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Getting Back To Blogging

The other day I noticed a bit of a gap in my daily process of information. I have Pinboard for capturing links, InstaPaper for saving longer articles for reading later, but there are a bunch of odd-and-ends that don’t get captured. Most of these tend to be photos and although I could bookmark them, links change and those images could get lost, so I was looking at different ways that I could capture these images.

FFFFound.com looked like the ticket, but you have to be invited to participate and even then it looked like a bit of a pile. Then I figured that Tumblr might just be the ticket. I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about the service and how easy it is, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

Suffice to say that I wasn’t all that impressed. Granted, I’m a bit old school and tend to post everything in HTML anyway, most of the bells and whistles of posting photos, etc. where kind of meh. I loved the way the blog looked, but being unable to post because of a service outage was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Besides, what I discovered was that posting to Tumblr was no different than posting to my blog — so why not just do that?!?

So, I swept up some of the dust and cobwebs, switched the theme to Modernist 2.0 and plan to move the two posts I did on Tumblr over to mashby.com

In other words…

I'm Back Bitches

329 days ago • site news • Tags: ,

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I Think I’m Going Crazy

I feel like my head is going to explode if I don’t do a brain dump.

Things have been very busy at the company I work for EarthChannel so I haven’t been blogging like I would like to… The community web site I tried to launch last year PEG Channels has been a failure… EarthChannel really needs a blog to help tell our story and put a voice on the company so I’ve been thinking a lot about what that would look like and sound like… I really like how Griffin Technologies has handled their social marketing… we had some crazy flooding here in Nashville. Holly and I are fine, the office and house were no worse for the wear but a lot of the places I love have been damaged severely… I want to delete my Facebook account and feel like I should do the same with Twitter… Mike Rohde’s illustrations are in a New York Times Best Seller and there’s a really nice interview with him about sketchnotes and how the his involvement with REWORK came to be… there’s a lot of news about Flash and HTML5 which impacts my business and I have a lot of thoughts on the matter… I like Steve Job’s letter and thought it hit on some key points that I agree with… I bought Holly an iPad and she really likes it… Been thinking a lot about minimalism and simplicity and doing more with less, so I haven’t bought an iPad, but I still wish I had one… I miss the community that we had with the Nashville Palm Users Group and I haven’t found anything to fill that hole. I’m tempted to jump head first into something, but don’t want to overcommit to a huge time suck… I wish I had a podcast still, but I don’t want to do the work, can’t I just talk? I’m good at that… went to Baton Rouge and hung out with “the guys” and had a fantastic time with them… flash sucks… I love my I7 27″ iMac… coming from Louisiana it boggles my mind to think that only 13.53″ of rain fell here in Tennessee over a two-day period. I’ve seen 12″ fall in an hour in Baton Rouge. However, when you realize that 13.53″ inches represents two months worth of rain I suppose that gives some perspective… I’ve got to stop drinking diet coke and get back on my diet… I’ve got to get back to work.

639 days ago • site news

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A Few Updates On The Blog

I made a few updates over the past couple of days that I thought I’d share.

New Photos
For starters, I updated the random photos that appear in the upper right corner of every page with MY photos and not just the stock photos that came with the theme. There should be around 10 images that include photos of Gracie, Holly, me and various vacation photos. It’s just a small touch, but it makes the site a little more personal.

Lifestream
One of the things that bothers me with all the meta data that we toss about through various online services, such as Twitter, is that it’s just lost in the ether… net. You know what I mean. :) Unless you happen to subscribe to my Twitter feed, you’re not going to be aware that I’m posting there. Well, now there’s a solution – it’s called Lifestreaming.

Thanks to a handy little WordPress plugin called Wp-Lifestream, I can now catch all those little bits and put them all in a list. You can find a short list on the sidebar on the home page and a more complete list under the Lifestream page.

It may be a bit too much transparency in my life, but I’m giving it a shot to see. Right now I think it’s kinda cool to be able to share what I’m bookmarking, listening to, or commenting elsewhere. What do you think?

942 days ago • site news • Tags: ,

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And Switched Servers Too

While I was in the process of switching from MovableType to WordPress, I opted to move my domain to a new server. Nothing like learning to move a WordPress install two days after my first install. :)

Anyway, if you run into any issues with the blog, please let me know!

1235 days ago • site news

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Paying The Price For Being #1

One of the funny things about having a blog is that you never know what is going to strike a chord with the people that read your blog, or for that matter Google. By some quirk of an algorithm you find that you’re at the top of the charts on one topic or another and you find yourself being put in the role of “guru” on that subject (wether you are, or not).

