Tag: blog-meta

About The Thin Line.

Categories
Random observations

Upgraded to WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.7So as per my last post, I’ve been playing around with my weblog a bit. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.7, which features a completely overhauled administration dashboard. In addition, threaded comments are now built into WordPress, so there’s no need for a plugin. I just needed to hack my theme a little bit to take advantage of this feature. I’ve done a minimal job, so threaded comments don’t look that great at the moment. I’ve added some test comments in the comments section below.

Another thing I’ve done is fully widgetize my blog. So everything that used to be hand-coded into the various PHP files that make up my theme is now a widget (Twitter feed, Google Analytics and so on). This makes everything much easier to maintain, and change, if I feel like it.

In related news, AJ has made the switch to WordPress from Blosxom. I’m pretty sure he won’t look back. I’ve been using WordPress since mid-2005, and I reckon WordPress is getting better with every release (2.7 in particular is a pretty big step in the right direction, IMHO). It’s very well supported, has a large user community, and it just works. Fantastic.

Update 29 Dec, 2008: I’m now using a variant of Chris Harrison‘s threaded comment styling. He’s written a tutorial on how to style your comments.

Categories
Random observations

Re-organised weblog categories

The list of categories on my weblog was slowly growing. So I overhauled them. I’ve reduced them to a set of six, and converted the others to tags. I noticed that, for a long time now, when it comes to publishing an article, I’ve been fighting the urge to add a new category. Now I choose a single category for the post, if I can, and then just add a bunch of tags, which is pretty much whatever flies out the ends of my fingers as I type. If I can’t choose a category, it gets filed as a Random Observation, and tagged as just described. If you read The Thin Line web site as opposed to the RSS feed, you’ll notice a tag cloud on the left, and a much shorter list of categories. I don’t know whether this will help you navigate, but it removes a mental hurdle for me.

Categories
Random observations

ScribeFire

I was looking for a desktop blogging client for an aspiring photo blogger. The one that seemed to meet all the requirements (free, works on a Mac, easy to upload photos stored in iPhoto, support for WordPress) is ScribeFire. It’s a plugin for Firefox and seems to be highly regarded by many bloggers. Uploading photos is as simple as clicking the “Add an image” button on the toolbar, and it will upload via FTP or WordPress’s blogging API (XML-RPC, I guess). When it opens the browse dialog for uploading photos, it selects the “Photo” media folder by default, which (as Mac users would already know) contains all your photos from iPhoto and Photo Booth.

ScribeFire also adds an item to Firefox’s right-click pop-up menu, which lets you easily create blog entries about web pages (and makes re-blogging a cinch).

The one downside compared to other desktop blogging tools such as Ecto is that you can’t do true image resizing from within ScribeFire itself. If you’re doing photo blogging, though, presumably you’ll be using some other image editing tool to get the photo looking just right before you publish it anyway, so I don’t see this as a major drawback.

Categories
Random observations

Blogging with TextMate: image uploads supported

Xander's 1st birthday cake
Drag an image to the blog entry you’re composing in TextMate, and it uploads the image to your weblog and inserts the resulting URL into your blog post. Like this. Cool.

Categories
Random observations

Website rationalised

Welcome to my new look weblog. Observant readers might notice that the URL for The Thin Line has changed. To accommodate this change, the content that was at rickyrobinson.id.au has been consigned to the dustbin of history. It was simply too difficult to keep two websites updated with fresh content. Now you’ll find everything at this one website, including my publications and media gallery… okay, photo gallery. Hopefully all the redirecting should be transparent, but if you find anything broken, please let me know.

Categories
Random observations

The Thin Line goes underground

This will be the last post on The Thin Line for the next few months at least, as the author attends to more pressing things.
Ciao.

Categories
Random observations

Ricky told to get a life

Who’s more in need of a life: the person who writes a short review, in his own damn blog, of his and his wife’s experiences at a fast food chain, or the person who goes to the effort of leaving a comment about said blog entry in which the former is admonished for having written the review in the first place?

The Thin Line has begun to collect comments, some of them very strange, from various unknown people. I’d like to thank these mysterious people for their readership. Please visit again! Happily, all comments are valued on The Thin Line, even moronic gainsaying of the kind left by the valiant defender of SumoSalad. However, comments of the more intelligent variety are definitely encouraged and preferred.

Categories
Random observations

Internet or internet?

I’ve always used a capital ‘I’ when writing about “the Internet” – the publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks. This is because I thought it was a proper noun, like “Shanghai”. It’s also useful, perhaps, to distinguish between the Internet and an internet, the latter being any internetworked set of computer networks. But the distinction between these terms can be made by looking at the definite (“the”) or indefinite (“an”) article preceding the word “internet”, so the capitalisation is redundant. Furthermore, there’s only one sky, but we don’t tend to capitalise the ‘s’. So, like many others, I’m making the switch to lowercase. I will use a lowercase ‘i’ whenever I write the word “internet” unless it’s in a title or at the beginning of a sentence. The same goes for “the web” and related terms.

How long until I start using lowercase ‘i’ for the first person singular pronoun like danah boyd (lowercase intended) does?

Categories
Random observations

The changes continue

I’m continuing to fiddle with this weblog in whatever spare time I have. Just think, in the cumulative time I’ve spent blogging and stuffing around with this website, I probably could have built a small house. Anyway, I’ve added an “About” page and a “Disclaimer” page, the latter being about as useful as a lawyer is in hell, but it lends me some comfort nevertheless. Additionally, I’ve changed the tagline for the weblog. The “About” page might go some way towards explaining what it means, but I wouldn’t count on it. This weblog may be completely losing the plot; then again, it might just be getting interesting. Such uncertainties are the very nature of The Thin Line…

Categories
Random observations

Unself-censored

I have removed password protection from one of my earlier posts. Enjoy the rant.