Got Wills

I’ve been using Google Buzz since it was activated on my account yesterday and I really like it… but, I usually do like cool new stuff from Google. The real question is going to be, “Can I get my friends and family to start buzzing, or even follow my buzz?” So far, that answer is a resounding, “No.”

I have 1 family member and 1 friend that has joined buzz and followed me. I also have 1 family member and 1 friend that have followed me, but don’t seem to have buzz’s themselfves (not sure how that works). Anyway, I’ll ride the buzz and see what happens. At least there’s a lot of good technical talk on there right now (Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, and Kevin Rose, just to name a few).

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for Google Wave to go public… I just hope I get an invite in the first wave, but I didn’t hear about it until just a short time ago. Google is supposed to open it to the public (limited invites, though) a week from tomorrow.

Open-sourcing it and allowing federation will be what makes it big… Honestly, how long do you think it will be before Microsoft takes it and tries to one-up Google? I was wondering how it was going to work with Internet Explorer, as IE doesn’t support HTML 5, but it seems Google has built a Chrome Frame plugin for IE.

I first read about this on Erictric, who argues that Wave is starting to fizzle even before it’s open to the public. I must say, I disagree. I think, come next week, it’s going to be all over the blogosphere and twitter… and then, yea, wave.

Well, I just finished redesigning and updating Holbrook Youth Football’s Web site. It took a little longer than I thought it would, but I think it looks 100 times better.

All of the image editing was done in GIMP and I used JetBrains’ new Web IDE to develop the whole site. It worked great, my only annoyance was that it creates xhtml files with .xhtml as the extension. Testing it in Internet Explorer with that extension got me a download, rather than a rendered page. It was probably a problem with IE (and may only be because I was accessing local files), but with most of today’s users still using IE, I need it to work.

I’ll be taking over the development of Northeastern Arizona Youth Football League’s Web site, as well. I’ll probably start the redesign on it in a few days. As of right now, it doesn’t even come up in Google when you search for the name of the organization… I’ll have to try to remedy that.

Let me know what you think and a big thanks to all of the sponsors and volunteers for helping Holbrook’s youth.

 

Well, I finally figured it out. It appears that the OpenID plugin is not compatible with the Contact Form ][ plugin I was using.

 

It's always worked great with registration and stuff, but never worked for me to use it as my OpenID server. I had figured it had something to do with me not having curl support built into PHP.

I just figured I'd check the error log today, right after I tried it again, and saw a lot of errors with various plugins. Well, I don't know if I can live without all those plugins, but let's deactivate them and see if it works. Wow, it worked...

After activating them again one at a time, I found it was Contact Form ][ that was causing the problems. Great, I went and found a different contact form plugin, Contact Form 7, and it is working great, as is OpenID.

I was just reading through the April issue of Website Magazine and found an article about Dofollow Blogs. I wasn’t aware of it, but most blogs add a rel="nofollow" attribute to links inside comments. I checked this blog, and lo and behold, it did the same thing. I didn’t like that at all, link love is one of the few benefits you get for reading and commenting on blogs. So, I immediately went to work to fix this.

The first solution I found was a plugin (more like 10 of them). I was scanning through them to find one that would definitely work with WordPress 7.1 and stumbled across an article on Perishable Press that explained how to do it without a plugin.

So I SSH into my server and find that the file mentioned in the article doesn’t exist in this version. Hmm, this article was written in 2007, I imagine WordPress has changed some since then. So, I take a guess at which file might hide the functions with the offending nofollow… and what do you know? I found it my first try.

So anyway, here’s the good stuff you’ve been waiting for. To make your WordPress 2.7.1 blog DoFollow just edit the file wp-includes/comment-template.php line 148:

From:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

To:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external' class='url'>$author</a>";

Basically, take out the nofollow and preceding space.

To future commenters (and past commenters), you now get some link love. Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.

Just changed my theme… again (don’t know if anyone noticed, I changed it 4 days ago, as well). Anyway, after some minor reconstruction, I think it looks pretty good.

I do still need to do something about the pictures being too wide for the content column and I’d like to get another picture of the kids up there. I’m sure I’ll figure something out, when I have a few spare minutes.

Now, I know this can’t be intentional, but it’s very annoying, and I can’t see any easy way to make it go away. It looks like this is being caused by some Microsoft style CSS, as the page loads fine in Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3, however, renders the ad right over the top of other content. I sure hope they get this fixed over at lifehacker. I do like a lot of their articles.

UPDATE: It looks like this is happening all over the web with these annoying “Mojave Experiment” ads. A refresh usually fixes it. I haven’t really looked into the CSS that is creating this issue, but I’m sure it something Microsoft designed for IE and threw in compatibility with Firefox as an afterthought.

Well, I thought it was kind of weird that I stopped getting comments all of the sudden… even spam comments have been absent (for quite some time, now that I think about it). Well, Frank, from futtta’s blog informed me earlier tonight that my comments weren’t working. It was claiming that all the required fields weren’t filled (name and email).

Well, I got to work investigating the offending code, and it seems there was a name attribute missing from the input tag for email in comments.php for the finestripes theme. I simply added the attribute name="email" to the necessary input tag and it started working. Now, I guess it’s time to get Akismet up to date.

Sorry, Frank, for misspelling your blog’s name in my last post.

After my recent upgrade to WordPress 2.6, I tried hitting the upgrade.php script, but was met with a blank page… That’s weird. So, I tried the home page… same thing… weird. Okay, I open my server log and find a php error:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 464

After googling, I found a post on futtta’s blog that described the same error. I fixed it the same way as he describes, by downloading the tarball and copying the a fresh copy of widgets.php over my offending copy. Viola, everything works as it should now, cept my search box seems a bit tweaked. I’ll have to check that out after I feed the kids.

I think I’ve finally gotten all set up again. I’m now running OpenSuse 10.3 on VMware Server. I upgraded my computer. I’ve got the latest release of WordPress running and a theme that I really like. Isn’t it great looking… and yes, those are my three beautiful children in the header image. For those that have slow connections, I apologize for the large size of the picture (almost 100K), I couldn’t justify reducing the quality of the picture.

I had too much trouble with Microsoft Virtual Server to keep it around after my hard drive change. Almost everytime my computer had an unscheduled reboot (my power went out), it dropped the virtual network card and created a new one which drove opensuse crazy.  I’ve had no such problems with VMware server. It was also a lot easier getting the VMware tools running than it was getting Virtual Machine Additions to work properly. So now my time is syncing and all (my clock was running a little slow before I installed it). Getting the mail setup correctly threw me a little. Opensuse 10.3 uses Postfix by default, and I had only setup sendmail, and my ISP requires authentication for outgoing mail now. I eventually found the necessary instructions. It was actually a lot easier to set up than I thought it would be. I ended up using my ISP’s SMTP server as a relay and SMTP AUTH to get me logged into it. (continue reading…)