Interactive Llama

Whether you believe that micro-blogging and syndication feeds provide too much information and makes us either dumber or smarter, information overload has been here for a while. Even though, Microsoft Internet Explorer has had an RSS button for two versions, I would say that syndication feeds are still not mainstream, yet highly valuable that you can feast on such a cornucopia of information without browsing to a single web page. Think of syndication as requested email (in juxtaposition to the majority of your Inbox, right?). If you are in the anal-retentive 43 folders crowd, you’ve probably already have a syndication feed management process in place for two years. If you haven’t and the thought of having to browse through 100 new blog posts every day is overwhelming, I recommend FeedHub. (more…)

I enjoy reading books. Most of the time, I read non-fiction. I don’t have anything against fiction. My wife reads fiction, but it’s not my cup of tea, unless its a classic. Whatever you read, you would probably like to share it with your friends. Now it’s easy. With these steps you can tweet about your latest book by simply adding the book to an Amazon Wishlist. No figuring out how much of the title you can post within the 140 character limit. No creating a TinyURL for the Amazon product page. A few hours later your twitter account will tweet your book addition! (more…)

If you follow me on Twitter, you noticed that I recently bought a home and that I was confused about the date of BlogIndiana. I’m happy to say that our move-in date and the blog conference are on separate weekends, so now you don’t have to help me move (you were planning on it right?). You can go to BlogIndiana at the IUPUI Campus Center on August 16th and 17th.

I read many books from the library. I don’t finished reading many books though. First of all, they are free, since they are from the library, and second my attention span doesn’t last that long. I believe browsing the web daily from age 14 (circa 1996) will do that to someone (read the latest cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, is Google Making Us Stoopid). Most of the books I read come from the magazines I read (The Atlantic, Books & Culture: A Christian Review) or from the podcasts I listen to (Diane Rehm, This Week in Tech).

Either way, I want to share my latest reading endeavors across my blogs. But how? (more…)

As you already know, I post all my non-reply tweets from Twitter on my personal blog with Twitter Tools. I do not display the posts with the Twitter Tools widget, but with SideBlog. With SideBlog you can place all posts from a particular category in the sidebar. I have chosen to show only my “Tweets from Twitter” category. The original output of SideBlog places a title, post content and a permalinked “#” at the end of the post. This wasn’t minimalistic enough, and on top of that with Twitter Tools the first 40 characters of your content is your title, so you are repeating yourself. I don’t care for the pound sign, “#”, either. So I made the following changes to the plug-in. (more…)

If you’ve been around WordPress for more than six months, most of the following plug-ins should be familiar to you. In case you haven’t heard of any them, I highly recommend all of them. I’m not a fan of widgets (too-limiting), since I create websites for a living. I’ve divided them into Anti-Spam, Category/Tag, and Additional Content. If you are not caching your blog, remember, don’t install too many plug-ins. (more…)

No matter how carefully you design your site, visitors will always request a page that is missing, moved, or non-existent (especially if you experiment with your site structure frequently). This past week, I’ve been obsessed with HTTP 404 errors and working on creating a better 404 Not Found page. The default 404 page for WordPress offers the opportunity to search the blog, but you should go another step. Usability is one of (if not the) key trait of a great website. If thought has gone into even your 404 error page, then I’d guess that much thought has been put into your entire site. (more…)

I’ve been familiarizing myself with WordPress 2.5’s new media gallery. If you’ve visited my blog before, you know I don’t upload many images, but I’m hoping to upload many images to my wife, Rachel Steely’s website. I was annoyed to find out that the default image posting size is medium (which is about 300px). On top of that, if you select full size, it doesn’t mean full size. It means your WordPress theme’s column width. So unless you are using Kubrick your media size will not be your column width. (more…)

It’s been a hot debate over what to include in your blog’s RSS recently. I say you should include more than blog posts in your RSS feed IF (and this is a big if) you can editorialize what goes in. The following, explains how to change which tweets from Twitter get posted to your blog and into your RSS feed.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (’@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded. (more…)

bbPress is still under version 1.0 (as of this writing, it’s at 0.8.3.1). You might think forums are dead, why not just Tweet away on a closed group channel or such. Although not the latest thing, forums are foundational. They are the web version of newsgroups and essential for large groups of people. As a lover of WordPress, I can’t wait to see bbPress develop and mature. Looks like others can’t either: Automattic raised $29.5 million in their Series B round of funding.