Category Archives: Blogging

Leaving Infoworld and its feeds

Posted on by
1

Infoworld wins.  I have read Infoworld for what seems like forever.  They were one of the first RSS feeds I subscribed to that embedded advertisements in the feed, which someone probably got promoted for, but it drove me crazy.  Always really disliked that.  Ranks right up there with only providing just a few lines of the article so I have to click on the link to visit the damn website and see even more ads.Even the Infoworld newsletters break up the email with ads and a link to read the rest of the article online.  Today I decided I had enough and unsubscribed from all of their newsletters and RSS feeds.  I just can’t take all the ads anymore. They win.  I quit.  I just won’t read their content any longer and will catch it from others that do not pound on me with so much advertising.I’m taking back my Inbox and feed reader. 

Diggers win and chase me away from Digg

Posted on by
Reply

One of my most active RSS feeds is the social news site Digg.com.  Due to a problem people had with Digg pulling down content that contained an encryption key to unlock HD-DVD content, everyone reacted like hurt children instead of rational adults and decided to post the key in a thousand different ways and posts yesterday.

As someone who could not care less about this key I have no use for the barrage of posts that showed up in my Google Reader today.  I’ve been getting less and less value from the Digg feed anyway, so this just forced the inevitable and caused me to unsubscribe.  I guess the Diggers “win.”

Congratulations.

New content, even when I’m not posting

Posted on by
1

Although I don’t always post daily, I do make it a point to go through any of the things I read and tag them for my Google Shared Items blog.   If you look over to the sidebar, you’ll see an area called Things I’m Reading.   That shows you the 5 latest articles I’ve tagged, but if you click on the Read More link you’ll go directly to the Shared Items blog, aka, the link blog.

Just another way to stay current without posting.   The same happens with my Flickr feed.

Damn you iTheme

Posted on by
Reply

I just posted about how I finally got White A Milk handling WordPress Widgets.  Everything was fine.  Two days later out comes iTheme and I had to check it out.  Look at it, it’s beautiful.  I tested it on Safari/OSX, Firefox/OSX, and IE7/WindowsXP and everything looked correct, so I’ll see how long I can stick with this them before moving on as well.

Damn you iTheme, I had everything perfect.

Finally found the theme combination I was looking for

Posted on by
Reply

I have always been a fan of the minimal White As Milk WordPress theme, but I also wanted the ability to have sidebar widgets.  I finally got around to figuring out how to have my cake and eat it to, so I modified the White As Milk them with only 7 lines of code from this site and now White As Milk is exactly what I want – it now supports Widgets.

Anything missing?  Oh yeah, content!  If only I had worthwhile content.

WordPress comment email notification fixed

Posted on by
2

Here’s how I finally got the comment notification working.

I deactivated the wp-PHPMailer plugin that I installed to help with email issues. Ends up I no longer needed it. What I did need was the realization that WordPress will not send the Author comments to his/herself! It only sends comments from people that did not write the post, so I went to another browser and commented as someone other than me (the author) and I received email notification of the comment immediately.

I can’t believe I spent so much time searching every forum I could find and it ended up being something this simple. Hope this helps someone fighting this in the future.

Here’s the Support Post that made the little light bulb go off over my head.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/100849

One last issue with hosting my own WordPress blog

Posted on by
Reply

I have searched the WordPress.org site, the forums, the WordPress.com forums, Google, and the forums and knowledgebase of my new host, BlueHost.com. I cannot find the answer to my last remaining issue with hosting my own WordPress blog – how the heck to you get comment notification email to work?!

I tried everything I could think of. I even did a live chat with a BlueHost support person and we couldn’t find anything wrong. Installed the wp-PHPMailer plugin and that didn’t work either.  I must have configured that thing a dozen different ways but I was never able to receive an email when someone would post a comment to the blog.

I’m going to post a question on the BlueHost support forums next, but for now I have subscribed to the Comments RSS feed until I get this figured out.  It’s better than nothing.  One step away from perfection.  If anyone has a suggestion please leave it in the comments, I’ll eventually see it in my feed reader.

The move is complete

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been wanting to host my own site for a while now so I finally got off my butt and moved to a web host that supports WordPress for blogging.  I was a Simplehost customer for a  year and a half.  They did a decent job, but I wanted to host my own blog again using WordPress software.  Although Simplehost provides WordPress for blogging, they are way behind on the versions and would not commit to a time when they would upgrade.

Enter BlueHost.com, my new web site host.  I think their pricing is fair and they are running much newer versions of all the software, including the Control Panel that you use to manage your site.  Hosting my own WordPress blog was pretty simple, and I made sure to keep the look as close to what I used on WordPress.com as I could.  One nice thing is that I now have an almost unlimited supply of different Themes and Plugins that I can use, so I doubt the site will look like this for long.

I tried to make sure that all feeds and links redirected correctly,  so if you find a  broken link or feed somewhere, please let me know by leaving a Comment.

Welcome to the new site.

The best post about blogging I’ve read all year

Posted on by
Reply

blogging.jpgThe Internet is a great place to get lost. Sometimes I start at one site reading about something I was looking for, and then 10 links later I’m on to the nutritional benefits of various cat foods.

Today I ended up at a great blog called engtech and read a post called “You can be a good example or a horrible warning – how NOT to be a successful blogger.”

After reading this post I realized that someone had put in words exactly how I felt about my attempt at blogging. I could never have written it as well, but I wish I had written that entry because it’s one of the best I’ve read all year, and definitely the best post on blogging.