Category Archives: The Never-Ending Bloga

Okay, Last.fm, I give in. I’m scrobbling again… to The Muppets. Blogging muse must be fed.

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I’ve given in to Last.fm, as I found that it was easy to add a widget to scrobble tracks I’ve listened to on iTunes or via Last.fm (it’s not working for the internet radio stations I listen to on Winamp). So far, I’ve listened to random things, and something I created called “The Muppets Radio.” It’s made for some interesting audio moments, which eventually led to Monty Python and something wacky called Moxy Fruvious. It’s high time I opened up to new music… I’m hoping it’ll help me dare to be a bit more productive and creative around here.

If you stumble across the blog after a long time away, you’ll see there’ve been a lot of changes. I’m giving a more modern WordPress theme a try… flirted with WooThemes, but found that their otherwise nifty WooTumblog plugin, paired with the Express for WordPress app for the iPhone really only works with Woothemes – all other themes require some modifications. The default Twenty Ten theme was the only example given for how to get it working; I had it working for a while with my previous theme, Amazing Grace, but it stopped working after the most recent WordPress version came out.

So, I decided to try the latest default theme, called Twenty Eleven. However, it was completely different from the previous default theme, and the instructions for getting WooTumblog configured were nowhere to be found. In fact, there was some indication on the support forums for WooTumblog that the latest version of WordPress kind of indicated that it would be harder and harder to integrate it into any non-Woothemes template.

Meh, I had played around with it from the iPhone, but it didn’t really make my blogging any easier from there. So I bailed on it (especially when an adjustment I tried to make to get it working totally broke my website. Buh-bye).

That said, I went all in with the new default theme, but still wanted a three column layout.

Enter NomNom Twenty Eleven child theme by Zeaks.

  • 8 premade color schemes
  • 6 new layouts including 3 different 3 column layouts
  • Nivo Slider added to header with several options to control the look
  • Option to resize the header
  • Support for excerpts with post thumbnails
  • Second menu above the header
  • Sidebar on post pages
  • Area to add your own custom CSS that will not be overwritten with an upgrade
  • Google Font selector for most areas
  • Built in related posts under each post with on/off option
  • Superfish dropdown menu effects
  • Custom Twitter, Flickr, Author Biography widgets
  • Plain text to URL support(just type a url in a post, no need to create a link)
  • WPPageNavi template and style support
  • Color options for all menu areas
  • All code is well commented

I didn’t really start working with it until yesterday, but it has plenty of flexibility for the kinds of color, graphic, and font tweaks that you might make to adapt a default theme. I’ve already added my normal CSS drop shadows – nice not to have to add it to the stylesheet, this theme has a custom CSS box where you can add it and it supposedly won’t get messed up in an upgrade. I’ve also added about a dozen custom banners that are taken from my own pictures – easy as pie, much simpler and more striking than the way I was doing it before. I may still fool with the Flickr badge in the right column.

There’s still some things to tweak but this is a pretty good start. And it’s been pleasant to listen to Last.fm come up with variations on “The Muppets” as a radio station, and see the music get added to my left side bar. I’ve also been listening to Radio Riel, my standby, which WON’T scrobble from what I can tell – via Winamp and http://www.radioriel.org.

More later, headed out to see “White Christmas” at the Marriott Lincolnshire.

Fixed a display error all by myself

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This is just a memo as to how I finally fixed a display error on the Holy Moly website. Something I did recently, probably related to social plugins, caused the body to overflow to the right. There were big scroll bars at the bottom, and it looked terrible.

Tl;dr: the width in a Facebook Connect button I was using was set to 450px, but I was using it in a 200px sidebar.

My family members (except for my husband David) should stop reading here.

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Not so Simple: Simple Facebook Connect « WordPress Plugins

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20111110-101631.jpg

I finally got Simple Facebook Connect working between the St Nick’s webpage and the Facebook page, mostly.

It was both simple and not simple: Facebook had changed the look of their Apps page, and there is more than one Apps page. So one “how to install this app” tutorial I tried to follow was visually outdated, but a text update had been added at the bottom.

The plugin developer had not bothered to remove screenshots on an old blog post on his site, but added a terse update noting that the instructions in the plugin readme.txt file and on the options page are correct, and that the link to the correct Apps page was correct. Also, to link to a Page (business page, fan page), where the Option page says “Enter the ID of your page,” he means the number contained in your Facebook fan or business page, not the entire URL.

Once I finally got that, and deleted the duplicate app I created with the wrong domain name, and recopied and pasted the correct app ID and Secret key, and saved, and authorized additional permissions for SFC and saved AGAIN, I was good to go.

