Author: Jeffro

Jeffrohttp://jeffc.meEnjoy writing about, talking about, and helping others with WordPress
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MyBlogLog Fixes Image Issue

MyBlogLog Logo

The MyBlogLog image and widget loading issues that have plagued the blogosphere the past 2-3 days are soon to be resolved. According to the MBL Blog:

We had a hiccup with our image serving system that displays your userpic in the Recent Reader widget. We’ve identified the problem and are running a script that is fixing this. Afterwards, we’ll be making some modifications to prevent this from happening again.

As it turns out, the CIVRF server must of been one of the servers that went down due to a power outage in a Rackspace data center facility located in Dallas, Texas. A truck smashed into a utility pole, causing the transformer to blow up. The generators weren’t enough to power the HVAC system so in order to keep the data center temperatures under control, they brought in 6-10 100KW generators to power the HVAC system.

This outage affected numerous sites such as LaughingSquid, 37Signals and RKNet.

Visual Mashup Maker MashupMania Reviewed

MashupMania Logo

Not a code monkey? MashupMania tries to make it as easy as pie to create a mashup using visual elements that are more like puzzle pieces. No coding required. I’ll come right out and say that the first time I tried to load this site, FireFox almost vomited all over itself. Thankfully, it didn’t crash.

The Site Design:

One of the first things you should notice is the Web 1.0 design elements. White background, web 1.0 button links, scroll bars and weird design elements. However, I have to give these folks credit for adding the beta logo in the top left hand corner and the blue TRY NOW badge. Not to mention, the black content bars have rounded corners. Let’s call the design, Web 1.5.

Upon visiting the homepage, I was knocked to the floor by the WTF do I do feeling. After taking a few wild guesses, I found out that the link to the MashupMaker was called ‘Widgeteria‘. Either I’m dumb or that’s not the greatest piece of text you could use to label that section of the site.

The Nitty Gritty:

I did manage to check out the tutorial thats posted on the front page of the site. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have any audio attached to it. It would of been much nicer if the tutorial was actually a walkthrough of the site and offered up audio that described what it was the Widgeteria did. You do however, get a taste of how the site works.

MashupMania Is A Mess

This is a small sample of what you’ll be greeted with once you enter the Widgeteria. In all honesty, it’s a mess, with draggable windows all over the place and no real starting point. Thank god their is a CLEAR button on the top options bar.

Once the area was cleared off, I decided to take a look at the Library. The library contains a list of pre-made widgets that can be customized to suit your needs without having to start from scratch. For the purpose of this review, I selected the RSS FEED 2 option.

Widget Library

After selecting RSS FEED 2, a box popped up which allowed me to type in an RSS feed URL. After putting in my FeedBurner address, the parser on the right hand side of the site was filled up with my blog posts. Not knowing what to do with the widget now, I choose to save it. Clicking the SAVE button opens up a new dialog box that gives me the options of giving the widget a name, and then a short description. After saving my Widget, I noticed it shows up in the library for anyone else to use.

When your finished tinkering around with your widget, click on the EXPORT button. The dialog box lets you know that before you can export your work, you have to save the widget. MashupMania then provides you a block of code which you then have to embed into your site. In my case, it was a block of javascript code within an Iframe.

I tried posting the code that MashupMania gave to me into the WordPress Text editor in CODE View and for whatever reason, everything in the WordPress text editor disappeared. I had to refresh the page a few times while constantly clicking on the CODE tab in order to delete the javascript. I did mange to see what the widget looked like on the page before it borked and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, I’m not even sure what it was I posted.

Final Thoughts:

This is one of those reviews that I couldn’t wait to get over with.

The Good:

  • Great Idea/Concept
  • For those that can figure it out, it could be one hell of a service for you
  • The FAQ section of the site

The Bad:

  • The site makes FireFox crap on itself
  • The site design is not user-friendly
  • Messing around in the widget area is a SLOW process
  • The video tutorial on the front page does little to help a noob.
  • Knowing what the hell your doing is almost impossible
  • The first visit to the Widgeteria greets you with a ton of crap you don’t need

At times, I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing. Making the creation of a widget as a step by step process with an explanation as to what THIS or THAT does might of made for a better experience. I think the idea of being able to create a widget without touching any code is great, but doing it the way MashupMania has it setup is a painstaking process that made me wish I knew how to code. This is my opinion and your experience and opinions may vary. If you decide to give this site a try, let me know how it went.

MyBlogLog Avatars Failing To Display

MyBlogLog LogoFrom the looks of it, some of the avatars on MyBlogLog that are being hosted on http://civrf.yahoo.com are not displaying. I don’t know if CIVRF is one of many of the Yahoo servers but apparently, the darn thing is offline taking anyone’s avatar that is hosted on the machine with it.

