I certainly post a lot of these “I have better things to do than post” posts, don’t I? You know the drill. Work, non-work, the pending holidays, etc, etc.

The annual pilgrimage to Kenebec was somewhat less than fruitful this year. The fall was uncommonly wet, which delayed the harvest by nearly a month. For reference, fields in South Dakota are effectively nations unto themselves. When 60% of the milo is still standing the birds have miles upon miles of cover and food to play in without ever seeing a person. The weather started to turn bad and we ended up with 3 solid days of rain. We came home a day early to avoid the impending doom of a mushy snowstorm. The outcome of the trip aside, it was some family time, which is always welcome.

Thanksgiving will be abbreviated this year as I have to be in the office to cover phones bright and early at 8am. I’m only working a half-day, so it’s entirely possible I may spend the afternoon buying a car.

No, really. My fury is without containment options.

This blog has (and will always be) my vanity site. My little corner of the internets where I can say whatever crazy nonsense pops into my head. I rarely censor (or grammar-check) anything I post or, for that matter, fact-check anything. Ever.

That’s just how I roll, bitches.

Every once and a while I get the bug to actually try writing something. I’ve always fancied putting quill to parchment but have always been hindered by being well… boring. Boring people write boring things. It’s a rule or something.

Why do I mention this now? Well the opportunity to contribute to a new site presented itself so I pounced. I posted my first commentary earlier today for review. Assuming the editorial powers that be find it worthy it should be up any day now. Assuming the site is fixed. Top men are on the case, I’m sure. But don’t be surprised if the site occasionally goes into convulsions for the near future.

Bite My Review – Now with 10% more direct-linking to my actual editorial! (also linked over ————-> in the blogroll)

I’m lazy.

Shocked cat is shocked, right?

The blog (and plugins) are updated to the most recent versions, but it looks like there’s some issues with a couple. I’m sure that is akin to daggers in your little hearts. I’ve got lots of interesting (to me) stuff to rant about, just no time to actually put pen to paper. I’ll try to carve out some time real soon nah, but you know how that goes.

edit: The author of the last.fm widget (see right sidebar) is aware of the issue and it’s apparently a problem with the 2.8 version of the html/http api. He’s apparently got a ticket in with WordPress so it’ll be fixed soonish.

A: Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis bored.

As I write this it’s Friday night and I am still waiting for a server to finish virtualizing so I can proceed with the rest of the project plan and possibly get to sleep before sunrise. Given that I am prone to bouts of lazy and vigor of equal and epic measure I’ve been queuing up random posts for the last 2 hours and just setting a future publish date (or leaving them as drafts)  so it looks like I’m all chatty. Twixsy hobbitses, am I rite?

Anyway, someone in my guild mentioned that he read my blog and has tried to comment in the past but didn’t have any luck. So after turned comments back on (no idea how that got fucked up) I also went ahead and linked up to Facebook. People hate logging in to <yet_another_website_001>. Options, we haz dem!* I actually got the idea from Lum’s blog, he did the same thing (although a different method) a few months back with great success.

The guide I followed was a pretty manual process, but once I got a handle on the nuance it was slick as could be.

So yeah. Fuck you WP-FacebookConnect. I’ve programmed professionally (briefly) and have no issues reading docs and hacking on PHP, but holy christ getting that shit to work right was a nightmare. I finally gave up and implemented the OpenID plugin. So there’s that at least. I installed 2 plugins and configured the shit and it was working. No them hax, no bullshit. It just worked.

A pleasant surprise indeed.

In other news, I just popped the newest version of the wp-armory plugin which features a 3D modeler. More shit on the sidebar? Yes. Yes it is. Suck it.

… On second thought, that’s horrible. It’s off now. Look right for proof. —————->

Aren’t you glad you asked?

edit: Let’s just go ahead and add the OpenID plugs to the FUCK YOU list. I leave this only as a signpost, to illustrate how far we have yet to go before all this stuff “just plain works”.

Not anymore?

Finally got a chance to kick the tires on the new raiding setup last night. We took 21 into the Arachnid Quarantine Zone and had a grand ol’ time with much achievementing and whatnot. We also managed to nab the achievement for dropping Sartharion with a mere 20 raiders. The loots were phat and plentiful. 15 suicide pieces, including 2 upgrades for moi. Lost the shot at the Fury of the Five Flights but I did grab Dawnwalkers and a Widow’s Fury for my troubles. A Webbed Death dropped as well.

I know I promised some pics so I’ll get to it later, promise. I’m thinking it might be useful to symlink my wowpics folder to DropBox or maybe the new LiveSpaces thing that I picked up the other month. Still gotta find a better way to push images. PWA is fine, but clunky for blogginatin.

Came across a good article the other day on improving the performance of Wordpress. It holds more relevancy if you run your own server or are paying for more access than your typical mass-market hosting environment.

I pride myself on reading revision histories but somehow the fact that Wordpress stores post-revisions flew right past without me knowing.

Anywho, if you run a WP blog take a gander.

As of last Monday it’s become the former, not latter. No new news beyond that, just income and whatnot.

I’ve got a slew of WoW stuff I just never pushed, I’ll get to that at some point. I’m still struggling with a good and simple way to manage graphics. I’ve got the wow stuff in a folder with the perl album scripts ran against them and it works ok to generate blog-sized thumbs for posting, but the size of everything is kind of a pain. Stuff I’m posting nowhere but in the blog are actually going in the Wordpress uploader thing which seems to be working fine. At least those will be “easily” portable.

Maybe Picasa web albums or Flikr or somesuch would work. Bleh.

The upgrade is done, but some plugins and theme crap have to be updated/fixed. Also, I seem to have deleted something, somewhere. Not sure what, yet. The new version has a much-improved (and non-plugin) media manager thing so I’m slowly converting some of the blog-only graphics to that so some links may be toast while I complete the move.

The long awaited 0.2 release of my first WP plugin is finally here. My apologies for the delay, I’ll do better on the next release…

This version adds support for limiting the maximum number of tags displayed, some code clean-up and approximately 5 new lines in the readme. I’ve adjusted some of the titles/filenames/etc. to be more clear. ITC seems as good an acronym as any, so the name will likely stay.

The new version can be downloaded from my projects page.

see also: ITC 0.1
update: Someone added the plug to a codex-style site. Neato.

“See a need, fill a need.”

I present the initial release of my 1st complete and functional WordPress plugin.

Improved Tag Cloud 0.1

ITC is designed specifically to combat a problem I have with the normal tagging cloud and related plugins currently available. Namely, the number of terms generated by someone who’s pretty bonkers about accurate tagging/searching. This blog with it’s sub-100 posts already has well over 100 tags and that’s only because I was distilling them down to keep the cloud small!

All ITC does is ask you what the minimum amount of posts you require a tag to have before it’s displayed in your cloud. For my blog a setting of ONE actually works perfectly! Your mileage may vary. I didn’t really test it (or code against it) but an excessively high number would likely produce … uh … nothing? Don’t do that!

I have also added a “My Stuff” page to the index as well where I’ll chronicle my ongoing coding exploits. THE HORROR!

This is my first foray into WordPress hacking, so be gentle.

update: The E! True Hollywood Story on this project was that I wanted to generate some code I could show a potential employer that was applicable to their business. Long story short, they kicked me to the curb after (what I thought) was two excellent interviews with some of the nicest people you’d care to meet. I guess you never can tell with people…