Tim Elliott » Tools & Techniques

Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress

Tim — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:45:08 +0000

I’ve been using WordPress as my blogging software for three years now. It started when I began podcasting and I just followed what others were doing. But I’m glad I went down this path as the platform has developed into a very powerful CMS for both blogging and maintaining simple websites. One of the great things about WordPress is the extention of features using plug-ins. Most of these plug-ins are written by individual developers so when someone like Yahoo! writes one you know that this software is poised to go to the next level.

Yahoo! Shortcuts is a WordPress plug-in that automates creating links and embedding photos within posts on your blog. The built-in visual editor in WordPress makes this super easy to begin with so I didn’t think at first that this was that good of an idea. But in using it to draft this post, I think it has some potential to improve my workflow so it will remain activated. It has an interesting user interface that is uber-minimal. Once you copy the plug-in to your WordPress installation and activate the only thing you notice is a box on the upper right of your “Write” window in the administration interface. As you write your post, it polls Yahoo! for links to embed; for some unknown reason, it only detected one so far on this post (to WordPress). When you choose the “Review this Post” option (presumably when you are done writing) it slowly takes you to a screen to approve the link(s) and find and embed pictures from Flickr (ah, it found a second link!).

It works as advertised, abet a bit on the slow side, so I’m giving it a tepid and provisional thumbs up at the moment. I’ll post more as I use it here and on my wine blog over the next few weeks.

The Camino Test, Day 1

Tim — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:58:01 +0000

Like a lot of geeks, I have used Firefox for a number of years instead of IE on the PC or Safari on the Mac. But lately I’ve been spending more time using Safari due to instability problems with Firefox. Safari is a fine browser but for someone who spends quite a bit of time authoring in WordPress, Drupal and Joomla I find that it does not play as nicely with those platforms as I would like, so Firefox has been the standard. Until today.

That’s when it stopped responding for the last time and has been replaced by the new build of Camino. So far I’m really impressed with the speed and native Mac look and feel. And it seems to like WordPress just fine (that’s not surprising since it’s based on the same engine as Firefox). So until this let’s me down or Firefox improves, Camino will be my default browser.

How does Blicki work?

Tim — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:07:29 +0000

I’m looking for a very simple way to turn a WordPress page into a wiki for my wine blog so I came up with a couple possibilities, DokuWiki and Blicki. Since the latter is written by the author of WordPress I installed it and created a wiki page. After looking at the zillions of things on the options page and fiddling with the page I created, it appears to be working but the “edit” function is not showing up for some reason. All my web searching has turned up next to nothing on the documentation front even thought the plug-in is a year old. I’ll continue to futz around with this before trying DokuWiki…

Microsoft Office Waterloo?

Tim — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:03:25 +0000

I spend quite a bit of time daily using Microsoft Word and Excel on both Mac’s and PC’s. For the past week or so I’ve been checking out Google Docs and Spreadsheets for much of this work and really like what I see. As someone who multitasks with multiple web browsers, email, chat, text editors and FTP clients open all the time, I like not having to open Word or Excel for simple document prep. Since Google Docs has PDF as an output medium, I don’t even have to use Word for SOW’s or invoices anymore. Best of all, it’s free.

If I worked at Microsoft, I’d be kind of worried right now.

My search for dumb-simple LAMP server

Tim — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:29:58 +0000

One of the other reasons I haven’t found the time to post in the past week, is I’ve spent more time than I wanted to getting a LAMP server set-up in my house for a project. Since it will not be accessed from the internet, security is not much of an issue so I thought it would be really easy to find a distro that would transform an ancient Celeron system into a development server.

All roads seemed to point to the Ubuntu server distro that promised a 15 minute install. I downloaded and burned a CD and within about 10 minutes I had an installed LAMP server; very cool. The only problem was that the interface for configuration was all command-line based, so I poked around and found Webmin that looked like a good solution for browser based configuration. Well it is, but I spend about 3 hours trying to get it setup and had a host of permissions issues.

So I did some more Googling and decided to try the Debian network install which allows you to choose the components you want to add at install (things like SSH, Webmin, ProFTPd, etc.). Since Ubuntu is Debian-based, I thought this would be a good solution. An hour and a lot of menu-driven configuration later I was looking at a webpage that could configure my new server. Very nice except I had all the same permissions issues that I had with Ubuntu.

Undaunted, I found a AMP installer called XAMPP that comes in Linux, Windows, Solaris and Mac OS flavors. Basically, this makes it easy to install Apache, MySQL, PHP and a bunch of other items to make a LAMP server. And, the standard install is completely open with no passwords or other permissions to get in the way. Exactly what I was looking for! So after a half hour of uninstalling the AMP elements on my Debian installation, I installed and ran XAMPP and browsed to their handy web admin panel and checked it out. Ten minutes later I had WordPress and bbPress installed and away I go on my project…

I’m surprised no one has published a Linux distro that takes all the pain out of configuring a LAMP server. Seems all the LAMP distros assume you are a command-line guru, which I am definately not. If I can figure out how to roll my own version of Linux, I might be able to contribute back something that will save folks a lot of time in getting their LAMP dev-box setup. But that will be much later…

What I did last weekend

Tim — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:02:09 +0000

On Saturday morning I started to FTP into my Winecast installation and copy down 2+ GB of WordPress + podcasts. I then went about my day while it downloaded. I noticed that a cache folder would not download so instead of just ignoring this I deleted the the folder from my live WordPress install. Big mistake as I crashed WordPress on my main website before I even started my migration to a new server. After a few hours I figured out my problem and started to transfer my website with the old one still up.

Lot of uploads late Saturday night into Sunday as I restored my podcasts and WordPress and waited for DNS to propagate. Then I had fun with SSH and vi commands which is how I loaded my 600 MB SQL database into Media Temple. All ended fine with only a few hours of outage but I thought I totally screwed up my last 2+ years of work several times Saturday night despite my many months of backups on the hard drive.

Great weekend, indeed. All worked out OK, however

Grazr-Google Reader Mashup

Tim — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 21:42:16 +0000

What started out as a Grazr showing my social media and marketing reading list became a way to display my starred items in Google Reader on the left sidebar. I was inspired by a post on the Grazr blog and used my Bloglines marklet to discover the feed of my public items.

Pretty cool, eh?

Best Linux Distro For Windows Users

Tim — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 17:47:32 +0000

I’ve been upgrading and rebuilding the Windows computers in my house over the holidays and have been using what I think is the most useful distribution of Linux: GParted. I know that every distribution of Linux has this software, but the live CD makes partition sizing and disk formatting dumb simple for Windows users. Just setup your bios to boot to your CD drive first, stick in the GParted live CD and follow the directions.

One word of caution. Don’t resize your Windows boot partitions or you might corrupt your installation. I did this yesterday with my install of Windows Vista and had to run the repair from the install DVD to get things back to normal. For all other partition resizing, GParted does as good a job as Partition Magic and it’s free.

And if you are looking for a full Linux distro to play with, I have found SimplyMEPIS to be the easiest. Just try their live CD to see if it’s right for you.

Socializer: Social Bookmarking on Crack

Tim — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:15:27 +0000

Via PlugIM I found Socializer a sort of meta social bookmarking service. Instead of clicking each of the links below and manually filling out each entry (to Digg and del.icio.us, for example) all you do is click on the “Socialize This” button and then the icon for each of dozens of services listed. It only took about 5 minutes to implement with Anders Bergman’s WordPress plug-in and an addition to the index.php page.

A very cool idea that will probably having me turn off the Notable plug-in sometime in the future. Check it out here.