mentioned the Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk scheduled for Athens Georgia. Several folks from the Athens Flickr Meetups showed up for this yesterday. Others I know from work, photography classes, and even just eating at restaurants also showed. Twice today people have mentioned they saw me and expressed interest.

Steven Skelton did a great job.

After 3 hours of walking and standing my feet hurt. :)

tag:

Diff and Spaces

June 19, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F |

Amy’s dump of the CE/Vista settings table ended up with a slightly different format than mine. I was able to use sed to rejoin the correct lines. This resulted in two files with spaces on about half of the lines in the file. Ouch.

Thankfully diff has a -b flag to ignore the spaces. Really useful in this case.

Now… To figure out why a pattern I copy and paste from a file is not found with grep.
:)

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