simplicity

Over the past few weeks I noticed that the daily digest  ’Interesting Reads’ post was getting  a little convoluted.  As a result, I have gotten rid of those posts and instead I have created a ‘Recommended Reading’ page which is a more effective way of showing what I’m sharing via my RSS reader.

Noticed that the daily digest post that happens every night with a list of ‘Interesting Reads’ has been incorrectly publishing the day.  So for example last night (Feb. 15th) it published ‘Interesting Reads for 2010.02.16′.  I can only assume that it’s getting the date from the server and that the server isn’t in the same timezone as my posting cycle.  I haven’t had time to look into this but will do so when I get some free time.

I’ve upgraded the MySQL database that this blog uses from 4.0 to 5.0. As a result of this, the blog is having some issues with certain characters, the encoding between 4.0 and 5 got corrupted. I’ve tried to follow a set of potential fixes but none of those have worked so far. As such, the old posts may look funky..

Saw this today and thought it was hilarious. It was great how they included all the scenes from the various shows.

I took the opportunity this week to implement auto-posting from Google Reader to WordPress. I spend an excessive amount of my time online in Google Reader, mostly catching up on all the latest blogs and news. The ability to share items or add a note to shared items is really quite easy and thus my ‘Google Reader Shared Items‘ feed is updated regularly. As a result, I thought it may be advantageous to take the items I share with notes and add them to the blog. It took some time to determine the best method to implement the posts from my shared items to my blog and it still is far from perfect. As such, in the coming weeks I will continue to update and tweak the method and how the post itself looks.

The most notable and major issue that arose during determining how to do this was ‘How to share only items that I have added a note to?’ While the ‘Shared Items‘ have one feed, each tag can also have an individual feed, but items with a note aren’t broke down into their individual feed. Thus, I decided that the feed needed to be manipulated and to do this I used Yahoo Pipes to manipulate the feed. I essentially created a pipe that would take my ‘Shared Items‘ feed and filter out items that did not contain ‘text’ within the content element under ‘item.gr:annotation.content.content’. The pipe then loops through the filtered content placing ‘blockquotes’ around the content and not my comments. That final loop was just for display purposes.

To implement the output as a post in WordPress I used the ‘wp-o-matic‘ plug-in. This plug-in lets you create a campaign, which will check an RSS feed for updates (using a variety of methods) and then create individual posts. The plug-in does have the ability to configure how the post is displayed in a variety of ways. However, there is one issue with the current version, the plug-in does not fetch any items in a Yahoo Pipes feed or any feed with an ‘&’ in the URL. Currently, any URL that contains an ampersand will have the ampersand get converted to its encoded URL value, so an ‘&’ will get converted to ‘&’. To fix this: In the wp_campaign_feeds table in your WordPress database find the erroneous URL and update the ‘&’ to ‘&’ and you should be all set.

As I said above, I will be continuing to tweak this as time permits.

Installed the WordPress application on my iPhone yesterday. Couldn’t use it immediatly because I had yet to upgrade my WordPress installation on my webserver. Proceeded to do that last night and thought I’d give posting from the phone a try. Pretty neat so far.

As I mentioned previously I’m currently using Tumblr to do a few of my quick posts. These quick posts are then posted from my Tumblr blog to my WordPress blog. The way I’m currently doing this is with the FeedWordPress plug-in. The plug-in checks my Tumblr blog on a certain schedule to see if it’s been updated before importing over the posts. The only issue I’ve run into is that the schedule doesn’t work the way I thought it would. I placed it on a 10 minute interval, but it really checks only every hour. That’s fine for me though as I don’t post that often and if I really need to I can always click the update button under the admin interface in WordPress.

I could install the Quickpost plug-in for WordPress to avoid using Tumblr, but I haven’t ventured in that direction yet. I’m interested to keep my Tumblr blog updated and see how easy it is to post from my iPhone. I’d also like to at some point start posting more pictures from my phone to the web, we’ll see if I eventually get that crazy.

According to Wiktionary ‘procrastination’ is defined as

The act of postponing, delaying or putting off, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness.

Ahem.

That is all.

The layout is slowly changing as I find the time to make the necessary updates. Hopefully in the coming weeks with my current rotation winding down I’ll find some much needed time to finalize the look & feel.

Over the next few days I’ll be changing the template/design of the site, so I’ll probably be doing a lot of various types of testing.