Archive for the 'Site' Category

Cleaning up the Clutter

Published
by
C.G.
on September 18, 2006
in Life and Site
. 0 Comments

I switched themes for a while and I will do away with some of the sidebar information and replace it will static pages to manage or some how get widgets working and link to the information in some other way.  I’ve decided that i have too much clutter in my life and I’m going to do something about it.

Over the next week or two, I’m going to throw out the clothes, CDs, books, and spare computer parts that I have not handled in a two years.  Believe me, its a lot of stuff and I’m sure it can help me stay organized.  The goal is to ‘archive’ things I haven’t touched in six months and throw it out after it ages to one year.  If I haven’t worn, listened to, read, or used any item after that cut off, I toss it.

This is not an easy task for me… I’m a pack rat.  My mother is a pack rat and I come from suburbia where there is space to put junk.  Now that I live in the city, I don’t have the room.  I’m going to start with my computer files and delete things left and right.  The only items I won’t delete are my MP3s and pictures; they stay for a reason.  But games, log files, PDFs - whatever - are gone.

Next, I’m taking care of the computer parts.  I used to keep old USB cables, power supplies, CD-ROM drives - you name it - handy.  I don’t know why, really.  Some it is that I spent good money on that stuff which is mostly worthless now; you know how the computer industry works.  The other reason is that I never know when I’ll need it.  Yes, the CD-ROM is 2x and regular IDE (not E-IDE) but who’s counting?  Actually, Its not that bad but it is a regular DVD-ROM and 16x speed.

And as for CDs?  Most of them are computer CDs - games from 1994 and on.  Some of them don’t work on XP or even Windows 2000 - Windows 98 Second Edition or better (if there is such a thing as better).  Some of old data CDs I made as backups; software that took hours to download over a modem and replaced by newer versions.

So you get the idea.  I’m going to add back some of the things I had in the other theme like the statistics.  But all the fancy Google Maps crap…. GONE!

Hopefully, the cleaner living will rub off in other areas.

Change of Themes

Published
by
C.G.
on August 23, 2006
in Site
. 1 Comment

I’m taking a break from the saga of the motto for a while to tell you I’m going to change the theme of the site every few days to freshen things up a bit. I’ll have a poll up in a little while with a list of themes people can vote on. If I get a number of votes to a particular theme, I’ll switch to it permanently.

If things don’t look quite right, please be patient. I’m not going to tweak every theme perfectly until I settle on a permanent style.

UPDATE: I’ve given up on the changing for a while. I do want some of the features in the themes but don’t have the time right now to do dev work on the files right now. I’ll try this again over the weekend.

Performancing

Published
by
C.G.
on August 11, 2006
in Computers, Plugins, Reviews and Site
. 0 Comments

I’ve just installed Performancing, a Firefox extension and blogging tool, and I have to say I am not impressed. I’m writing and publishing this post with it now and it looks like a good WYSIWYG editor but it is no different than the editor that is bundled with WordPress. Maybe for those who user Movable Type will find it useful but I am 99.99% positive that MT does have a WYSIWYG editor too. Hell, Blogger has one and its free and in serious neglect by Google.

Go to Performancing’s site to see a list of features which you may or may not find interesting. Nothing really stands out for me except one flaw: No spell check.

Supposedly, there is support for the spell check that comes with Firefox 2.0 but since I don’t run it, I don’t get to use that feature. And its not a feature of Performancing, really. Its a Firefox feature.

I suppose the thing I could say about the extension is this: It combines a few features into one platform but doesn’t do them well enough to convince me to not use all the apps it intents to replace.

For example, it has built in del.icio.us support which I can do on my own or with a different Firefox extension. I don’t tag my own posts in del.icio.us because I’m not into to that kind of shameless promotion - I shamelessly promote myself in other ways.

I mentioned the technorati tags earlier but, again, that can all be controlled with a plugin for WordPress. If MT, Blogger, and the other systems it supports doesn’t have that, then this might be useful but for me and my WP blog, its not all that helpful.

There is built in FTP support and image uploading but what system doesn’t have at least image uploading?

You can manage multiple blogs (using different CMS types) all in one place - that is helpful. But Flock can do that and it comes with a spell checker!!

