These workers were installing a series of aluminum bars to prohibit people from parking on the sidewalk to a local pub. How long do you think it will take before the workers realize they may have a hard time getting out of the area?
Lion Plus Tiger Equals Liger
I thought this was rather interesting. What do you get, when you cross a tiger and a lion? A Liger, thats what. As described in the video, these cats become larger than their mother and father combined. I’m not sure why a lion would mate with a tiger, but the result is nothing short of enormous. Seems like the Cabella Safari hunter now has a new animal to put in his sites. Check it out.
Proposed WP Plugin Standards
Wow. Someone has come through and put together a list of proposed standards that plugin authors should abide by. This person goes by the name of Weathervane and considering this fella has downloaded 530 plus plugins, I tend to think he knows what he’s talking about. A little warning, the list of proposed standards is a bit long but it’s definitely a worthy read.
Weathervane makes a ton of proposals that I agree with. But there is one thing he didn’t mention that I think would solve many of the problems that are mentioned. That being, the use of the Official WordPress Plugin Database. Weathervane takes the approach of plugins being available on the authors main website. I take the stance that any and all plugins should be submitted and stored in the WP Plugin Database. This provides a central location for all types of plugins, provides the hosting necessary for plugin authors if need be, provides the ability to have a discussion/support area for each individual plugin, and something I feel that is really important. Automatic notification that a plugin has been updated.
Of course, my view on the proposed standards for WordPress Plugins requires that we start off at the top of the food chain. This would be the WP Plugin Database. Once a series of guidelines were established at the top, the rest of the job becomes easy. Think of the advantages of having a central repository for WP Plugins. As end users, we wouldn’t need to Google Search or bookmark tons of seperate web pages that housed plugins. We would automatically be notified of updates within the plugin page in our WordPress back end. Depending on the coding guidelines that allow plugins to be entered into the repository, as end users, we would have that much more confidence that the plugin actually works and won’t do any hanky panky.
It’s awesome that I think weathervane put in the time and effort into his proposal and I believe a lot of his guidelines would be great to use for WP plugin database. Now that we have someone who has put together a base of their own proposals, it’s time we put our thinking caps on and contributed to the list.
Turning Categories Into Feeds
Out of the box, WordPress generates a number of RSS feeds for you automatically. These include feeds for comments, posts, and believe it or not, categories. I had previously thought that a plugin was required in order to turn categories into RSS feeds but that is not the case. Check this out.
WordPress supports a number of different syndication specifications, those of which are listed below along side their respected WordPress generated URL.
RSS Spec / WordPress URL
RSS 0.92 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed-rss
RDF RSS 1.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com?feed=rdf
RSS 2.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=rss2
Atom Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-atom.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=atom
Comments RSS Feed / http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss&p=50 where p stands for post and 50 is the post id.
Now here is the feed link which I found interesting.
Category RSS Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=50 where cat stands for category and 50 is the category ID.
Finding the ID number for a category is easy if the blog your browsing is not using pretty permalinks. However, if the blog IS using permalinks, you can type in the following URLs to access their RSS Subscription Links.
http://www.domain.com/feed – Main RSS Feed
http://www.domain.com/comments/feed – Comments RSS Feed
http://www.domain.com/category/category-name/feed – RSS Feed For That Category
Why would you want to know this information? Now, if you come across a site that publishes articles within only a category or two of interest, you can subscribe directly to those categories instead of the entire blog making your RSS reader that much more efficient. For instance, I occasionally publish jokes or perhaps something out of my personal life when all you really care about, are reviews or news.
Photos Of The Blogging Master 3000
Today as I was building the machine, I took the opportunity to take a number of photos of each individual piece of hardware. Most the photos involved me playing with the MACRO settings on my Kodak EasyShare and are not of the best quality but, they should suffice none the less.
All of the pictures I took today can be found within the Blogging Master 3000 Flickr Photoset.