I’ve been browsing around the MyBlogLog Blog and the MBL community and no one seems to have mentioned it or at least, no one seems to be talking about it. The images began disappearing starting yesterday. Is this happening to anyone else?

CommenTag Promo Video

Here is a promo video I found on YouTube for CommenTag.org A service that lets you organize the discussions on your blog, otherwise known as comments. The system looks like it will be interesting to use and will be in private beta on January 1st, 2008 Midnight GMT.

There is very little info in regards to the company on their own website. At any rate, the thing that is stopping me from using something like this, or DisQus or any of those other commenting system replacements is that, I’ll have to start over. Unless you guys know of a system that integrates with what I already have so I don’t lose all of the comments that are already published on the blog, I’ll be sticking with what I have.

VectorMagic – Turning Rasters Into Vectors

Vector Magic Logo

VectorMagic is an interesting site that takes raster images and turns them into vectors. Raster images are made up of pixels. A general rule of thumb to remember is that, anything created out of pixels can not be enlarged while maintaining quality because to maintain the quality would require more pixels. However, you can downsize pixel images and maintain an acceptable level of quality because of the number of pixels available for the downsized image.

Vector based images are those that are made out of lines. Think of vector images as one large shape or a series of shapes. An example that seems to make sense to me is that, think of a square as four lines. No matter how you resize the square, the square still ends up as four connected lines. This is one of the primary advantages to using Vector based images. You can make them as big as a skyscraper and they would look the same as if they were the size of a stamp.

VectorMagice works on the basis of tracing the outermost pixels of a raster image and transforming the image into a shape. To test out this service, I am going to use Mike’s avatar that he uses on this blog.

Here is Mike’s avatar as a raster image:

Mikes Raster Based avatar

Here it is after going through VectorMagic:

Mike Vector Image

As you can see, it didn’t do a terrible job but it didn’t do a perfect one either. I don’t lay all the blame on the website though as Mike’s avatar image is somewhat complicated and at the pixel level, contains numerous artifacts that affect the outcome. As I was going through the conversion process, VectorMagic provided me with a few questions such as the number of colors in the image, the quality of the image, and whether or not it was simple or somewhat complicated. Then, it did the best it could to turn the raster image into a basic shape. I’m going to go ahead and try a few other images to see if I can get the two to look alike. Until then, if you have a simple pixel based image or logo and don’t have the Adobe Illustrator skills to turn it into a Vector image, give this site a shot.

Please report back with your findings!

Stack Overflows Under Control

While listening to the Browns game today, I tried my hand at figuring out the stack overflow errors that were being generated by the MyAvatars plugin. No matter what I tried, the damn thing kept spitting out those errors. I tried deleting bits and pieces of the code, but each time I did so, the Gravatar function didn’t work or some part of the plugin would ruin the page.

So I opted to try out a few other Gravatar based plugins. The ones I tried are as follows:

The first one is more of a programmer’s type plugin. Unless you know how the code works with the various ARRAYS and configurable strings, you’ll have a hard time getting the block of code correct. The next two didn’t work out exactly as I wanted either. I also tried Doug’s EasyGravatars plugin. EasyGravatars worked well, except that it was hard to place it where I wanted in conjunction with everything else I have in comments.php. So after tinkering all day with this crap, I finally settled on something called MBLA.

MBLA stands for MyBlogLogAvatars. This is a newer version of the MyAvatars code base which hasn’t been updatd for over a year.

Use avatars from services like Gravatar and MyBlogLog in your posts, comments and pingbacks. Remember to change options at Options -> MBLA. By Jan Olsen.

After a bit of configuring, I’ve finally managed to display the Gravatar for anyone that has one. If you don’t have a Gravatar assigned to your email address you use to comment on the blog, head to http://www.gravatar.com and make one. It’s quick, easy and free. I’m gonna support Gravatars at the very least. Not sure about MyBlogLog avatars.

My Second Life Experience

Second Life Logo

The Global Geek Podcast recently announced they will be messing around with Second Life and I thought it would be a good time to recount my own experience within the virtual world.

It wasn’t too long ago when Juliaroy from Twitter posted a message asking for anyone interested to hop into Second Life to check our her estate. Since I wanted to give Second Life a try after hearing all sorts of stuff about it in the news, I decided to download the client and jump in. Once I logged in, I had to complete a series of tests, sort of like a walk through or beginner’s guide tutorial which taught me how to move around, how to fly, and just how to get around this new world.