This happened to my good buddy Mike Rohde with an article that he did on Yoplait yogurt. He wrote a quick article about an idea he had regarding their packaging and next thing you know, he’s in the top 4 on Google if you do a search for yogurt packaging.

As for me, my hotspots have been Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap (currently slipped to page 2) and National Brand 43-571 (page 1) because of an entry I wrote concerning my love affair with paper. However, in looking at my Google Analytics this week, I found that the bulk of the traffic to my blog comes from an entry entitled “Having A Hard Head Can Sometimes Pay Off“. Doing a search for “Axiom and Garageband” turned up the reason why — I’m the #1 result.

The article dealt with my trials and tribulations in getting my Axiom 25 to work with GarageBand. It was a project I did almost 2 years ago and one month after the post, I never went back to it. Another case of something I “had to have” only to move onto something else 20-days later. :)

Regardless of my lack of interest in the subject, clearly there were plenty of people still looking for a solution, finding me and as luck would have it, being met with frustration. Over the past year, I’ve hacked this site every which way and never really completed the process. It goes a little something like this.

1. A client of mine wants to change something with their install of MoveableType.

2. I apply it to this site first to see if it’ll work.

3. It does/doesn’t and then I usually, but not always, revert the site back to the way it was and you can see where this is going.

All these changes affected my Axiom / GarageBand article when they broke the download to the PDF that provided the solution. Doh! So this afternoon, I updated the PDF, checked all the links, fixed the download tool I use to keep track of such things and generally cleaned this up a bit in the process.

So for those of you that found that article only to be met with frustration, I apologize. Hopefully the revised article will be more helpful. As for me, I’m going to be a bit more cognoscent of the long tail of my articles so that they don’t spank me in the butt. :-P

1330 days ago • site news, weblogs • Tags: , , , ,

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Reverting ReCaptcha Plugin To .01

I’ve been a big fan of the ReCAPTCHA service since it launched and was eager to implment it on my blog when MT4 was released last year. It was a complete kludge to get it working, but I eventually did figure out the voodoo necessary. You would think I’d leave well enough alone, but alas, I did not. I attempted to upgrade to the latest version, failed and then took the long road back to version .01.

How It All Began
For starters, I decided to upgrade to version 4.1 from version 4.01 of MovableType. I exported my entries and comments, deleted the entire site from the server and then did a clean install and import. Once I was sure everything was running properly, I began adding my plugins back and saw that there was an update for the MT ReCAPTCHA plugin. That’s when I played with fire and decided to upgrade to the new version only to find out it didn’t work.

What Went Wrong
The plugin itself installed just fine and the one big change that I saw what that the public and private key information was stored properly now in the plugin. Previously you had to enter this into the plugin itself, so this was a nice change. There could be other enhancements, but that was the one that I noticed.

So far so good, but as I walked through the rest of the instructions, I ran into a huge snag.

8. Edit Javascipt index template, to remove these lines of code which calls delayShowCaptcha… [snip] …If your install does not have these lines in JavaScript index template, these lines should be in GlobalJavaScript, which is a global system template.

Guess what, there was nothing in the Javascript index template that matched the calls I was looking for. Moreover, there isn’t a GlobalJavaScript template in the default build of 4.1.

Hitting a dead end, I tried rebuilding the site in the hopes that everything would work anyway, but of course it didn’t. No errors, but no display of the ReCAPTCHA code either.

Time For A Rewind
Luckily, I had copies of my templates and the old plugin, so I figured I’d simply revert back to what I had previously. Things didn’t work out that way because in an effort to get the new version working, I’d made changes in the “Blog Settings” as well.

“No problem”, I thought, because I could just pull up Josh Carter’s original reference of how to implement version .01 of the plugin. Unfortunately, it appears that he’s moving his site to TextDrive and that page is no longer available. CRAP!

Doing a Google Search and then pulling up the cached version though did save the day and I was able to get my blog configured properly again. *WHEW*

Plugin Redux
With everything back up and running properly, I decided to indulge in one more whim. I kept the templates and blog settings like they were for .01 and just dropped in the .02 version of the plugin. My hope was that the problem existed with the templates and not the plugin itself, but that didn’t work either.

So as it stands, only the hacked .01 method has successfully worked for me. The new version simply doesn’t work in any way shape or form. Looking in the forums, I see that other people are having trouble with it too, so at least I’m not alone.

Given the fact that Josh’s site is down and that I can’t seem to find the earlier version of the plugin, I’m thinking I might need to create a post specifically on how to get this working as a resource for others. Maybe even go so far as to provide the original plugin. I don’t know. What do you think?

1397 days ago • site news • Tags: , ,

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