My recent acquisition of an iPhone has simplified my digital world tremendously. I found myself using my laptop less as the iPhone has most of the capabilities I need – email, surfing, Facebook, IM, etc.
The only missing capability or app was an easy way to post to my blog, which I haven’t posted to in a very long time. Well, the search is over. The WordPress folks built an iPhone-specific tool. Check it out at:
http://iphone.wordpress.com
Enjoy and happy blogging! Oh, and Happy New Year!
Here’s a how-to in adding whitespace in your WordPress posts, as the WordPress system currently wipes them out:
For a blank line:<p align="none"> </p>For a double blank line:<p align="none">&nbsp;</p>For an indented beginning (or any other space formatting), format the text in a simple text editor, enclose it in the following code, then copy-paste the whole:<pre style="font:inherit;"> TEXT </pre>
Enjoy!
Intel apparently just launched a Digg-like site where users can rate software startups/companies. Interesting…
The CoolSW site is an online community of people passionate about software. Members can post information about an interesting new software company and, more important, the community votes on whether they think a software company is, well, “cool.” Companies that receive a lot of votes get elevated to the site’s front page where the casual visitor can see what community members consider the most interesting software.
If you use MediaWiki to power your wiki, you’ve probably heard of the Bad-Behavior plugin to help fight spam.
Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.
I was all for it after I read the description as well as the functions it adds to one’s wiki. So, I did the following:
1. Downloaded it like so:
wget http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/download/bad-be…
2. Unzipped it with the -a option (for ASCII mode):
unzip -a bad-behavior-2.0.10.zip
3. Copied the whole folder to /path-to-wiki/extensions
cp -R /path-to-wiki/extensions
4. Edited LocalSettings.php an added the following line at the end of the file:
include( ‘./extensions/Bad-Behavior/bad-behavior-mediawiki.php’ );
The include statement above should’ve worked where a new table would’ve been added in my MediaWiki DB, but this did not happen, and when clicking on any link, I would just get a blank page.
My HTTPD logs also showed “undefined variable” errors, so after searching for fixes, I found that the following line had to be added just below the require_once(“includes/DefaultSettings.php”) line to resolve the issues.
Apparently, you’ll need this if you’re using a certain combination of Apache-PHP-MediaWiki versions:
require_once( “includes/DatabaseFunctions.php” );
I restarted Apache and all worked fine. You can also add the Bad-Behavior 2 Extended extension if you’d like, which I did.
My blog/site has been running for 17 days and it’s been quite a ride so far. And throughout my writing and posting, I’ve been using Microsoft’s beta version of Windows Live Writer.
I must say, it’s very easy to use and has a plugin feature like Firefox and WordPress. Here’s a screenshot:
There are, of course, some quirks that I find annoying such as when trying to change fonts: You have to click on Format > Font > Type or scroll through to pick your font. Sometimes, it doesn’t pick up the font I want when typing it; for example: “ver” for Verdana. The HTML will try to use “ver” as the font face.
On the other side of the coin, I really like how it detects, connects, and uploads your post and images to your blog platform without any intervention, other than the initial setup. The images, like above, is automatically created; a thumbnail and full view when clicked on. There are times, however, where I didn’t want it that way.
In any case, I believe Microsoft made the right decision with this desktop application. They’re headed the right direction within the context of the blogging world. Too bad it isn’t available on other OS platforms, but hey, it’s Microsoft. What do you expect?
Pros: Easily detects and integrates with numerous blog platforms, automatically saves as drafts, easy to use, has different “views” like HTML Code and Web Layout, automatically creates and uploads to your blog platform, supports plugins (i.e., Paste from Visual Studio plugin)
Cons: To access certain features like changing fonts is cumbersome, images uploaded do not include alt info thereby failing verification tools, not available on other OS platforms, still in Beta, might not be free later on(?)
I find it more user-friendly than w.bloggar or Deepest Sender (haven’t tried ecto yet which is OS X and Windows compatible), so I’ll continue to use it and write about it in the near future.
Take care. =0)