It now automatically reposts from blog post to Facebook page, and I can manually publish both posts and pages.

I followed instructions at the developer’s website to get the enhanced comments working. Code details in the extended post.

I’m using a different plugin, Tweet Like Share +1, to add more share boxes. They don’t seem to conflict now, after enabling SFC first, then enabling TLS+1. Testing to follow, the SFC developer has +1 on his blog but doesn’t include it as an option.

Otto is rather… blunt about not using other Facebook plugins, so proceed carefully and follow directions to the letter. Your own assumptions, and selective blindness, are your biggest stumbling blocks when installing Simple Facebook Connect. Also, older posts and comments on his support sites can be helpful, but may be outdated.

Screenshots and the steps that eventually worked to follow.

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Fixing WordPress 3.2′s HTML editor font on ALL my blogs

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Yeah, I fixed it on Blogula but now I need to fix it again on the church blog and my Second Life blog.

So there!

One of the coolest things about WordPress 3.2 is its “distraction-free writing” mode. I’ve been eagerly awaiting using this feature on my own sites for months. Unfortunately, WordPress 3.2 also shipped with a font change for the HTML editor to a monospace font, which isn’t so distraction free when you’re trying to write.

via Fixing WordPress 3.2′s HTML editor font

UPDATE: And now I’m doing it again, because I didn’t do it right the first time. Shaming how I had to Google myself to figure it out.

Minor Tweaks and Minimal Tweets

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Yeah, this blog has pretty much been a wasteland lately – no new posts of any great shakes, and a whole lot of “weekly tweets” auto-posts… BOR-RRING! So based on something ***Dave said the other day, clearly it seemed like a good time to look at getting a better process for doing more actual blog posts here, even if they might be shorter.

This all stems from the change in my ability to blog from work during “slow time” or times when I’m not busy and just waiting for an incoming call. As I think I’ve blogged earlier it’s really cut down on the volume AND QUALITY of posts; and leaving it all for the weekend or the evenings just hasn’t been working that well.

Although I was initially excited by the advent of the Express App for the iPhone, which works with the WooTumblog plugin, I quickly discovered it was lacking a couple of features.

The first one was the lack of a bookmarklet, to make it behave a bit like Press This Reloaded so that I could pick  up a link and a quote from a given page.

The second was that when I managed to implement the WooTumblog plugin, the “quote” template had a “source” field that to my mind was clearly meant for a URL to cite, but actually it was just a link to the post title URL… of the post the reader was… already reading.

So I put the attractive, easy to use Express App button on a lower page on my iPhone, and went back to trying to get the occasional link to work with Press This Reloaded (which works fine on the iPad, but barely or not at all on the iPhone due to weird things that happen to URLs on the mobile phone).

I’d occasionally go looking for solutions, and run across posts like this one where clearly, I was not the only one longing for a kick-ass bookmarklet for WordPress from the iPhone (and you’ll notice I don’t mention using the official WordPress app, which is… pretty telling, don’t you think?).

When Matt Mullenweg announced the live version of WordPress 3.1, he said, “There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts…”

And there are some really promising Themes ready to carry out that task, including Wumblr, Lightbright, and from WooThemes,  Auld, each of which do a great job of taking advantage of this new post format feature. Auld distinguishes itself already by taking advantage of a slew of “Tumblog” utilities that WooThemes has provided for some time now, including Express App for iPhone, extensive multimedia support, and their advanced QuickPress funtionality that is built into the theme.

The good folks at WooThemes have made their Tumblog Plugin available to everyone. And their documentation on what to do to make your blog tumblog read is extensive. So, you can tune any theme to take advantage of the power of the new WordPress 3.1 features. The Tumblog plugin automatically enables their QuickPress widget. Combine that with their Express App and you’ve just taken a huge leap toward the ease of use that distinguishes platforms like Tumblr and Posterous.

Here’s the problem. Something is missing.

All of that is excellent, but  the main reason why I’ve been excited for the release of WordPress 3.1 is the hope that it wouldn’t require me to run to so many different sources for plugins and widgets to get to this kind of functionality. The problem? Something is still missing. It’s a better bookmarklet.

And then in my feed I ran across a reference to a new, paid WordPress theme from WooThemes called Canvas (their stuff does look nice, for all that most of the themes are pay and not free). This new theme was newly updated to work with the Express App/Woo Tumblog plugin out of the box, and I started thinking that maybe it might be time to do a revamp on the site a little.

Canvas is highly customizable and has a very simple process for changing  style elements and post types on the fly. Even a skilled webslinger finds it’s flexible enough to work with on a complex project. There are a number of “how to customize Canvas” videos that made it look quite easy and even fun to customize the appearance and make it “your own.”

