I scan a lot of stuff via my networks, news readers, twitters, email… mostly it is just a humongous pile of disconnected bits, and sometimes, sometimes, strands come together to make sense. Huh? In the way back, the way way back of human memory storage I recall Ewan McIntosh writing about some new tool he […]
A Single Purpose Useful Web Site posted 12 Jan ’08, 9.16pm MST PST on flickr It exists solely to answer the deep question istwitterdown.com/
On my tale of switching media player plugins, D’Arcy’s comment about troubles with the Anarchy Media Player preview got my thinking, why be stuck with the lame graphic the plugin provides? Just make your own, and replace the vid-play.gif file inside /wp-content/plugins/anarachy-media/images — here is a test to see how mone looks- this is the […]
Note to readers- mostly tedious details on WordPress nuts and bolts to follow- click next for the usual shallow barking and whining)
WordPress Plugins are awefully powerful to let you easily add/subtract functionality form your own hosted WP site. But sometimes, they become a marriage that may be difficult to extricate yourself. For the NMC Campus Observer, our WP powered site for our Second Life antics, since its inception on March 2006, I had used PodPress, a rather full featured plugin to handle the embedding of audio, sometimes video.
It has a huge list of features, and if you have ever looked, adds a lot os “stuff” to your pages. It has a lot of updates, and each replacement is a not so moderate upload of scads of files. Adding the audio/video content is not done via editing your content, but via a separate editing pane. But more problematic, I’ve had numerous incidences where the site’s display was mangled on certain browsers– sometimes Safari lost a sidebar, more recently the site was totally wrecked in Internet Explorer, the sidebar pushed down to the bottom, bottom of the post/comments field cut off. If I disabled PodPress, the display issues went away. But then also, did all of my links to the media. And one of the recent WordPress updates seemed to have a conflict with PP as well.
So its been on my list for a while to get myself out of this relationship. I have been using Anarchy Media Plugin on other sites which is one with less overhead, no mucking of display (well I did discover the Gregarious plugin has a conflict that disables Anarchy), but better it works simply by replacing a simple hypertext link to your mp3, .mov, etc with a player icon. This way, should you ever move to another plugin, your content is in tact.
If you are looking for a simple plugin to just convert mp3 links to a nice small player, I like Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player WordPress Plugin.
So the task was I’d have to find every post that had a PodPress managed media, and rewrite the post to have a normal href link that Anarchy could pick up.
A D- For Twitter Interface Design posted 11 Jan ’08, 8.29am MST PST on flickr I challenge anyone to convince me they can regularly use this drop down menu in twitter to send direct messages. Try it yourself. This interface item contains all of the people I follow, but it is presented in some random […]
It’s been almost a month since I blogged about the Chronicle of Higher Education, the “flagship” of the ivory tower had published on their web site misinformation that it had scooped from some other blog sites on a story about the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. The Chronicle wrote on December 17 that the 2007 report […]
I leave it to Phillie Casablanca to issue the Twitter Commandments now available in pretty flickr form– to jump into parody mode, “I Give You These 15…. 10 Twitter Commandments”: I too think “commandment” is a bit strong, but the metaphor is not the point. And again, if you believe there are absolute “right” and […]
Finally Get to Meet Cole posted 9 Jan ’08, 8.52pm MST PST on flickr I’ve "known" Cole Camplese for a number of years, though we had yet to meet… He came to speak at Maricopa last May, and wouldn’t you know it, the same week i was at University of Mary Washington. So our "knowing" […]
Oh flickr, how I adore thee! my love runneth over… But after a lot of blog rants, its just so nice to say some nice things about nice people. Nice! I always get extra excited when my RSS feed for comments on my pix lights up in that “unread” color, so I checked out a […]
Blog Danger Code Level Yellow posted 6 Jan ’08, 10.31am MST PST on flickr Word choice on CogDogBlog has earned me a code yellow, Elevated: Tom Cruise might ask me for spare change. The Airbag Blog Advisory System was just quirky enough I had to take time and try. In these dark times you can […]
