Archives for category: blogging

Houston.. I thought we had a problem.

September 9, 2008 //

I would like to give some well-thought out excuse as to why I hadn’t yet upgraded this blog from WordPress 2.5 - “waiting for confirmation of stability” comes to mind.. But er.. no. I was just lazy.

So today I finally upgraded to 2.6.2. Again I mistakenly forgot to copy one folder over (the wp-includes) folder and immediately thought I had hosed the whole thing. Luckily, I’m so used to forgetting things and screwing things up in my approaching old age that the second thing to come to mind was that I had made a simple and stupid mistake. Clearly I’m smart about my stupidity.

Anyway, the usual thing holds true. If you spot anything odd or buggy with the blog, please let me know. Or alternatively, tease me about it, and then let me know.

Cheers.

Categories blogging, design, technology, web

Posting to Identi.ca from Ubiquity

August 28, 2008 //

A very cool Firefox plugin called Ubiquity was released by Mozilla labs very recently. It’s hard to describe just how useful it can be, but think QuickSilver/Launchy/Gnome-Do within Firefox. What’s interesting though is that while it has quite a few very neat commands, anybody can add new ones.

I’m fairly active on Identi.ca these days, and when cgerrish asked about using Ubiquity to post to identi.ca, I did some quick investigation. Lo and behold it was *very* easy. First I went to this page which holds a list of commands that people have already created for Ubiquity. Then I did a quick text search for identica and found this script.

To make this a new command in Ubiquity, you just Ctrl+Space to bring up the Ubiquity command line and type “command-editor”. Then just paste in the javascript and Bam! you now have a command called identi.ca. So you just type “identi.ca Testing 123” and this will post a dent (“Testing 123”) right up there for you.

Wow. I’m impressed with the simplicity and the flexibility of this Ubiquity thang!

ps. Of course, you can find me at http://identi.ca/rfquerin

Categories blogging, linux, technology, web

Putting the Wheels Back on This Wagon

August 26, 2008 //

It’s high time I get off my duff and get the focus back. And that not only means blogging more than once a month here, but in a few other areas as well.

I figure the best way to get this thing back on the rails is to plunk down a post that at least lists some of the things I should be finding (making) time to do. Let’s cut to the chase. Here are a few things on my list:

Blog more. Not just pithy two-liners either. I used to enjoy crafting some semblance of a coherent post. Why am I avoiding it?
Get another screencasters episode out the door. I’ve got a couple of decent ideas, just have to sit down and do them.
Re-theme this weblog. Not a do or die thing, but I’ve grown a little bored with this theme and I really like some other design elements I’ve spotted in my travels recently. Plus, it gives me another reason to do some Inkscaping.
Get caught-up with backing up my photos. I desperately want to clear and re-format the card in my Canon Rebel XTi, but I’m hesitant until all the photos on my PC are backed up safely.
Bring my family blog up to snuff. Mostly that means a tremendous heap of RAW processing and image uploading to Flickr. But by picking the best of the best ones, I can cut down on that work. Cull, cull, cull baby.

I think one of the reasons I’ve been posting less and less here, is that I’ve been putting a lot of my cool links, mini-thoughts and various bric-a-brac over on Identi.ca. For those not aware, Identi.ca is an open-source microblogging implementation. I push all my Identica posts over to Twitter anyway, but if you want to check it out, head over to my Identica page and hit subscribe.

ps. I’m posting this from ScribeFire which I haven’t used in a dog’s age. Let’s hope it works ok.

Categories blogging, family, inkscape, life, screencast, web

I’ll Trade Ya 24 div Elements and a Smallish PNG file for Some Related Posts

June 24, 2008 //

I’ve been meaning to add a ‘related posts’ plugin to my theme for quite a while now. Adding the plugin was dead easy. However getting it to look decent on my blog template was an exercise in first class, grade A, CSS butchery. Look away Dan Cederholm.. Bulletproof CSS this is not.

I approached the problem thinking “It’s nothin’ a little elbow grease and a truckload of div’s can’t fix.”

Actually, after wading around knee-deep in extra div elements and adjusting padding values like a pair of itchy underwear, it ended up being a div background image that was created too short to begin with. Oh for shame… Who’da thought that I’d ever have anything down there more than 150 pixels high.

Anyway, the (allegedly) related posts are now down there happily nestled in their padded boxes.

Categories blogging, design, technology, web

My 45 minutes of fame

May 16, 2008 //

One of the highlights of my recent Vegas vacation didn’t have anything to do with Vegas. The inimitable Dave Yates interviewed me via phone for Episode 73 of his Lottalinuxlinks podcast. This is definitely one of my favourite Linux podcasts, and that is probably all down to Dave himself. He always makes me chuckle.

It went pretty well and I don’t think I fell too flat on my face. But you be the judge. One of the things I love about Dave’s podcast is that he interviews regular linux users and the interviews are casual and conversational - no scripted question-answer format here. If you want to listen to Episode 73 or any of his past episodes, you can check them out at: http://lottalinuxlinks.com/podcast

Here is the direct link for the Episode 73 mp3 file.

Mucho thanks to Dave for the opportunity!