Meet The Blogging Master 3000
Ok, the blogging master 3000 is not me per se, instead, its the name of my new computer system I’m building. Inside this picture is the following hardware (all purchased through NewEgg.com):
- COOLER MASTER CM Stacker STC-T01-UWK Black/ Silver Aluminum / Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case – $149.99
- EVGA 122-CK-NF67-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i LT SLI ATX Intel Motherboard – $159.99
- BFG Tech GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card – $329.99
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor – $189.99
- Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory – $74.99
- Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – $42.99
Total cost for this new machine came out to be $947.94. This is without shipping and handling added in. It’s been a long time since I’ve built a PC from scratch and I must admit, I’m pretty stoked about putting this thing together. Not that there was anything wrong with my current system. It’s just that, my current system has hit it’s upgradeability lifespan. For instance, my current computer only has support for 8x AGP for graphics cards. I am only using DDR memory clocked at 400 MHz. And last but not least, I’m using an old Pentium 4 2.4c at 800MHz FSB. Sure, I could overclock this thing to get more out of it, but I decided to plunk down some cash and join in on the PCI-Express revolution.Before I go, I wanted to let you in on a bonehead moment. Last Friday, I ended up getting all of the parts in that I ordered with the exception of the case and hard drive. Those didn’t arrive until Monday. When I began to build my new blogging monster, I realized that the motherboard didn’t ship with a small baggy of screws. These screws include the risers that are needed to seperate the motherboard from the case so that it doesn’t short out. Well, I spent some time online to see if these screws were left out of the packaging (this motherboard was cheap) which didn’t turn out to be the case.
So, I checked all of the screws I had left over from previous PC builds and only four of the riser screws has the proper threads on them to work in this case. That wasn’t enough. So I put the case away thinking I was screwed. (do you see all the intended puns here?) Today, after trying to find more riser screws, I told my dad about what had happened and he told me that usually the case comes packaged with all of the screws. He asked if I had checked the case to make sure that the screws weren’t tucked away in a drive bay or something. As it turns out, in the top portion of the case, there is a cardboard box which I thought was nothing more than a space filler, so I never bothered to check it until now.When I took out the box and opened it up, there were all of the screws I needed, including the casting wheels for the bottom of the case. This was one of those total bonehead moments. Now, I have to get ready for work and I have no time to build the machine.I thought I’d share that story because it was pretty funny. Tomorrow though, this baby is going to be put together, no questions asked!
WordPress Premium Theme – Reviewed
I don’t think I’ve ever done a review of a WordPress theme before, so this ought to be interesting. However, ever since I laid eyes on the WordPress theme called WordPress Premium, I’ve been wanting to review it.
WordPress Premium was designed by R. Bhavesh and comes with 3 different color styles. Black, Soft-Red and Brown. In the screenshot up above, that is actually the Soft-Red version. At first, I didn’t like the color scheme. But after I altered the brightness settings on my LCD monitor, the color scheme has grown on me and I actually think it’s soft on the eyes.
First Things First:
One of the things you’ll notice first is the RSS button that is predominantly located at the top of the design. What I like about this particular section of the theme is the beautiful integration of a subscribe via email form, right next to the RSS button. This allows your readers to easily choose between which method works best as far as keeping up with your posts. Believe it or not, there are still a large number of users who subscribe to websites via email. In fact, there are at least 5 individuals who have subscribed to this blog via email, not including myself. Another nice aesthetic is the rounded corners presented all across the design. Despite what critics have said, I believe rounded corners to be easier on the eyes than 90 degree corners. Of course, my own blog design is filled with hard edges. I get a ton of emails from readers complaining about being cut from the blog. At any rate, the rounded corners just add to the smoothness of the overall design.
Advertising Strategy:
As for advertising placements, WordPress Premium comes preloaded with three advertisement squares that are built into the sidebar. These are 100X100 squares that typically hold advertisement images similar to the ones found on WeblogToolsCollection.com
3 In 1 Module:
Other highlights worth noticing is the multi use, tabbed search box. This tabbed widget serves three purposes. A search box, an archive displayer, and a list of categories. I believe this to be an excellent use of space and wouldn’t mind having something like that for my own design.
The Sidebar Effect:
The sidebar for WordPress Premium takes special notice from me. It’s hard to come across a blog with what I call a 2 in 1 sidebar. That is, a wide sidebar built into two smaller sidebars. That way, you can put those big widgets in the bigger sidebar, while putting smaller width items in the skinnier sidebars. That is the kind of side bar I wanted for this blog, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. With WordPress Premium, this kind of sidebar is built in, and should serve as an excellent area for those third party widgets to reside in.
