nomaded's little corner

Blog borked and fixed

Some how I managed to really screw up my blog yesterday. I'm going to assume that it was related to yesterday's post. I'm pretty sure it was a combination of my use of emacs' weblogger mode and trying to use a category that did not exist. With the help of my gf, my blog started resembling a blog again.

With the customizations I did to TripleK2, and the old version of WP, I think it's time to start anew again. I think I found a decent theme as a starting point. And it's time to upgrade to the current version of WP. I hope to work on some of this during week. We'll see how far I get.

Posted in blog | Comments Off

Twitter borked

So, I recently started using Twitter, mostly to see what's the BigDeal(tm) about it. I guess the "fun" of Twitter is the inherant voyeurism of following people without them following you back. I was kind of hoping that Twitter would be more of a "2-way conversation" but that doesn't seem to be happening, at least from where I'm sitting.

Of course, this post is not supposed to be a rant about how to use Twitter, but more about the recent "maintenance" from this past weekend. By Saturday afternoon, I noticed something a bit "off" with my Twitter webpage. I was not seeing as many tweets from others as I wousd have expected. I was trying to catch up on events overnight, and noticed some tweets showing up on gTalk that didn't show up on the webpage. I didn't think too much about it, until Sunday morning, when I noticed more "missing" tweets.

And it looks like Twitter is aware of the problem.

Posted in blog | Comments Off

Twitter-enabled

I've been considering setting up a Twitter account for a little while now, but I haven't because I hadn't figured out a good way to tweet from work, without it it being in the clear. I'd rather not have work be able to capture and track what I'm doing, even if it's just reading my RSS feeds (through the https version of Google Reader). I'm not doing anything illegal, but I want to keep my work-life and private-life separate.

So, my gf offhandedly mentioned that she can tweet and follow with Google talk. I realized that was the easiest solution to my "problem". So, now I have a Twitter account.

I had been considering setting up one of the CLI-based Twitter clients on my linux box from home, but I couldn't decide if I wanted to go with one of the various scripts to tweet and follow from the shell prompt, or if I wanted to try out an Emacs module to do this, like I did for posting to this blog. As an aside, I still can't say I'm totally happy with the Emacs webblogger module. (See the previous post about the wonky timestamp.)

Of course, I just noticed that the Twitter page for tweeting is an https page. Oh well. I would not be surprised if Twitter is something that gets blocked by the work webproxy.

Posted in blog, geek | Comments Off

foo baz test

foo baz

Posted in emacs | Comments Off

Updates to weblogger.el

I've made a few changes to the latest weblogger.el from SVN.

I've changed it so that it's more obvious that the "Subject" field would be the title, instead of using the first several words of the first line, or using <title></title> markup in the entry.

I also exposed the "Keywords" field so that it's easy to add categories to the entry.

I still have a couple to-dos. When editing previous entries, the dateCreate param gets screwed up. It's either a problem with the version of WP I'm running, or I need to figure out how to determine the timezone of the dateCreate param, and pass the same timezone back to the server.

I also want to change the fields that are displayed by the weblogger-entry-edit function. I'd rather the fields reflect the "blog" fields, rather than "email-like" fields.

Posted in blog, emacs | Comments Off

Testing (again) weblogger mode

While trying to edit previous posts, it seems to be doing some strange things to the timestamp.

Edit:

Interesting. I originally added this post at 12:42am, and the post is currently showing a time of 01:42am. I wonder if the time should be in GMT/UTC as opposed to "local" time.

I wonder if the timestamp will stai the same when I say this entry. Time to add some stuff and see what happens.

Edit 2:

Ah ha! WP really wants the timestamps in GMT/UTC and not local time. At the time of this edit, the time is 9:42pm. Let's what happens when I set it to 5:42am.

Posted in blog, emacs | Comments Off

Testing emacs weblogger mode

Testing posting with emacs, using weblogger mode.

Posted in blog, emacs | Comments Off

Test

Testing… kadfalkdjflaj

1. One
2. Two

Posted in emacs | Comments Off

A need to speak

I have this strange yearning to start blogging again.

The past few days, I've found myself looking for different ways post entries that do not require a browser, or anything particularly GUI-based. I found a few different ideas to use perl to talk to WordPress via XML-RPC. I think the easiest way to use this would be to read in a marked up text file and post based on the mark up - much like how Blosxom works. But instead of saving the text file a certain directory, I would read in the file and then toss it. I could probably write something smarter, but I think this would be a good starting point for me.

Another idea that I'm tossing around my head is to try to get the weblogger mode to work on the box that is hosting this blog. That way I'll have a secure way to post by connecting to the box with ssh then running emacs to do my writing. Call me weird, but I like writing text in a text console.

Posted in blog | Comments Off

Fair Use as demostrated by Disney characters

Wired has a blog post about a 10 minute short film that explains copyright law as it exists right now in the United States of America, and what is fair use. And of course, the only proper way of doing this is to use clips from various [Disney] films to define it all. The film came out of Stanford's Fair Use Project.

The film starts by defining copyright, and then goes onto describing what can and cannot be copyrighted. Next, it describes the original duration of a copyright, what that duration is as of today, and what the public domain is. Then, it talks about fair use, and finally the creators motivations for using Disney clips and characters in this short film.

As I said above, it's a short film, about 10 minutes long. It's quite educational on the subjects of copyright and fair use. Everyone should watch it and let their friends and family know about it.

Posted in film, funny, good, random | Comments Off