Categories blogging, linux, podcasts, web

More WordPress 2.5 woes… and advice wanted

April 4, 2008 //

Another problem I’ve just noticed I’m having with WordPress 2.5 has to do with image uploading. After attempting to upload an image to a blog post, I was presented with the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_constrain_dimensions() in /home/u5/ng0larmlon/blog/html/wp-admin/includes/image.php on line 173

A quick search revealed (again) that I’m not the only one having this problem. I’ve checked that I can post images no problem if they are specified by a URL (eg. hosting it on Imageshack, my own server etc.) but if I try to upload an image from my local machine it barfs.

Now one thing I’m not sure of is whether or not the problem(s) I’m having is because of the way I installed WordPress initially. I took the newbie route and installed it via my ISP’s control panel. Problem is, the latest version on their control panel is still 2.3.3. So being the adventurous soul I am (not really), I went ahead and upgraded it via FTP. Now when I got back to the control panel on my ISP’s site, the currently installed version is listed as “N/A”.

Maybe I should have NOT gone the route of letting my ISP install it and should have just rolled up the sleeves and done it myself.

What do you think? How did you first install WordPress? Via your ISP’s control panel or in a more macho way? Do you think this could be part of the problems I’m having?

Categories blogging, technology, web

WordPress 2.5 Upgrade – one small apparent problem

April 3, 2008 //

I followed WordPress.org’s 3 step upgrade instructions and I think I’ve got it right. Every thing in the dashboard and editor is nice, pastelly, roundish cornery goodness. The blog itself still looks fine. I’ve got all the plugins reactivated and it seems to all work hunky-dory. However..

When I hit my wp-login page, I see an unstyled page with two simple text fields in which to enter my login credentials. Not the centred gradient boxy wordpress thingy, but just almost a css-less page. The login works, but I’m thinking maybe I screwed something up (forgot to copy over something?) which left my login page looking like dogs balls.. so to speak.

Any clues on why it looks unstyled? Maybe it takes a bit of time for that part to ‘take’ ?

[Edit: Seems I’m not the only one with this issue. Check out: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164246]

Categories blogging, web

New Blog Theme – EasyPeasy (not!)

February 2, 2008 //

After several lunch hours of hairpulling, several evenings worth of reading and re-reading articles about floating left, floating right, clearing both and all about how IE treats the css box model like a red headed stepchild, I finally hit a milestone in the journey (how’s that for overstatement!). I have a new and almost passable (and fluid) theme on this weblog.

This theme you see before you is henceforth known as “EasyPeasy v0.1”.

It was neither easy nor peasy. I scrapped an entire layout along the way, reworked and subdued the colours and graphics several times. Inkscape was my friend; my mistress; my therapist. Anyway, you should be able to stretch and smush (smushability is limited by design) your browser window and things should hold together.

If you’re reading this post via RSS, then please hobble on over to the site at least this once. Have a look, kick the tires, leave a comment and tell me about all the things I missed and all the things I did wrong. Believe me, there are likely plenty.

There are still problems to fix. For instance, the sidebar is “widgetized”, however it doesn’t seem to like the MyBlogLog widget. For some reason it won’t display it. So, like I said, take it for a ride and let me know if and when it breaks.

Edit: I almost forgot to mention. All that crappy whining and moaning you hear about IE not being standards compliant and a general pain in the ass.. All true! This site will render semi-properly in IE6, but compared to Firefox, Flock, Safari (on XP) and Nautilus, Internet Explorer 6 is butt-ugly.

Categories blogging, design, graphics, inkscape, web

CSS frustration.. a little anyway.. spare a guy some help?

January 28, 2008 //

I’ve decided I think I’m going to go to a fluid layout for my new blog theme. I happily started re-building my CSS to do just that but I’m running into a problem that seems a little weird involving CSS and div heights. I’ve approached it six ways from Sunday and still don’t understand it.

It’s probably something simple, but I’m really going nuts trying to figure out what the problem is. I’ve posted a message about it over on welovecss.com (complete with screenshots illustrating the problem and my php and css as well.). So if you’re at all capable in CSS and html and can give me a hand I’d really appreciate it.

Blogged with Flock

Categories blogging, design, technology, web

Google Docs Slideshows now embeddable (sp?)

January 24, 2008 //

Back in September I posted about the fact that Google Docs supported uploading of Powerpoint presentations and the gave the ability to have a chat session through Gtalk at the same time.

I just found out that recently (I think as of the New Year) they’ve also provided an embed code when you publish a presentation. The reason I found this out was that I’m teaching another night course (a structures course this time) and I’m providing a wordpress.com blog with links to the slideshows for students who want to review things online.

Funny thing is that the embed code didn’t seem to work on my WordPress.com blog. But I’ve uploaded another one to post here just to test it out. Hopefully it’s not too wide for this theme, but what the hey.

So this is really just a test. Let me know if it barfs or anything. But if it works well, it would be a neat tool for people to publish pseudo-screencasts or even (gasp) entertaining slideshows - something I know absolutely nothing about - right in their blog posts.

I’m still waiting for the Openoffice Impress support but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Anyway, let’s see if this works or not:

Blogged with Flock

Categories blogging, technology, web