Content Is King:
As for the display of content, the content background is white while the foreground text is a dark gray. I think the dark gray text provides a smoother contrast when compared with the black on white. Out of the box, displaying images either on the left or right side of the post looks good as they have the appropriate padding attributes so that the text is not squashed up against the image. As a nice touch, the comment notifier is displayed in the top right hand corner of each post. This little gem displays the number of comments per blog entry and links to the comment section of that post.
Conclusion:
To download and see this theme in action, click here.
Before the new year started, I browsed around for hours, checking out numerous WordPress themes along with template designs on Templatemonster.com, looking for inspiration for the redesign. As you can see, I merely rearranged my current theme and elected not to go for a completely new look. However, had I changed the blog to a completely new theme, this is the one that I most likely would of chose.
Actually, while I might still have your attention, do you think the color scheme or some of the elements from WordPress Premium would look good on Jeffro2pt0? There are a few things I wouldn’t mind trying to implement from that theme into this one. But I figured I’d ask first.
New Business Idea
So Mike, Mark and I each enjoy using the Shoutmix service. Shoutmix is a shoutbox provider. They host the box, content, ect and all you have to do is place the embed code on your website. It only costs $6.00 for 3 months of service and it’s worked out quite nicely.
Now between the three of us, we each have our own blog. And on our own blogs, we each have our own Shoutmix shoutbox. We were thinking, how cool it would be, to be able to use the same shoutbox on multiple blogs. To be honest, this is already possible by the mere fact of placing the embed code for one shoutbox on multiple blogs. However, the design of one shoutbox does not meet the design requirements for every other blog on the net. So the biggest problem we are facing is that, we can use the same shoutbox on different websites, but we can’t configure the shoutbox design to configure to our blog’s design.
I sent in an email to Shoutmix to see if #1 this was possible and #2 will this be a feature in a future version of Shoutmix. Here is what I found out.
For now V2 does not offer a convenient way to do this so this feature is not supported yet. I am considering it for the upcoming V3.
Just to make sure we were on the same page, I sent a follow up email and garnered this response:
I get what you mean, a singular shoutbox being shared over different sites or blogs, sharing the same contents. I’ll try to make that available in V3. It will take some time before V3 will be out though.
So it looks like we’ll be waiting a little while for something like that to be built into Shoutmix. Now to get to the new business idea. If you have been wanting to do a Web 2.0 startup and want to tap into the blogosphere, here is an idea how. Develop a shoutbox type of service similar to Shoutmix. Call the service BlogChattr to go along with the Web 2.0 naming scheme. You can offer your service in a number of ways. For instance, embed codes, links, widgets, ect. However, the biggest feature you would need to implement is the ability for one shoutbox, to have multiple designs.
Think about how cool that is. Think of it as an instant messenger for bloggers. Instead of having to browse each bloggers site to send messages to their respected shoutboxes, we could (chat from home). The main shoutbox would be the central administration area for every other shoutbox that connects to the chain. I’d like to see the option to lock down the shoutbox, unless exclusive access was given to a particular domain. So that way, I could add in domains that I accept having the shoutbox displayed on their website.
To tell you the truth, what I’m basically proposing is the combination of Cliqin and Shoutmix. The widget/design implementations of Cliqin with the administrative abilities of Shoutmix.
What do you folks think of the idea? Because I’ll tell you what, If I had the startup cash, this is one idea I would jump on because I think it has the ability to be a hot item in the blogosphere.
Make Post Titles Less Spammy Looking
Stephan Spencer has written a brief article highlighted by an interview he conducted with the infamous Matt Cutts. The article discusses why it’s a bad idea to have a ton of keywords as part of your URL permalink. In WordPress, depending upon how your permalink options are setup, whatever words are placed into the post title, are the same words that will appear within the permalink, unless you manually configured the post slug.
When Stephan asked Matt what is excessive in the length of a keyword-rich URL?, Matt responded with:
If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.
So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.
While Stephan goes on to offer some tips on keyword permalink management, I have a tip of my own. When you are writing a blog post or an article, come up with 3-7 keywords at a maximum that are relevant, and give the reader a good idea as to what the article will be about. Once again, we come up against the word of Relevancy, and you don’t need 500 keywords in your permalink URL to be relevant.
I’ve seemed to have had success with my permalink setup. In case you were curious, this is how I have mine configured:
Custom: /%postname%/
Car Wash Rage
Remind me not to go into the carwash after or before this guy. Holy smokes. It’s as if the car is a rubber ball!
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 