Lightly Organized Chaos » Blogging

WordPress plugin: withings-scale

sandro — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:29:53 +0000

I just released a WordPress Plugin for the Withings WiFi Scale.

The plugin just allows you to easily embed the Withings smaller gadget into the sidebar of your WordPress blog. It should be appearing in the WordPress plugin gallery sometime in the near future.

You can download it now (assuming you have a Withings Scale and WordPress blog) by going here.

Wedding Update

sandro — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:24:54 +0000

I’ve been particularly quiet these last couple of days because I’ve been working on the new wedding website. Well that and slogging through some data analysis for a journal article. Anyway, head on over there and let me know what other CSS nightmares I’ve caused.

http://tying.the.knot.org

PS: No, I didn’t plan that when we got the knot.org domain.

A Couple Blog Stats

sandro — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:12:24 +0000

In the last 4 years, Akismet has handled 102,497 spam comments. That’s better than 25k spam messages a year. Pretty impressive when you consider that Google Analytics says the site had less than 10k pageviews last year. I know that the spambots do not generate trackable pageviews, but it’s pretty sad that more log space and energy goes into serving them than legitimate site visitors.

Work in progress

sandro — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:18:48 +0000

I’m way behind on blogging. So the next little bit I expect to be doing a lot of posting, as I try to catch up. Hopefully, what will follow is a rash of posts.

Sorry!

sandro — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:28:48 +0000

I apoogize for the lack of posts. Getting a decent Internet connection has been a bit tough.

Twitter

sandro — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:48:00 +0000

I’m now on twitter.

I’m going to try to be more proactive about writing updates by using twitter. Since they’re smaller and more lightweight hopefully it’ll be easier for me to generate posts. You can follow my exploits in the sidebar to the right, or at: http://www.twitter.com/SandroFouche.

Also, if anyone wants to recommend twitter tools for the iPhone or the Mac, please feel free to leave me a comment.

Photoblog feeds updated.

sandro — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:32:32 +0000

This really only concerns 1 or 2 people in the world, but I just updated the theme for the photoblog to include thumbnail images in the feeds.

Yea!!

Anyone who is using this theme, and would like the current update, should go ahead and contact me directly.

Someday when I’m bored, I’ll write up real instructions for using the theme…

Comment Spam

sandro — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:47:23 +0000

The photoblog is being hit with a massive storm of comment spam. Most is being filtered by Akismet, but quite a few messages have gotten into the moderation queue this weekend. What’s odd about this is that I have comments “turned off” for old articles (and everything in the photoblog is old.

Even weirder is that this blog isn’t being hit as hard, even though it’s far more frequently updated.

I’ve set the photoblog to require registration and login to post comments for the time being. I’m looking for more good tools, any advice is appreciated.

Fixed comments

sandro — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 12:20:01 +0000

I accidently broke the comments system earlier in the week. I finally noticed it, and it’s fixed and working again.

Subtle Changes

sandro — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 09:42:47 +0000

Kate‘s comment last week regarding content “above the fold” reminded me of my posts from last year on making an impact in less than 30 seconds and tools for more effective blogging. I realized that I hadn’t evaluated my own blogs in the intervening 18 months since I wrote those posts.

Much to my surprise, bloat had occurred on both blogs. Google and Amazon scripts plus my own CSS code had taken their toll; both sites had balloned to over 100K each. Now 100K might not sound too bad, but Google’s main page is a mere 10K and I’m not nearly as useful as Google .

Early last week I decided to take my own advice, so I implemented several changes to both blogs. On this blog the main change is fewer posts on the first page. I also revised the CSS to be more efficient, but you shouldn’t notice any real difference.

The photoblog had a pretty severe re-design, but for some viewers the changes will be invisible. The roll-over effect that presents more information about each photo has been changed to pure CSS, instead of the hybrid CSS/Javascript solution I had been using. While this is a really positive change and I’m happy with the leaner, meaner implementation of that feature, users of Microsoft Internet Explorer will no longer see the roll-over effect.
As it happens, the effect had been broken for some users of IE anyway (I think those who had certain Office components installed), so the loss bothers me less than it might have otherwise. Additionally, this frees me from having to support Mcrosoft’s constantly broken implementations of web standards.

Those of you still using Microsoft Internet Explorer to surf the web should really switch Mozilla Firefox, it’s standards compliant, fast, flexible, and free.

I’ve managed to get the pages cut down appreciably, and I’m going to continue streamlining as time allows. If you have any suggestions (I do plan on moving the HTML to 4.01 strict eventually) or tools you like, please let me know!