Archive for the 'Network News' Category

Twitter Postings

That’s odd. I just noticed, Twitter Tools is putting the wrong date on my tweets. Today already has a post created, and today’s posts will show as tomorrow. That is, unless I change something. So, I just tweaked the settings so Twitter Tools will fire off the digest of my tweets at 11:59 PM, rather than 12:00 AM. Hopefully, that will address the problem. If not, I’ll have to find a different solution.

In other news, I’ve also added a script to my hosting account that will automatically loop through the database and close comments (but leave pingbacks open) on all Twitter Tools postings. All I get on those is comment spam anyway, easily weeded out by Spam Karma & Akismet.

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Blog Cleanup & Consolidation

Those who follow my blog may remember back in February 2009, when I cleaned up many of the posts on this blog by making many of them private. Today, I’ve laid most of the groundwork to finish bringing this blog back to the forefront of my digital life.

Yesterday, I installed Twitter Tools. This brings better Twitter integration to my blog, allowing it to publish tweets about new entries to Twitter automatically. I’ve also installed Creative Commons Configurator to give each page on my blog a proper license, and reconfigured Contextual Related Posts so it won’t try to put itself on all the asides on individual post pages. Google Sitemap Generator has been re-enabled so popular search engines can index things a bit better again, and I’ve added the PHP Code Widget plugin to make some items easier to work with. Finally, I’ve put in a Follow Me link on the right side of the page, that links to my Facebook, Last.FM, Twitter, Google Buzz, Flickr, and the central aggregator.

Users who make comments will be allowed to subscribe via email to new comments made in response to theirs now. I’ve updated a few elements of a couple REALLY old plugins that were not completely compatible with the newer versions of WordPress, but none of those have quite made it out of the lab yet.

I’ve removed the cherished Vader styling for K2. For now, it has been replaced with Jolie 3.0 by van blogzor. However, I’m still on the fence about this styling and will probably change to a different theme that allows what I need it to. With the Vader theme discontinued and not working properly on the latest version of K2, I just needed something temporarily that will work.

The future should hold a different theme, a few more links added to the Follow Me feature, and probably a few more tricks thrown in to make things a little more interesting around here. As stated before, the last time I seriously looked at new theming and plugins was 2007, and this blog was starting to show its age. It’s hard to believe I’ve been blogging for a little over 8 years now… Seems like just yesterday when I started.

New Feature: Twitter Tools!

As visitors to my blog may have noticed, my sidebar has an area that shows the last 5 tweets I’ve sent to twitter. Previously, this was handled using the RSS feed from Twitter, and was fairly ugly. For example, it kept the username, and the entire thing showed as a link rather than just the time it was posted.

I’ve just added the Twitter Tools plug-in, which has fixed that. Now, tweets show as regular text, with a link back to their original source on Twitter. Plus, I have a way to publish tweets directly from my blog’s home page, which means I may come here more and actually maintain my blog. Also, news of blog posts will be posted directly to Twitter as they happen, which of course has a ripple effect over to Facebook as well.

This is not the only improvement planned for my blog. In the upcoming weeks, I would expect to see more useful plugins and a new theme enabled, categories consolidated, and possibly more Cool Stuff added. The last time I seriously revisited the theme and plugins of this blog was in 2007, so hopefully something suitable can be found and tweaked to my liking.

Oh, and I plan to post more content as well. I’ve been using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer for the past few months, and I must say this is actually a WordPress-posting client worth its salt. I do have the WordPress client for Android on my phone too, if I want to spend several minutes getting frustrated with the on-screen keyboard… it’s great for short messages, but longer ones just end up being frustrating.

www.mattfast1.com

I finally pushed out version 1.0.0 of mattfast1.com, with the final conversion of some pages from HTML to PHP. The site itself will not reflect the changes made until the automatic updates occur, sometime around 1:02am PDT (-0700). If you have any problems with the site after this automatic update, you are encouraged to let me know.

If you want to read the release notes, here’s the [ link ].

I’m Baaaccckkk!

Wow, it’s certainly been a crazy ride, right? Especially considering the last time I actually penned anything here was nearly 5 months ago. I’d be surprised if I had any readers anymore, other than spambots and stalkers… but I digress.

