In Line Editing

Tagged with: , . Written on March 20, 2005 at 3:07 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

Are you tired of having to go through the administrator interface to edit some small item in your WordPress post? Then try out this in line editing plug-in/hack from Twilight Universe.

I am especially picky about spelling and grammar mistakes since I thoroughly believe that you must preserve the English language. This plug-in, which I have had installed for about 20 minutes, has already proved useful.

The hack is very simple. You must move one of the WordPress hooks and insert a new function. Even a WordPress novice could work this out with no problem. Then just upload and activate the plug-in.

VoIP

Tagged with: . Written on March 19, 2005 at 9:25 AM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

We have VoIP at home. So far, I like it a lot.

It is inexpensive, which is appropriate since we do not use it that much. I hated having a home phone with the minimum service available costing me $40 a month (Thanks Verizon. Your service was pretty shitty, too.) I think that this was a great innovation and was pretty excited about this being the wave of the future.

But Ma Bell is striking back with the help of the cable companies. They cannot completely deny service to third party VoIP providers, so they are tagging their own service so that it receives priority, and the third party vendors get the leftovers.

There is nothing explicitly legally wrong with that. The problem I have is that the final consumer is then not getting what they are paying for and are “second class” to people purchasing VoIP from their ISP. Competition is becoming a thing of the past. It is about upholding the profit margin at the expense of the consumer. To hell with innovation, Corp. likes the big profits he sees now, and does not need to change.

So much for the days of the free internet! Is Comcast going to start blocking my use of Firefox? Is Verizon going to require that they be your home page in the terms of service? Maybe SBC will block you from looking at competitors web pages if you are browsing the internet with their service. This is a bad precedent and we need to voice our opinion before it is too late.

Dial-up Blogging

Tagged with: . Written on March 18, 2005 at 9:22 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.
Bloggar
My rating: 4 out of 5

My mother is a blogger. She is also using dial up. I have not ever seen nor used a dial up connection that I trusted. Dial-up can get the job done, if you are not in a hurry.

But the thing that irritates me, and Mom, the most is when lose your connection on a nice, long, post. (And you know that you will never be able to recreate it!)

That is where bloggar comes in. You can compose all of your posts off line and post when you connect. Bloggar supports most of the major blogging software. It has the basic features for formatting and spell checking that are so necessary. It also has features for uploading images to your server, whether you are using your own or an image hosting service to store your photos for your blog.

This may not be necessary if you have broadband, but may also be of benefit to those that that have a high speed connection. The Interface is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and you can even further define that by actually calling to the style sheet of your blog to display your post preview.

One feature that I like is that you do not have to open another browser window to publish to your blog. You can open up Bloggar right there and be able to see what inspired you as you write your post.

I do not have enough experience with this to make a statement on whether the code it generates is valid or not, but unless you make several changes in the formatting, I do not see where it would be a problem.

“How to Blog”

Written on at 3:53 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

There is an interesting, self-explanatory article on how to blog at busblog.

According to him, I have made some grievous mistakes in my previous post.

1. write every day.
7. have an email address clearly displayed on your blog. sometimes people want to tell you that you rock in private.
9. use Blogger. it’s easy, it’s free; and because they are owned by Google, your blog will get spidered better, you will show up in more search results, and more people will end up at your blog. besides, all the other blogging software & alternatives pretty much suck.
13. if you havent written about sex, religion, and politics in a week youre probably playing it too safe, which means you probably fucked up on #5, in which case start a second blog and keep your big mouth shut about it this time.
25. dont use your real name.
29. dont apologize about not blogging. nobody cares. just start blogging again.

It seems that I may have some work to do. But in the spirit of

4. cuss like a sailor.
26. dont be afraid to come across as an asswipe. own your asswipeness.

Fuck You! I like what I write.

Rational Justification

Written on at 2:30 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

OK, so I have not posted anything the last couple of days. But I have justification.

I normally post in the evening or early morning. Well, in the early morning, I have been fortunate enough to be able to sleep in and in the evenings I have been working.

Not that any of this really matters, but I am trying to justify it to myself.