After completing the tutorial, Julia transported me directly to her Second Life house. It was pretty fancy seeing images from the real world plastered on her walls and even on her computer monitor. After the tour, Julia logged off and I managed to spend an hour editing, then dressing my avatar. Once I thought I had a decent looking guy, I decided to give the rest of the Second Life world a tour.

The thing I noticed first was that, unless you know a ton of people, Second Life is boring. Also, based on what I could see, some of the only places to have a congregation of people were the dance clubs. The dance clubs were pretty cool at first. People were dancing, music was streaming live, and weird lights were flashing abroad. After doing the dance thing for awhile, I started to wonder why so many people would be wasting their time, sitting in front of their computer monitor watching themselves and others dance the night away.

Second Life Dancing

So after dancing my own Second Life away for awhile, the entire Second Life thing started to get pretty boring. At this point, I decided to join the DARK SIDE. I undressed my avatar, made him fat, ugly, and PINK and kicked off the party. Apparently, people hate it when you run around and push other avatars off the dance floor. After doing this for a little while, the dance club security people would kick me out. I’d run right back in and push them around some more. Then, the security people would ban me from the territory. When your banned from a territory, there is a giant RED square that surrounds the place that prevents me from even getting close to the club. That’s ok. I went to a few more dance clubs I could find.

After being banned from 5 dance clubs for running around naked, pushing avatars off the floor, I found a particular club which allowed something I’ve never seen before. I noticed an avatar that was able to SMACK the ass of another avatar. It even played the sound of a SMACK. This was just too funny and I had to give it a try myself. So I took my ugly, pink, naked avatar and walked up next to a male avatar. I looked down at the posterior of this guy and double clicked the mouse button. Each time I did I heard “SMACK” and the text “BLABLA has smacked BLABLA’s ass”. This was hilarious. The male avatar kept telling me to stop, as he doesn’t swing that way. He kicked me out of the club but I ended up turning around and coming right back, smacking his ass hundreds of times before he kicked me out again. After a couple of times, he finally wised up and banned me. I tried to take screen shots but they never worked out to anything.

After that banning, I calmed down from my half hour of insane laughter and proceeded to uninstall Second Life. I understand some of the applications that Second Life may have such as, board meetings or some other cause. But I often times wonder what those people could be doing to benefit their first life. The graphics in second life suck no matter how high your graphic settings are. The entire world is based on 2D which is why it looks so bad yet, thats one of the reasons why Second Life is so mod-able. It’s just a world based on textures. In the end, Second Life is nothing more than a virtual social network. And like most of the other social networks, if your anti-social or don’t know the right people or have a ton of friends, Second Life becomes yet another waste of time.

A Few Updates Worth Mentioning

https://i0.wp.com/jeffc.me/images/jeffrobannerDARK.png

First off, I’d like to thank those of you who participated in the Live Chat last night. I had a blast talking to you in real-time and I think I’m going to make it a weekly occurrence. Every Friday between the hours of 9PM EST and 10PM EST, I’ll be hanging around the blog to chat with whomever wants to chat. So who showed up to the party last night? Sierra, Brad of Strangework.com, Ronald of the ReadersAppreciationProject, Mark Rizzn – Contributing Editor over at Mashable.com, and John Kolbert of Simply-Basic.com. Thanks guys for making the chat a success. The event is logged within the shoutbox itself so if you’re interested, you can browse the back pages of the shoutbox to see what was discussed. I really enjoyed my conversation with Brad concerning Facebook and OpenSocial which will probably turn into a blog post.

Asides from the chat, I have received numerous links pointing me to helpful guides for those that are starting a forum community. I’ve read them all, and I have taken at least one of the hints and implemented it into the forum. I have slashed the number of forums to post in from 20 to about 7. I hope this encourages more people to visit and post within the forum. I’m also working on installing a PHPBB mod which will help me syndicate the forum as a whole, or seperate categories. Once I have that working, keeping up to date with the forum should be easy and I’ll be able to place a widget on the front page of the blog highlighting the 5 or 10 most recent posts.

I’m still working on the MyAvatars code to figure out how to get it to work without stack overflow errors. No progress has been made just yet.

That’s all. Have a great weekend. Don’t forget to visit and sign up to the forum – Jeffro2pt0 Forum

Jeffro2pt0 Interview Now Online

Just wanted to take this oppurtunity to thank Bes of the Readers Appreciation Project for taking the time to interview me via email. The interview contains information about why I started this blog, my thoughts on reader appreciation, commenting, public interaction and of course, my rant against Digg.com. I encourage you to check out the interview and let me know what you think. This would also make a good precursor to the chat that will take place later today.