Category: Website News

Various updates about the website:

PLANNED MAINTENANCE: My web host is planning to do some upgrades in the near future. These are scheduled to take place in the wee small hours of Eastern Standard Time. So if the site is unavailable, that’s most likely what’s going on. I’ll update this as my host updates me.

NEW FEATURE: When you visit a WordPress blog, the software defaults to loading the 10 most recent stories. When you get to the bottom of the page, you can click “Older Stories” to load the next 10 stories, and so on. The people who make WordPress also make a set of plug-ins called “JetPack”, and a recent update added an “infinite scroll” feature: when you get to the bottom of the page, the next 10 articles automatically load in the browser, and you can keep scrolling as far back as you wish. This is a feature of the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and I really like it. Unfortunately, you can’t use a footer with infinite scroll, so I moved the footer widgets to the sidebar.

NEW FEATURE (OF SORTS): One of the biggest complaints people had about Instagram is that it lacked “profile pages”. When you uploaded a picture to the site, Instagram would create an HTML page around the picture, which you could then send to friends as a link. But there was no “profile page” where people could look at your other pictures. Instagram has finally created profiles for users, and my account has been upgraded. You can see all my pictures here, or just use the Instagram icon in the sidebar (with the RSS, Facebook, Twitter and other icons).

THE PLUG-IN MERRY-GO-ROUND: For a long time I used a plug-in called WordBooker, which automatically added a Facebook post whenever I published a new article on this site. I also used another plug-in called Twitter Tools to do the same for Twitter. However, the author of WordBooker seemed to be locked in a constant battle with Facebook’s ever-changing API, so the plug-in broke early and often. Not too long ago, the folks behind Twitter Tools created a new plug-in called Social, which added the ability to post to Facebook as well as Twitter. But Social had one annoying bug: it would pull any random picture from the site and use that as the “featured picture” in the Facebook post (that’s why I temporarily disabled the Instagram widget in the sidebar). I found a plug-in which fixed that bug, but then noticed that JetPack has a similar feature called “Publicize”. I figure the “official” WordPress plug-in will be the most reliable and have the best support, so I’m gonna use that one… for now.

OK, so I’m back! The missus and I went on a short vacation to Myrtle Beach, then came home and left around 40 hours later for another trip. But we have nothing planned for the next several months, so I should be able to get back to the Mad Men recaps soon!

I swapped out the banners on the site. It’s kind of funny: I saw a cool picture on the Internet that I wanted to use as a Facebook cover image. I opened it in Paint.NET and edited it….then I thought of another cool image… and the next thing you know I’ve created a stockpile of Facebook covers. And today, for no good reason at all, I decided to convert them to banners for this site:

The Clash: The iconic cover of the infamous London Calling album.

Joy Division: The famous pic of the band on the bridge over Princess Road in Hulme.

Japan: Details of the cover of the 1980 album Gentlemen Take Polaroids.

Lord Nelson: British naval hero of the Napoleonic Era and all-around bad ass.

London Underground: The world-famous map of London’s subway system.

Kate Winslet: The greatest actress of my generation flips you off, British style!

Art Rooney: A.K.A. “The Chief”, the founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team.

Jack Lambert: One of Rooney’s all-time best players: the much feared Jack Lambert!

Edwin Hubble: American astronomer and all-around awesome dude!

Just a heads up: I’ve done some pruning to the categories. The “Time Warner” category is gone, and all posts that were in that category have been moved to “Geek Stuff”. I also killed the “Life On Mars” and “Hotel Babylon” categories and moved those posts to “TV”.

– Jim

Hi Folks!

Just wanted to let you know that I have updated the ShareThis options at the bottom of every post. I’ve changed the look from large buttons to small icons, and did so because I also added support for Pintrest, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and the Google+ “+1” feature.

Note that you can choose from dozens of other sharing services including Orkut, LinkedIn, Digg, Xing, Technorati, WordPress.com by clicking the green “ShareThis” icon at the bottom of each post.

Sorry for the downtime earlier today folks. My web host disabled my site again this morning. I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what happened, but from the looks of it, my WordPress backup plug-in – BACKWPUP – once again went crazy on the server. It’s been disabled, and I’m doing manual backups until I can find a plug-in that doesn’t randomly eat gobs of CPU and memory space. Suggestions?

