Got Wills

 

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.

The Motorola Q9c is awesome. The keys are really easy to hit… I rarely fat-finger it, even with my big ole thumbs. In fact, I’m typing this post on it right now. Pocket IE still sucks in WM6, but Opera mobile is great on the Q9c, definitely worth the money.

My only real peeve about it is that Verizon locked the GPS. Currently, in order to use it, you have to pay $10/month for VZNavigator. However, there is a forum, http://www.everythingq.com/forum/moto-q-hacks/verizon-q9c-gps-hack-21606.html, full of people hard at work trying to open it up for Google Maps and Live Search.

One more difficulty that I just noticed… creating links. Maybe there is a good blog writing tool for Windows Mobile 6 out there somewhere. We’ll see.

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…)

Well, I just signed up for pownce today (I forgot my usb drive and have little to do in class because of it). The service looks good, but there are still a lot of missing features. For instance, while they do let you choose your theme, you have like 4 to choose from, and it’s not customizable beyond that. Also, there is still no way to send a message via text or email (just as effective as text, of course). I like that you are able to link to your social networks from the page, but right now it really lacks anything noteworthy. Sure, they have a multi-platform Adobe AIR desktop client, so what, if I’m sitting at my desktop, I’ve usually got a browser open anyway.

Another real downer is that there are going to be ads mixed in with the messages. IMHO, this is always a bad idea (mixing the ads with the content). The ads should have their place on the page and stay there. I hate it when I’m trying to view a page and accidentally click an ad, when I’m trying to view content (although, it can’t be as bad as the mouseover popups in some blogs and forums).

I was really excited about this beta at first, but, as most things, it’s not all I thought it was cracked up to be. There is some chance it can develop into a great service, but I don’t see it gaining much traction.

Well, I got an invite to GrandCentral a few weeks ago and finally found time to set it up. There were no Holbrook phone numbers available. In fact, as far as I can tell, there were no numbers in the local Frontier calling area (Show Low, Snowflake, Heber, Pinetop, Lakeside, etc…). So I went with a Winslow number. The features on this service sound really great, so far (would have been better if I’d have found a Holbrook number). I can get any calls sent to any of my phones that I choose. I can even have them sent to a hotel phone if I choose. Also, I can listen to my voicemail online and choose to have all calls go to voicemail.

If you use the link on the right hand side of my blog, you can call me for free. It will call your phone, then mine. No charge for the connection at all. You can use it to record calls (both parties are notified when you turn the feature on) and you can use it to keep a call log. All in all, it sounds like a great tool. Maybe I’ll even start giving out this phone number to my students, since it’ll be easier to check the messages. Then I can have it go to my office phone only when I’m in the office.

You can also send emails to my phone number at grandcentral.com and they will come to me. Of course, I will not be giving out my number on this blog, but if you would like to know my number and have a good reason to know it, please use the button to leave me a voicemail.

I don’t know how this will work in the RSS, but here’s a call link in the post.