Sorry I keep mentioning that. I can’t get over that missing feature. If Performancing had one, I’d using it all the time in a heartbeat.

Anyway, I’m giving it this shot… and if you think it could be helpful, then you should too. But I still believe that you can do more with either the standard interfaces the blogging systems offer you or with extra tools you can download and incorporate yourself.

Meebo Me!

Published
by
C.G.
on August 2, 2006
in Computers, Reviews and Site
. 0 Comments

I just added another feature to the site which I hope to benefit from. If you scroll down to the bottom of the right sidebar, you will notice a white widget called ‘Meebo Me’. This widget, created by the wonderfully brilliant folks at Meebo, just launched their Meebo Me applet this morning and the moment I saw it, I knew I wanted it for the site.

The way it works is really simple. Meebo is a Web 2.0 style, web-based, multi-client, IM system. It allows a user to log into their AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber/Google Talk systems and chat with their buddies within their browser window. You can log in once (and quickly) through the main page or you can create a Meebo ID and set up all your IM accounts for easy sign-in later on; the Meebo ID also allows you to configure multiple IM names for a particular service - say, you’re two AOL names (you know, the one you have for work, i.e. your name, and your personal one, FuZzyBunnYsLiperS). It can retain your conversations if you ask it to and you can use that feature while chatting one on one with someone or in a chat room you set up with the site. It doesn’t support everything IM has to offer yet (like file transfers) but not everyone uses that anyway.

So with a Meebo ID, anyone can go to their site and create a widget. When you are done creating one (and you can make more than one), it gives you the code to cut and paste into your website, blog, whatever. Once you do that… you’re done! Log into Meebo and wait for someone to visit your site. When someone does, you’ll notice a buddy show up online in your contact list. If the user types into the bottom text box of the applet, you’ll hear a chime alerting you to the new message. And through that new window, you can chat back. The visitor, by default, gets a weird name and number but they are allowed to rename their own given ID; meebome12345 can become SiteVisitor or FuZzyBunnYsLiperS - whatever your heart desires.

In case I forgot to mention, it requires Flash. The applet doesn’t work with crappy Flash 7 for Linux (when is version 9 coming out, Adobe?) so you might have a problem if you are an Ubuntu user like me. But if you have a Mac or some other boring miscellaneous non-descript computing device, you should be fine.

But I hope that you visitors will use it. I’d like to hear where you are from, what your interests are, your pet peeves, your measurements - oh, wait… Sorry, wrong publication. Anyway… I want to learn more about other people and would love the opportunity to chat with those who find my reviews, ramblings, and rants interesting.

Hope to chat with you soon!

IE Sucks (or I do)

Published
by
C.G.
on August 2, 2006
in Site
. 1 Comment

I just noticed that the site doesn’t work correctly in Internet Explorer; the sidebar is missing. I don’t even know how long ago that happened let alone what caused it because I haven’t used IE since Firefox came out as a 1.0. Hell, since I switched to Ubuntu, I don’t even use Windows. I was told that it doesn’t work in IE by someone who is forced into it by policy of the company he works for (Thanks for the tip Michael!).

So I apologize to all the IE users out there. While I encourage you to install Firefox, Flock, or Opera, I don’t want to alienate you IE guys (and gals). But rest assured, I will find out what I did to cause IE to conveniently omit the sidebar. The funny thing about development of any kind is that one typo can cause the entire application to crash and burn miserably. IE seems to be picking up my typo perfectly (probably the only thing it does right).

I don’t know why the Mozilla’s Gecko and Opera’s Presto layout engines handle the exception and not IE. IE’s Trident just doesn’t like it. I’m hoping it’s fixed in IE7 but even then, I don’t know if I really want bad code on my site. I looked at the XHTML validator and found lots of errors but I don’t understand what it is they say is wrong with the code to fix it. But whatever I did can’t be that great of a mistake because the other browsers handled it.

If anyone out there knows what I’m doing wrong, I’d appreciate the feedback and educate me on how not to have it happen again.

UPDATE: I found out why. Two posts had metadata and formating from OpenOffice in them that broke the layout. Chalk it up to me trying spellcheck with WordPress. I still don’t know why IE had a fit with it but after removing the metadata, IE renders the page layout just fine. Sorry IE users.