So then I signed up for a 2 week “trial play period” at WooThemes and set up a test blog using Canvas, and realized “Oh, right, that thing that bothered me about Express App/WooTumblog still bothers me.”

After tinkering with the look of the test blog, I started realizing that I could probably make a theme with Canvas look pretty much like the current theme does here, probably also with the image rotator from my “best in show” Flickr set.

This made me really ponder the $70 purchase price (it includes two free themes) and think it might be worth it anyway, but just in case there was a chance of getting something better working, I sent a query via the Express App website, mentioning my two suggestions.

Much to my surprise yesterday (the Saturday of a holiday weekend no less), I got this reply back within an hour:
Hi Ginny, I’m sorry you have issues with Express, but we’re here to help so let me answer your questions.

1. By bookmarklet, do you mean one for your desktop browser, or one for Safari on the iPhone? For the later, I plan on adding something like similar in the future, but I don’t know when.

2. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to add a link to a quote from Express. I plan on adding it soon though. The ‘source’ field is actually for the author. What I can do, if you don’t need the author field, is to make a custom version of the WooTumblog plugin (just for you), that uses the ‘source’ field for the URL, until I release an update of Express that supports the quote URL. Would you be okay with this? Oli Kenobi Studios

I replied back with more information, examples, and a link to that “better bookmarklet is needed” blogpost, and earlier today (on a SUNDAY morning, even) I had a custom WooTumblog plugin (Oli is the programmer) that behaves more like a “quote/cite URL” template the way I wanted it. He cautioned me not to update the plugin after it was installed (my husband David, who’s written a plugin himself, installed it).

And… ta DAH, it’s working! This makes the Express App much more of a viable option for those times during the day when I want to grab a quick link AND a quote and blog it without too much fuss. I don’t mind that there’s currently no tagging or categories, but I’m told that this has a higher priority than my other “wish,” which was an easy 1-button bookmarklet. As it is, I have a two-stage process that’s simpler and easier than struggling with WordPress with Press This Reloaded, which only shows me my quicktag and HTML tab (which is okay) but rarely formats the URL AND the quote correctly.

I can work with this, I can blog more.

Now as for other kinds of content, I’ve got a big backlog of photos from our Washington State trip to upload to Flickr, and I’ll be able to blog some of them pretty easily too – and videos now and then, too.

Hooray for Express App… and maybe sometime soon, hooray for a revamped Blogula Rasa with a spiffy new WooThemes look.

Fixed the Delicious 500 Error Posting Problem (I Hope)

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My benign neglect of all things Blogula is ending – at least that’s my intention. One little thing that’s been bugging me is a bug with Delicious.com’s filtering – they’ve recently started filtering out links saved via their otherwise excellent service that they identify as “malicious” or bad somehow, and replacing them with “Internal Server 500” errors. I finally tracked down the Postalicious plug-in’s blog to get a possible fix for this problem, or at least a workaround: burn the Delicious feed through Feedburner, and use THAT feed in the plug-in.

As a side note, duh, when did Google buy Feedburner? Oh, well, I’ve been spending too much time just reading in Google Reader rather than actually writing or blogging to keep up with this stuff.

My Delicious link feed will now be http://feeds.feedburner.com/ Delicious/ginnyred57

And I promise to save interesting links, once I’m satisfied the thing is working right. The posts will be titled “Links” instead of “Linkdump” if I set it up right.

Via Shifting Mind » Postalicious 2.0

Is this thing still on?

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Yes, Ginny is a bad blogger. A bad, bad blogger; she never updates her blog. Or she lets automatic updates fill in the blanks from Twitter and leaves her broken del.icio.us reposter running.

She’s on vacation and tinkering with a really old desktop blogging platform on her laptop called ‘ecto for windows’ that hasn’t been updated by the developer since about 2007.

It would have been convenient to work offline, but oh, well, she’ll have to blog the normal way after all.

More to follow.

Pinboard or Delicious? Staying For Now

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Stay if you…

  • Like a more graphical UI.
  • Dont want to pay a signup fee Pinboard costs around $6 to join.
  • Want to see thumbnails of your bookmarks.
  • Want to auto-post to WordPress or Twitter from your account.
  • Are excited about integrating your bookmarks with other Yahoo services.
  • Want a Firefox plugin for bookmarking.
  • Rely on tag bundles to keep your tags organized.
  • Want to see who has you in their network.
  • Like to share URLs with others using for: tags.
  • Want a more compact list view of your bookmarks.

Don’t want to pay, want to auto-post, want a Firefox plugin, want a compact view. So that’s where I’m at, standing pat for now.

via Pinboard or Delicious?.