“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…

Minor housekeeping and such this evening. Pay no mind if you’re looking for actual, you know, words and stuff.

Dropped the 2.3.1 wordpress upgrade and a couple wp-plugs in/out/upgraded. I dropped the Technorati tag generator in favor of a newer iconic one. Saves an extra line on the posts and makes it nice and easy to cloud into the local site or techno. Still looking for good cloud and link widgets. I can’t believe someone else hasn’t hit on something similar to what I want yet. Oh well, maybe I’ll finish writing mine.

I was moving through the Akismet catches from last week and there was actually a comment-spam from a technorati category. Not sure if that’s supposed to be funny or sad, but I chuckled…

edit: Some days I just don’t understand…

So I was browsing the referrer/stats/miscellany this afternoon and one of the links I followed led me to the best non-porn use on the interwebs – free shit. Take My Tech is a blog listing various pieces of used “tech stuff” and invites users to post comments for any item they’re interested in. When the comments ding 100, a random commenter gets the goods.

The  site is powered by AdSense which funds the transfer of the goods and, I’m assuming, a little profit. Take a look, drop a post, you might get lucky!

As chronicled here and here I, on occasion, make bad choices when it comes to my own personal web stuffs. For reasons that escape my current understanding I upgraded my perfectly tuned and working WordPress 2.2.3 install to the “eagerly anticipated” 2.3. I followed the preflight checklists the the letter and even used a “preflight” plugin that verified everything I intended to use was on the compatibility list.

Result? The db failed to upgrade on the first, second and 3rd passes. A db/file restore got my old stuff back up and running again tried again after reading some of the troubleshooting instructions. Huzzah, the db upgraded cleanly…sort of. All my categories were deleted and the new cano-rewriting engine sent my crap into infinite loops for a solid hour until I moved things around. Apparently trying to redirect “www” traffic AND having my blog in a folder called “/blog” was an unforeseen function. Oy.

I made the assumption that eventually I’ll have to deal with this crap so I chose to do it now. I just finished re-categorizing every post I’ve ever written. Of course all my old technorati tags are gone now as well and the native tagging features are … whatever. I don’t know at this point. I was under the impression that I would be able to (finally) just use tags instead of categories but there are still two blanks. Color me confused, I guess.

Anywho, bear with me. I’m searching for a 2.3 compatible theme that doesn’t suck so I can re-mod everything to get back to where I’m happy. If shit is broken blame THESE GUYS and not me, ‘kay?

Also: It seems that 2.3 is dogshit slow. Sorry. If it really starts to be an issue I’ll launch a ticket with dreamhost and see if there’s something they can tell me.

edit (11:25pm): After a few hours of hax0r I think I have this working somewhat reasonable. I really like the theme, which means that it’s already in use on 99.9% of all blogs ever. Such is life. This theme is actually plugin/tag aware so everything seems to be kosher. I’m using about half the plugins now that I was before. a) in an effort to speed things up and b) because they’re broke.

edit, part the second: technorati reconnected!

So a guildmate and friend of mine is taking a year off of law school to campaign for Barack Obama. That is, in a nutshell, wicked cool.

To chronicle his adventures and to keep in touch with those of us who merely comment on politics rather than put any actual effort in he’s started up a brand new and as yet unnamed blog.

http://laskybenson.blogspot.com/

Feel free to suggest a name, we already have, but they were less than perfect. Some of my favorites were…

• O’Bama, Where art thou?
• Obama Rama Ding dong?
• Barack Barracks

Good luck man!

Nothing to report, specifically, yet. Stay tuned. If the site goes away for a few days just give DNS time to catch up. When I know more, you’ll know more.

Until then…

postscript: I posted this using the Windows Live Writer Blog-o-matic tool thing currently in beta.

postscript, part the second: The aforementioned Windows Live Writer Blog-o-matic tool thing is teh sux and has been summarily sacked.

Today marked the release of Movable Type 3 Developer Edition. Normally such an event would be met with much rejoicing of the unwashed masses. Not so in this case as bloggers far and wide are making with the wails and gnashing of teeth usually reserved for MMO launches.While I don’t have some ultra-huge system happening here I do intend to add a few blogs/authors to the system in the not so distant future. Given my hosting situation I would be required, per the license, to use the (currently) $199.99 version. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people making money off of their creations but why fucking bother with the pretense of “free” versions if -5 users out of 100 are eligible?

There is nothing wrong with stating that your “personal” license precludes any and all commercial enterprises and then charging reasonable rates to anyone who wishes to use the product as a service offering. I’m not making money off this site. Nor would I be making money if I also happened to host a few blogs for my friends. This smacks of the same kind of stupidity running rampant over in the Ventrillo camp. I can’t really blame them though, who really gives a shit about people using your software for free anyway? MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY!

There are, however, a few layers of silver lining in these dark clouds. First and foremost – I don’t need to upgrade. I want to, that’s for damn sure, but 2.661 will function just fine for as long as I wish to use it. Secondly the trackback entries on very blog that inspired this post have an absolute bounty of suggestions for replacements. So at whichever arbitrary point that MT pisses me off I will look around for a replacement.

Just wish I had known about this new license before I spent 2 weeks importing historical posts into this damnable contraption.

edit (7/11/06): Obviously this site is and has been (for a while) wholly WordPressed. I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could, but that would only be if I could create/edit a theme even remotely close to my liking. Such is life.

edit (10/3/07): I have a theme I actually like now. So suck it!

postNuke, while robust, is not the content manager that I would have liked. Having a hojillion options at your disposal when all you really needed is something to dump nicely formated text is just silly. I’ll rip the phpBB forums out sometime next week and restore the proper functionality to them.

Oh, and pretty up the place too, I guess.