I have goals. Short-term, long-term, and in between – I have them all. One of the things I’ve realized, though, is that many of my goals are currently undefined. One of the reasons I haven’t even touched this site in months is because of a lack of stated goals concerning the site, which has lead to a lack of motivation. What this means for you is that you definitely have less motivation to read my writing, and in the world of Web 2.0, that’s commiting suicide.

So here’s the bottom line: I am stating a goal to write a blog post every week from here on out. Any more than that will be a bonus. I think the current state of the world brings me no shortage of things to write about. I also intend to finish the “quick” project I started over two years ago to bring my websites into the 21st century, by recoding into PHP and potentially linking content in from all of my online sources. Long-term, I will probably look into redesigning my website. The modular design of my PHP-driven code should help in that.

My writings will also probably become more personal, about things that affect me on a day to day basis. This means that occasionally, this blog might host stories about virtual chickens, the Geek Squad, and computing technologies in general. This blog will hopefully become more well-written. I reserve the right to kill off old, poorly-written entries, although things like the outing of Bill Smith Auto Parts (who it occurs to me now that I sent the CEO an email about the quality and quantity of posts by one if its employees here, and nothing appears to have come of it) will stay until the end of time so people can read about these types of business failures.

My pages have apparently all reverted to posts with the latest database upgrade… please stand by while this problem is fixed.

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New Policies Regarding Comments

Due to repeated abuses from someone styling themselves as “George Obrien” (relating to my two previous posts about my bad experiences with Bill Smith Auto Parts, ebay ID billsmithautoparts), and my anti-spam defenses not being crafted to work against manual spam, I am now requiring that all comments are approved by me before they can appear on my blog. I am hoping that the WordPress setting isn’t overridden by Spam Karma 2. If it is, I’ll have to investigate moving to a different anti-spam solution on my blog.

If you are curious about the type of spam I have been receiving, it began with comparing me to devices used to introduce water to the human body, various comments of a sexual nature, a few racist and bigoted remarks, and of course the ever-popular name calling. In practice, these comments have only been degrading to the one posting them, as well as the company they work for. I realize anyone could type an arbitrary email address and name into a form on the internet and think they could get away with it, but with the multiple abuses including the particular email addresses used, the IP addresses used, the comments received, and other info, I feel confident in saying that these are mostly, if not all, from the same human being, presumably one who works for Bill Smith Auto Parts.

If you have anything constructive to say about this situation, I am open to hearing it. If not… your comment will hit the dung heap. I’m sorry that’s the way it has to be, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Quickie Update, with an added Eulogy

Apologies for not updating my site in a while! I suppose I shouldn\’t neglect my blog for so very long, especially when I have the software (WordPress) set to update automatically nightly from the development source, as well as the theme (K2). Continue reading ‘Quickie Update, with an added Eulogy’

Forum Deleted

The domain forum.mattfast1.com has been deleted from my DNS entries. This means that it will no longer be accessible in any form to anyone. This is as per my previous postings on this subject.

New Policy: Users

Due to abuse of the registration system at this blog recently, I have disabled user registrations. If you want to have an account (don\’t see why you need one, but whatever; you can still comment without an account), you will have to contact me. Otherwise, I\’m decreasing my headaches now.

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That’s odd. I just noticed, Twitter Tools is putting the wrong date on my tweets. Today already has a post created, and today’s posts will show as tomorrow. That is, unless I change something. So, I just tweaked the settings so Twitter Tools will fire off the digest of my tweets at 11:59 PM, rather than 12:00 AM. Hopefully, that will address the problem. If not, I’ll have to find a different solution.

In other news, I’ve also added a script to my hosting account that will automatically loop through the database and close comments (but leave pingbacks open) on all Twitter Tools postings. All I get on those is comment spam anyway, easily weeded out by Spam Karma & Akismet.

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A wireless headset has many advantages over a wired one. One of which is the ability to hit the head late at night with other people in the house trying to sleep, but still rock out.

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Thanks to TweetDeck Support posterous for getting my issue with a blank TweetDeck after a fresh install fixed!

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My pages have apparently all reverted to posts with the latest database upgrade… please stand by while this problem is fixed.

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If you want to hear something bizarre, simply play Rhianna’s Disturbia over ICP’s Let’s Go All The Way. Weird.

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