It turns out that Daylight Saving (not Savings) Time is a bust. I had always suspected that it was more trouble than it was worth, but now, via the biggest Indian in Indiana, comes hard-hitting research that proves that DST costs us three bucks a year in extra heating and cooling costs, even after saving some lighting cost. And that doesn’t even cover the cost of all the hassle and confusion and extra programming that goes into supporting the changover twice each year. If you want to get up an hour earlier all summer, go ahead and do so, just don’t drag the rest of us with you.
I’ve set this post to appear at 2:24 Sunday morning, a time that will not exist, since the clocks will go from 1:59 directly to 3:00. I wonder what WordPress will do…?
I’m seeing intermittent errors when posting comments. Please help me troubleshoot. Please try to comment on this post and include your browser and OS in the comment text. If you try to comment and fail, please email me at dkarp at limeduck dot com. Thanks for your help.
UPDATE: still can’t figure this one out, seems to happen only with the second (and subsequent?) comment on a single post. I’ve seen it on other hosts and with other themes. Disabled and re-enabled plugins, etc. Anybody in the wordpress world know what’s going on? I guess I just have to wait for v2.5
I’m off to Miami this weekend to attend a wedding and maybe sneak in some additional cultural or culinary fun. While I’m in the sunshine state sipping mojitos poolside, some people here in Massachusetts (and elsewhere) will be immersing themselves in the ice cold waters of the Atlantic ocean and local lakes and rivers.
Why?
Because some sadistic genius at the Special Olympics came up with the idea for raising money by holding Passion Plunges in wintry locales around the country. This is truly a brilliant idea. You have to be in some kind of shape to run a marathon, and even a shorter run or longer walk requires some kind of training commitment. Just about anybody can dunk themselves in cold water. Not that it doesn’t take guts and some dedication, but it doesn’t require training or even much of a time commitment. Plus, it’s too cold and icky in winter to do any conventional run or ride fundraisers.
I’m including a fundraising widget (at right) for a team of plungers fielded by Firstgiving.com where I’m doing a consulting project. In addition to taking a gander a Firstgiving’s cool technology, you should click through and consider making a donation to support the Special Olympics and cheer on the plungers. Or search the Firstgiving site for other events you can support, or learn how to set up your own personal fundraising page.
Before I call it a post, I have to spend some time geeking out, since the implementation of this widget in WordPress was not as smooth as I would have liked, and maybe others can learn from my experience.
What you’re supposed to do is grab the code from your Firstgiving fundraising page and paste it into your blog post. But WordPress’ “visual editor” mangles FG’s code (and YouTube’s and no doubt others’) and it doesn’t work. Unless you disable the visual editor by going to Users, selecting the user in question, choosing Edit, and UNticking the box marked “Use the visual editor when writing.” If you do this, things work just fine as long as you don’t mind composing your blog entry in raw HTML.
I hope that this makes it easier for people to use the Firstgiving widget and other kinds of scripts in WP blogs, and also that somebody notices this and either fixes it or tells me that I’ve been doing something wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I missed the obvious solution. Maybe a nice cold dip will clear my head…
Are we alone? Nobody watching? Good. I want to tell you about a secret blog. (Don’t arch your eyebrow at me, KC, this isn’t about your secret blog) I’ve been working hard at migrating Ipswitch’s Daily Network Monitor Blog from its current Movable Type install to a shiny new WordPress setup. Here’s the old DNM, and here’s your secret preview of the new one. (of course once the cutover is complete, both links will show the new site)
The DNM blog has been a little neglected of late, but we’re getting back on daily posting, and with the new setup, I think it’s going to be a serious SEO force for the main product site. Here are some technical reasons why this is going to be so:
Moving the blog from an Ipswitch-owned domain to a hosted domain will give it some separation and make the links from the blog to the company site more valuable
Taking advantage of tagging and categorizing makes it easier for bots to understand what the site is about, and also creates more pages for indexing
WordPress’ easy architecture will make it possible for us to extend the web visitor tracking system to the blog to better understand the flow of traffic
Updating the social bookmarking links - digg, stumbleupon, delicious, reddit, etc. - will help get the site noticed (and it wouldn’t kill you to use them to spread the word about limeduck, either)
and most importantly, getting more technical posts and some guest authors will make it more readable and commentable
I have to give lots of credit to the tools and vendors here. You already know that WordPress is excellent, and that I dig the Mandigo theme. What I’ve also discovered is that the folks as BlueHost have an amazingly easy to use system for automatically installing and setting up WordPress on your hosting account, and their tech support people are actually clueful and available.
Well, that’s enough geeking out for now. Look for the new Daily Network Monitor soon, and expect some of the learnings to come back and enhance the limeduck experience, too.
Ok, I waited for Wordpress 2.3 and have installed it. Next steps, importing all the old entries and fixing up the template. Thank you for your patience during this time of transition.
Looks like some of the images have broken and the video is definitely busted. And there are some odd duplicates of a couple of posts. I’ll start cleaning up from the present back. I think the old archives are still around even though the homepage is gone.
And wordpress has somehow turned my tags into categories. Oops. That’ll take some undoing…
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9/29 update
1. Actually, the old homepage is still there, and seems to be fully functional. I guess I’ll leave it there, but please update any links you might have from www.limeduck.com/index.html to www.limeduck.com or www.limeduck.com/index.php if you must.
2. I ditched the tags temporarily but categories seem to be ok. I really want a tag cloud, so I’m going to have to figure out how to get that working again.
3. I found the most awesomest wordpress theme ever, Mandigo. It’s exceptionally customizable, mostly without touching any css, and seems to be rock-solid code-wise. I made up three header graphics, and the theme rotates them at random.
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