Carpentology
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
A Sitemap for Plogger
I spent a decent amount of time looking to see if there was a sitemap generator for Plogger. After a lengthy, fruitless search I decided I would take a stab at building my own. It checked out OK with Google so I thought I would share it to see if anyone else had ideas.
This sitemap maps all collections, albums and pictures. This version assumes that .htaccess is enabled for nice URL’s, but it would be a quick rewrite to have it work without nice URL’s. It would be a long rewrite for it to check if mod_rewrite was enabled, but that could be done, too.
Windows Live Writer
I am writing this post from Window Live Writer. It seems to be all over the blogosphere this morning, so I thought that I would give it a shot.
Installations was a breeze, but you are unable to specify an installation directory, so those of us who install programs on separate drives are SOL.
Setting up the blog was even easier than the installation. All you need to do is type in the URL and Windows Live Writer does the rest.
There are three interfaces for composing. There are two WYSIWYG. One is an HTML(link) preview with the styles from your blog and the last one resembles a simple word processor. The third interface is the classic HTML(link) view. WLW also has preview and spell check functions which PFF, my preferred tool, does not.
I will update this post once I have published it, just to let you know if everything came across alright (unlike my post from Office 2007 Beta).
UPDATE: The worst thing that WLW did during post is not separate my paragraphs. Not too shabby.
UPDATE 2: The image uploads are a little wonky. For WordPress is loads to the correct directory (i.e. uploads/2006/08), but there it creates a sub-folder based on the post title and another folder to contain the thumbnail and the original image. This in itself is not a huge deal, but is makes these uploads inaccessible through the web admin panel.
Bad Yahoo!
I got a little tired of trying to send and receive files over IM using Trillian, so I gave in an installed Yahoo! instant messenger and AOL(link) instant messenger again. I have had these programs installed from over three years, so I figured I would give it a shot.
I knew that there were going to be bundled products. Before even running YIM I removed their helper program (that was a new one to me), the tool bar and mail. It downloaded flash and installed that as well. I ed-selected all of the add-on and preference options as I do not regularly use Yahoo! for anything other that instant messaging.
I started YIM and opened Firefox. The install had also installed the Yahoo! tool bar for Firefox. With Firefox’s growing market share that was not totally unexpected. I clicked on the toolbar to see if I would give it a shot (slim chance) and saw a remove this option. It intrigued me so I clicked it. It opened a “Why is there a Yahoo! menu on the menu bar of my browser?” page.
After browsing through the help pages for a few minutes, I was disturbed. Nearly every problem referenced a corrupt profile. In the past two and a half years I have only once had to create a new profile. I install and un-install extension on a weekly if not daily basis. It also mentions fixes in the about:config. While I have no problems making any of these changes, I find it disturbing that this stealth installation could corrupt the customizations I have worked so hard to make.