Things I Learned In The Last Week Of October

I haven’t posted anything new to the blog all week, and yes, I’m feeling a little guilty about it.  In my absence I have been battling dragons, building castles, and staring at empty Word docs trying to come up with inspiration.  During a week of this, I have learned a few things and thought  I would share them.

WordPress 2.7 and 2.8

Last Sunday I was fiddling with the core files of my WordPress theme, trying to hard code a feature into it that would otherwise be easily accessible through the use of a plugin.  I bumbled the code and instantly rendered my site useless. Yay for me!  Not to be outdone, I thought I would delete a plugin which I thought was causing me my current problems in a misguided attempt to get the site back up running.

It didn’t work and things were starting to look bleak.  I started thinking that re-uploading the plugin files along with a fresh WP install followed by a database restore would bring me back into blogger’s bliss, but alas, it was not meant to be.  I found out that my backup SQL file would not re-import into my newly created database as WordPress 2.8.5 did not include a column within a table that 2.7 had.  I ended up manually importing some information into the database and recreating past articles.

Everything is back to normal but in hindsight I can see where I made a few mistakes in the process.  Had I not made these mistakes, a manual restore from scratch would not have been necessary.  Oh well, I have learned from this fiasco and am slightly wiser from it.

Ubuntu 9.10 is the same as 9.04 is the same as 8.10

Yesterday I downloaded the Karmic Koala version of Ubuntu, on the day of it’s official release.  If you were smart like I was (a rarity, I assure you!) then you downloaded the distro through the torrents.  I downloaded the 64bit ISO in less than 10 minutes, burned it to a disc and went through a Wubi install.

Oh sure, 9.10 boots a little faster now, but it’s still Ubuntu with maybe a different shade of lipstick.  It still uses Gnome, has pretty much the same set of default apps installed by default, and it still makes me want to cry when moving windows across the screen.  Unlike my preferred choice of Arch Linux, dragging a window across the screen causes the left and right side of said window to get rather pixelated and choppy.  And no, it is not a compiz enabled feature.  This “feature” showed up for me in 8.10 and has been around since.

Hey Ubuntu!  I really like you for how you configure some things out of the box, like font rendering and printer setup, but you leave a little to be desired in the graphical server department.

Twitter lists

I was one of the few people who have had the ability to create lists of tweeps on Twitter since that feature was released.  I have yet to make one.

I’m not saying that Twitter lists are a bad thing, and I definitely don’t want you to think that.  It’s just that I spend 99.9% of my time using Twitter through the Tweetdeck app.  On Tweetdeck you can make “columns” and decide which users are listed in that column.  That’s how I try to organize the flow of the Twitter timeline and make sense of things.

But if I navigate my way to my Twitter homepage, I can see that I’ve been included on several people’s lists, and I am downright humbled in the company that some of you have placed me in.  I am in lists centered around tech, coding, WordPress design, writers and social media.  When I looked through those lists I saw that I was included with some giants in the industry and I feel very honored that some people think of me in that way.  Again, I thank you all.

IE6

I hate IE6.  I would rather take a sledgehammer to my shins and set fire to my toes than to code a site to make that decrepit, pathetic excuse of a browser happy. ‘Nuff said.

Digg

Digg claims to be a tech news site with stories submitted by and voted for by its user base.  That is a lie.  Well, it may have been true with Digg of yesteryear, but the Digg of today is nothing more than an aggregate site for a few select websites with an increasing collection of XKCD comics, lolcats, and celebrity worship.  It’s like the offspring between People Magazine and Mad Magazine.  And don’t start feeling smug Reddit!  You’re not much better!

Porting websites over to WordPress

I took two established HTML sites this week and converted them to WordPress.  It gives me a case of the warm and fuzzies when I can turn a table-infested website and change it over to WordPress, allowing the owner to easily update and change their site.  I could do that all day.

So this is a glimpse into my past week.  How was yours?

Tagged as: Twitter, ubuntu, Wordpress