We’ve had a big hole in the cement in our back patio that was caused a while back when a water pipe broke underneath it, and it had to be broken up to get to the pipe so it could be fixed. Yesterday I finally got around to taking care of that hole, after two trips to Lowes because I underestimated the amount of concrete I would need.
There are still a few lingering problems that I have to tie up with this new theme:
- In some browsers, the syndicated content doesn’t stay inside the boundary.
- There is a flickering image of the tagboard that appears over to the left whenever things change on the page, like when a new tag is submitted or the syndicated content cycles to the next entry. This has to do with some page reflow bug that I remember seeing when I did the tagboard before, I just don’t remember how I fixed it.
- Altering the way that the show/hide links in the sidebar remember the selected values; they aren’t currently preserving the selected states across browser sessions.
- I’m probably going to add a “don’t show this anymore” link to the syndicated content thing, so if people don’t like it they can close it and have it now appear again.
The first two show up properly for me, using Firefox 1.5 on XP and Linux, but have problems in FF 1.0 and Safari (thanks Nathan), so I believe that they are based on bugs in other browsers that have been fixed in FF 1.5, but I still need to work around them.
I decided to try out the iTunes application for managing podcast subscriptions, just for (what I thought would be) the ease of browsing their directory and subscribing, etc.
For a company that’s supposedly big on usability and UI design, their method for managing podcast subscriptions really bites. Doing a search (or browsing through categories) and then not being able to subscribe to multiple selections from the result set is really lame. As far as I can tell (and if this isn’t the case, please point it out to me) you have to click the “subscribe” button on ONE and only one of the listed items, which takes you away from that screen into your subscriptions. Then to get back to that list (since you have to subscribe one at a time) you have to navigate back into the podcast directory and rerun your search or browse to the same place again, over and over.
That is ridiculous.
I knew I wasn’t that out of it last night when I changed everything…
Turns out the reason the blog reverted to the default theme last night (and again this morning) is explained here. Basically, it had to do with me having two web servers both referring to the same DB, from back when I did the migration to the new server. I never turned off the old one, and some indexing service was apparently still using the old address to crawl the pages, and since the new theme was not on that site, WordPress would revert it back to the default in the database that they both shared.
Long story short… the theme should stay the way it is now. At least that’s what I hope the problem was…
Just a quick post to say that I forgot to set my theme back last night after I made all the changes, so I imagine it wouldn’t have been looking good. Also, I forgot to disable the syndicated content portion on the single entry pages, which I have now done; it should only show up now if you are at the main page, not individual post pages.
So, in case you looked at some point between now and last night, just pretend you didn’t see that and take a fresh look now. 
Unless you’re reading this via RSS, you probably noticed a few changes here on the blog. It is much too late at night to elaborate on any of them in lengthy detail (as I am prone to do), but I will post a quick summary for now, and follow-up later with more details.
- Rojo Syndication: This one solves two of my recent desires: (1) Wanting a way to include headlines from other sites, etc. without creating a whole post about them, and (2) really wanting to write a 2.0-ish plugin. I wrote this one by making use of Rojo’s feed data, where I can “flag” posts as I read them, and then my plugin will pull them in here and cycle through them.
- Tagboard: Yes, it’s finally back. I decided to totally rewrite this one, basing the UI around this AJAX Shoutbox plugin, but instead of the custom table backend that one has, mine uses the standard Wordpress commenting system, so that it is automatically integrated with your existing anti-spam systems. It will auto-update without refreshing the page, so if you are carrying on a tag conversation with other people, you will see their entries without refreshing. And it’s now a “widget”, as well.
- Widgets: All my sidebar items have now been packaged into Widgets, which is a new WordPress package for sidebar plugins which will allow you to use a little ajax-y UI to reposition stuff (plugins, etc.) into your sidebar, and not need to know how to insert the appropriate PHP, etc. - (see the link for more info).
- New Recent Comments and Top Commenters plugins: I’ve rewritten both of these plugins I did a long while ago to be Widgets, and they have their own configuration options available on the widget admin page now, instead of specifying them in the call to the plugin like you had to before.
- Widget Collapser Plugin: I packaged up the javascript I’ve been using in my theme for a while to collapse those side menu items into a plugin that will automatically work with any sidebar widgets that are on your page. After the page loads, it ads show/hide links next to the title for all your sidebar widgets, and then will remember any given user’s settings (via a cookie) so that the next time the come to the page they don’t have to collapse and expand the ones they did the last time, if they like seeing things a certain way.
I’m pretty tired now, so that will have to do it for now. Like I said above, I’ll probably follow up later with individual posts that will go into more detail about each new plugin (including download links).
I just got done watching this classic movie for the first time, and boy did it suck. I love De Niro, but how anyone ever watched this particular movie enough to make those quotes memorable is beyond me.
What I’m wondering now (having not seen too many movies from that era) is whether the standards were just lower back then, or if there’s some other reason for the movie’s popularity (other than the eventual fame that De Niro achieved). Perhaps someone who was around back in ‘76 (Dave?) can tell us whether this movie was popular at the time, or whether it only became famous in retrospect?
A couple years ago, I developed an automated proposal generation system for some friends that run a small business. I got a call from them today to help them transfer the data over to a new system.
They were moving to a newer version of Quickbooks, which included the QuickBooks Easy Estimate product as an integrated part of the package. It is definitely an obvious choice for them to use that instead, since it will all be in one integrated package with all their other financial data.
The interesting thing is that this product does EXACTLY what the one that I developed a while back did: gives you forms to enter your data, and then transfers that data into proposal templates, which are stored as Word documents with fields that get populated from the database values. Then you have the filled out Word document that you can print out and/or further modify if needed. If you go to the web site, there are movies & tutorials that show how it works, and it is literally the same thing as the one I did, just slightly different looking screens for the input data.
I’m not saying that Intuit copied me or anything, but it is a nice validation of your design when you see a large software company that is the industry leader in this particular vertical market implement their solution to this requirement in the exact same way.
Or is that security teams on crack?
Homeland Security accepts fake ID
The Department of Homeland Security allowed a man to enter its headquarters last week using a fake Matricula Consular card as identification, despite federal rules that say the Mexican-issued card is not valid ID at government buildings.
Bruce DeCell, a retired New York City police officer, used his phony card — which lists his place of birth as “Tijuana, B.C.” and his address as “123 Fraud Blvd.” on an incorrectly spelled “Staton Island, N.Y.” — to enter the building Wednesday for a meeting with DHS officials.
Mr. DeCell said he has had the card for four years and has used it again and again to board airliners and enter government buildings, without being turned down once. But he said he was surprised that DHS, the agency in charge of determining secure IDs, accepted it.
Good ol’ Homeland Security!
No, not the PLA you may be thinking of, I’m talking about the Phone Losers of America. They’ve always put up really funny stuff, and now they’re repackaging some of their older stuff along with new ones into a podcast format. I think the show is up to about nine hilarious episodes now. Even if you aren’t into messing with the phone system, you will still probably find a lot of these things pretty funny.