Yep, it’s been a while… so here are a bunch of new banners for the website! Enjoy them… until July or so, when I update them again!

Alexander Hamilton: As George Will once said, “we worship Jefferson, but live in Hamilton’s world”.

Bobby Dodd: Georgia Tech football coach from 1945-1966, compiled a record of 165–64–8.

Bernard Cornwell: Author of historical fiction, esp. the “Richard Sharpe” series from the Napoleonic Wars.

Katy Perry: I just don’t care what anyone says… Katy is America’s Sweetheart!

Neptune: This gas giant, the last in the solar system, is my favorite non-Earth planet!

Pecan Pie: Why? Because it’s just the best damn dessert in the whole world!

Richard Hooker: Along with Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker, considered a father of Anglicanism.

Sylvie: This is taken from the cover of Saint Etienne’s “Sylvie” single.

Steven Levitt: American economist and co-author of Freakonomics.

Marsheaux: Greek synthpop band. I’ve fallen in love with them the same way I fell for Jenni Belle in 7th grade:

Marsheaux: instantly, overwhelmingly, and giggledy. Seriously: I get love pangs when I listen to them!

Stilton: Is there any cheese that can compete with Stilton? It’s the King of Cheeses!

Thomas Aquinas: Highly influential theologian, one of the 33 Doctors of the Church.

A meal from The Varsity: Because sometimes you just jones for hometown deliciousness!

Thomas More: English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist.

I use the WP Random Header plug-in to change the header image each time you load a page here at the site (a feature that is now built in to WordPress, by the way. I guess I’m too lazy to reconfigure it!).

I sometimes add or remove one of the banners, and every so often I’ll go nuts and replace all of them at once. I did just that this past weekend. In case anyone’s curious, here are the new banners:

Lisa Gerrard, lead singer of Dead Can Dance; has also done several movie soundtracks, including Gladiator.

John Henry Newman, Anglican priest and founder of the Oxford Movement.

Edwin Hubble, astronomer who confirmed the existence of other galaxies and that the universe is expanding.

Bryan Cranston as Walter White from the TV show Breaking Bad, one of the best shows ever!

John Harrison, an English clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer and solved the “longitude problem”.

Idris Elba as John Luther from the BBC series Luther, one of the best modern cop shows around.

Isaac Newton, the English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, alchemist and theologian.

Grace Kelly, American actress, later Princess of Monaco, and most beautiful woman in history.

Norman Borlaug, agronomist and Nobel laureate who saved a billion people’s lives in the Green Revolution.

I hope you enjoy the new banners!

Hi folks!

My site was down for approximately 9 hours today. This is because of a WordPress plug-in I use called BACKWPUP. The plug-in is supposed to back up the MySQL database this site runs on and email that backup to me every morning. However, latest version of the plug-in contained a script which kicked off multiple backup threads, which ended up eating 89% of the CPU on the shared server which runs this site. Ooops! My host temporarily disabled my site until I could delete the plug-in. I have done so, and now I’m back!

Sorry for the downtime, but you know how it goes sometimes.

– Jim

Hi folks!

I have, ONCE AGAIN, disabled the AllConsuming widgets in the sidebar (the “I’m reading” and “I’m listening to” widgets). This is because AllConsuming is ONCE AGAIN having some kind of issue which causes the widgets not to load properly. This was not only greatly increasing page load times for my site, it was also causing other widgets not to load (especially the “Share This” widget, which allows you to easily share my posts on Facebook to Twitter). When (if) AllConsuming gets their act together, I’ll put them back.

In the meantime, does anyone know of a FAST and RELIABLE WordPress plug-in that allows me to post the books I’m reading and the music I’m listening to?

Thanks!

Jim

I just wanted to let you guys know that I’ve been going through some old stuff on this site and will be releasing updated versions of things over the next few days. For instance, I deleted the old “Useless Facts” page and copied everything to a standard post. I’m also going through the Old Stuff Archive and updating older articles that didn’t make the cut when I converted this site from FrontPage to WordPress.

– Jim