Archive for May, 2006

Notes on WordPress presentation for Mugoo.

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

My presentation for Mugoo was not smiled upon by the demo gods – lots of problems, but I rolled with it, and my audience seemed happy with the information.

Some comments/ followups for my presentation.

For Neil Herber: On the bottom of your “Write post” page you will see this:

WordPress bookmarklet

Right click on the following link and choose “Add to favorites” to create a posting shortcut.

Press It – bales.ca

(don’t bother pressing it – I’ve disabled it)
Products/sites mentioned: Wordpress sites: Download software at: wordpress.org, get a free blog at: wordpress.com.

Another blogging product I’m told has good anti-spam features: Movable Type.

Tool that I’ve used and enjoyed for more fully featured CMS sites (Content management system) Drupal. Drupal does lots more than blogging so it is much more complex than WordPress that focusses on blogging and allows some static pages. People I know have not had good experience with Drupal’s anti-spam features. Your mileage will vary.

More to come.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

I’m presenting for Mugoo

Monday, May 29th, 2006

Mugoo the best club anywhere is pationtly watching me ake a post.

LeRoy – LeRoy from Mugoo (not Cameron)

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

Tales From The Future

Sunday, May 7th, 2006

My cousin Andrew is teaching English in Japan and has a blog:
Tales From The Future

Which takes me back to one of our first days in Japan. We were at the train station in Umeda and I had to go to the bathroom. It was quite the experience. I walked in and saw the first stall, a squat toilet. So, I moved on to the next one. Which was a normal toilet, but with some crazy seat. So I sat down and was treated to a very pleasant warming sensation. There is nothing quite like going to the bathroom and getting warmed up along the way. Then I discovered the buttons on the side of the toilet. Man, that was interesting. There was one that released a spray to cover any smells, there was one that provided a faux-flush (no water, just the sound) to cover any unfortunate noises. Then I found the spray button. Courtney got a kick out of the smirk that was on my face when I left the bathroom. This is something you have to experience to understand.

It’s amazing what you can learn away from home.

Posted in Family | 1 Comment »

Sitewide GeoURL Implemented here

Friday, May 5th, 2006

I’ve added GeoURL tags back to the site. using:

GeoURL Tags at The Aquinas Hub
This is a really simple plugin to add GeoURL tags to your blog. It isn’t supposed to do anything more than that, but it’ll save you having to modify your header file everytime you change theme. This lets visitors to your site find other sites near you in ‘meatspace’.

You can see sites close to me in the real world. I was reminded that Gabrielle is living in Ottawa – I’ll have to get in touch with her. Hmmm, it seems she’s moved back to the Moncton area and hasn’t updated her GeoTags.

I’d like to be able to tag specific posts with GeoLocations of some sort, but I’ll have to investigate this further. I’m not sure that the GeoURL technology is the most appropriate for this.

Update:  May 9.  I’ve changed from the GeoURL plugin to the Geo plugin At the suggestion of Aquinas.  This plugin allows me to tag posts with different locations.
GeoPlugin

The Geo plugin allows you to attach geographic coordinate information to posts. It also lets you specify a default geographic location for your entire WordPress blog.

Posted in Ottawa, Technology | No Comments »

Vonage=sanity

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

Vonage is my current phone company and they make me very happy. If you have broadband to your house you should seriously consider switching to them. We are paying twenty bucks a month for a line, 500 minutes of calling, call display, call answer and any other phone service we might want. They can take your current phone number so you don’t have to go through the hassle of getting a new phone number. If I refer you I get two months free and you get one month free – great for me, maybe not for you since they often have one month free. In any case if you want a referral I’ll email you one.
Vonage_logo_new

Vonage have quietly changed their logo from a square-font blocky corporate one with “The Internet Phone Company” tagline:

new Vonage logo

To a friendly font huggy-V one with no tagline:

Skype LogoThe new logo more directly compares with the logo for Skype:

I don’t think it is wise for Vonage to try to compare themselves to Skype. Vonage works well right now, while skype is something for the future.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

WordPress tech

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

I’m still playing with the Technology of the new site and I’ve tried a plugin that makes Google Sitemaps:

Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 Final This plugin generates a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

The installation was quite surprisingly easy and seems to do everything it should.I

I also have the WordPress Widgets plugin installed which allows me to easily include bits for flickr and delicious that you see over there.  I tried a couple of other themes but went back to this one.

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Just another WordPress blog….

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

My delightful hosting company has started moving sites from Drupal to WordPress. Wordpress does blogging and static pages and that is all I need – I’d like some of the missing Drupal features but so far I’m quite liking the default feature set of WordPress. Of course moving site platforms has growing pains and I’m fighting with WordPress a bit.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »