CogBlogged from ‘August, 2008’

I’m sampling now some of my own WordCamp Takeways and am really excited about Ozh’ Absolute Comments plugin recommended by Lorelle. As she mentioned in her WordCamp session, it rather frustrating in the shiny new WP interface where one goes to edit a comment, though it sounds like she does a lot more comment editing than me. Among the many extra features Ozh’ plugin ads in this is just one. In your comment admin interface it offers a number of new commands right where you need them: Besides ones you have now, like spam and delete, you can get directly to the screen to edit a comment or see all the comments together from the same post. That’s nice, but the other features are better. The reply function provides a right there ajax interface for posting a reply comment (it even does the @SoandSo prefix). But wait, there’s more! The [...]

photo credit: lordog Continuing the gastronomic theme for my WordCamp experience, here are a few quick things I took away from the experience (for complete coverage, see Andrew Mager’s live blogging) WordCamp’s t-shirt colors (brown this year) seem to follow directly the lead of Northern Voice ;-) Almost everyone I met was with some company, start-ups to large to individual consultants, people just creating themes, and were making a living selling services based on WordPress. Search Engine Optimization- I do buy the importance of making sure your stuff is well found, but the obsession with tweaking the game for the sole purpose of more rank is… well not my bowl of biscuits. If it your thing, check out Stephen O’Grady’s preso If you have a site based on LOLCATS, you have lots of good images for slides — see Ben Huh’s preso on Virality. He is one shrewd and funny [...]

To say I had a great time this past weekend at WordCamp would be an understatement. Beyond the gathering of 400 other WP junkies, there was getting to meet all the Automatticians (and fascinating to learn they work as a completely decentralized organization; 30 some employees strung across the US, Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Japan…). And of course the wp-fanboy-plugged-in cherry on top was going to the speaker’s dinner the night before and being seated across from Matt Mullenweg, who remembered sneaking in on my session at Northern Voice. Matt described that they only plan the San Francisco WordCamp, and the other 15 or so that go on around the blog are locally organized– he says he likes to show up un-announced to check out what people are doing who use his company’s wares. Yes, it was through a connection via James Farmer that I got invited to do a presentation [...]

When you type some keywords into a search box, be prepared for a naive assumption that you are searching an entire web site. A few weeks ago, in my first aborted attempt to give money to Apple, I came across a web site on Apple.com that allows you (well after 9pm) to check whether a certain store purportedly has alleged devices, bearing a big header Check 3G iPhone Availability: But let’s say you don’t happen to know that URL. A logical step would be to use the search box on Apple.com. Interestingly enough, if you type in the words check 3G iPhone Availability, none of the 9 results yield this page: Glitch? Evil Plot? Alan’s weird obsession? Draw your own conclusions. Despite being thwarted from trying to give Apple my money, despite their lock-in to a wireless provider who claims to have “the widest coverage” yet has zero bars where [...]

Talk About WordPres Fan Boy by cogdogblog posted 16 Aug ’08, 1.24am MDT PST on flickr How cool to have dinner with ma.tt Mullenweg and satisfy my WordPress fanboy moment Wish me luck tomorrow, I present first on the schedule (rumor is there is actually a schedule for WordCamp). A fun evening meeting people who work for Automattic– the people who make WordPress happen live all over the country, world, and manage the whole flat, distributed company quite nicely. Matt also mentioned what should be a wild presentation tomorrow on “Crazy Horse” a radical prototype of a new WP interface. And what a bush with fame- chatted with Ben Huh, the dude behind I Can Has Cheezburger et al and he shared some details on a new wacky site coming on line Monday. Funny, he said to me, “I think I recognize you from your photo on the WordCamp site” [...]

cc licensed flickr photo Day 200/365 “Yawn” by Wellstone This may be in the “pot calling kettle black” category> tag, but I have this long standing growl in my belly about Screencasts. The technology is great, lots of tools, free ones, but when we talk about them it seems to be always about the tools. We rarely talk about the production quality, and I find nearly all of them to be yawn inducing. I can count on one paw (maybe) the number of screencasts I have been able to watch from start to end. Maybe one tail. Maybe. Why are they all delivered in monotonic voice? Why is there little human conversational voice? Where is the inflection? I think what happens a lot is we turn on the camera and just start recording, perhaps with an outline list. Or it is too organized, and we get someone reading (monotonic) us [...]

I have yet to even explore all the features that clicky offers for web stats, but am still on a love plain after accidently discovering it. I am running the free version here on CogDogBlog, and just found that there are widgets you can use, so I have the daily stats now embedded on my Blogs n’ Bits page or what smart people call “colophon”. It’s done via a Google Module, which means I have one on my own Google ig page. This also widened my eyes to information I see that any module you can embed on a Google home page can be embedded in other web pages. Hmmm. In addition, I have been using it on the NMC web site, and today paid for a year’s worth of service, meaning I can use it our multiple domains, use the “Spy” real time reporting. I too made a page [...]

I was just IMing with Nick Noakes who asked if I had tried pictobrowser, a flickr web widget thingie. Like other tools that allow you to embed flickr content, you just need to provide your flickr handle and select a set or tag to display your photos, embedded in another site.

Are tag clouds, as Read/Write Web suggests, entombed? dead? On my fleet of NMC WordPress site I am shifting to using tags more on posts as an organizer, and tossing some clouds on the pages (see lower right sidebar of Pachyderm Services). Its a bit easier on these sites that have a relatively low number of posts to go and “back tag” content. But here at the old Yeller CogDogBlog, there are a lot of old bones- this, when published will be number 2100. And my tagging in the past, has been, well spotty. On the other hand, I was never too rigorous with the categorizing, so I am thinking as far as being effective, the approaches may be tied for last place over here. Never the less, I am more of a loose ranging tagger than a cubby-hole categorizer, so I have started tagging posts, and swapped out the [...]

Thanks EduBlogs! Thanks James! by cogdogblog posted 12 Aug ’08, 10.46pm MDT PST on flickr Thanks to a tweet from @jdwilliams I learned that the edublogs dashboard (like all 190,000 of them) have a nice little pitch for people to help in my quest for interesting uses of WordPress in education for a presentation at WordCamp. And that reminded me that among those 190,000 hosted edublogs is my ghost town Wag the Dog which has managed a whopping two posts in 2 1/2 years. Okay, that one does not count. The message there goes: Share your Edublogs! Let CogDogBlog know about your Edublog – edit the wiki or tag it ‘wpeducation’ through delicious. I am pretty confident I have James to thank — beers and dinner are on me (I am shouting!!) next time I am in Melbourne. Gotta love this net thang.