Some spam comments are just gibberish, others attempt to flatter me with generic praise. On Sunday, I received a unique comment via the church blog begging me not to ignore it.
HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia xyzrxyz [deleted] enlargement xyzrxyz and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. xyzrxyz [deleted] enlargement xyzrxyz They’re coming back now. xyzrxyz [deleted] xyzrxyz Please send help!
Nice try. Still didn’t get past the spam filter though. When the Russians do show up this is the song you should sing as your being dragged away.
In the course of Life the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. Flowers bloom in Spring and they die in the Autumn. So it must be also for WordPress themes…
ummm, yeah we don’t need anymore of that. My previous theme has been in use for over a year. At that time, a commenter promised that maintainership was being transferred so that new releases would continue in the future. A year later there are still no signs of life to be found. I then started to seriously look at new themes for the church website and the BrakeBlog.
Blog.txt rendered to be unmaintained.
When I started browsing the directory on wordpress.org for ideas I had two goals in mind.
The church website and BrakeBlog would be dramatically different from each other after I make these changes. To be clear that the BrakeBlog and the church website are not the same.
I wanted at least one theme to have a customizable image in the header.
The new theme for the church is very different from Blog.txt. Zenlite is a single column blog with no sidebar. The header is easily changeable to keep the website looking fresh. Several of the items that were in the sidebar had to be moved, unfortunately.
On this site, Simplish is very close in style to blog.txt. So close that it was a drop-in replacement. I may consider changing the fonts to those used by blog.txt. I like the look of Sans Serif-based fonts over Serif fonts.
It’s 10:30 PM I was supposed to be fast asleep over an hour ago. I have work tomorrow and I’ll be getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning. The worst thing you can do for a blogger is to give him a regular day job. During October of 2008, I made 13 posts during that month because I quit my old job. For all of 2009 I’ve only made 4 posts plus this one. In my personal life, there’s nothing happening I go to work and come home and go to work again. A dull dreary life is better in most aspects than living a soap opera, but it also doesn’t drive new material to write about.
Of course, there’s always national news that I could rant about but just quoting a bit of an article and saying I agree or disagree is rather boring. Another thing is the presence of Hoptownhall, there are a lot of topics where I might post on HTH because I can get plenty of discussion surrounding the topic.
Previously, my hard core Linux kernel news has come from free sources like kerneltrap and kernelnewbies. When I started tracking the development kernel releases. I wanted more information about the changes coming and what it meant for my hardware. When kerneltrap is writing regular updates he provides pretty good information. kernelnewbies is another good source for functional changes to the kernel. The human readable changelog is a good look at the kernel in broad strokes. The diff -u section in the LinuxJournal is another broad overview with some discussion of kernel politics thrown in. The disadvantage in reading free sources, blogs is that the author often posts in spurts then goes to sleep again. That’s the nature of blogging. The BrakeBlog was dead for several months before I revived it again.
On the spur of the moment I bought a subscription to lwn.net. I think I’m going to be very happy with it. Reading through this week’s LWN I was pleased with the twenty bucks I spent. I was so inspired that I went to work creating a LWN badge to display on my website. Go steal it for your own use I don’t care. If you make a better one let me know.
WordPress developers spend a great deal of time making their software standards-based. A vanilla install of WordPress will pass the W3C’s validator easily that is until you try to embed flash video. The classic flash embed code includes the non-standard <embed> tag unique to the netscape browsers. However, there are methods of embeding flash with valid markup except that the non-standard behavior of Internet Explorer continues to get in the way. In order to get the same behavior in all browsers a hack like the Satay Method is required. Given that the videos I want to embed are random things from youtube and other sites using a container flash movie won’t work. So the simple work around I’m using is to insert WordPress’s <!–more–> tag and place the video after it. This limits the non-standard code to just the individual post page and it keeps the rest of my website standards compliant.
This is the original color image. The camera is a Canon Powershot A300.
This variation shows what can be done with layer masks in the GIMP. To create this effect, I copied the original image into a separate layer and removed the red panic button using a layer mask. Then it was simple enough to invert the mask in yet another layer to isolate the panic button from everything else. I desaturated the layer excluding the panic button and increased the saturation in the layer that isolated the panic button.
Continuing from the previous image this one I increased the contrast and brightness of just the panic button excluded layer.
Hosting for the BrakeBlog was coming up for renewal at the same time I bought ericbrake.com. I debated whether to buy the dot com TLD. To GoDaddy’s benefit, they want you to believe that you must buy every TLD variation of your website. However, I didn’t want to fall into that trap of impulse buying. So I didn’t impulse buy, I’ve probably been thinking about buying the dot com for a month. Right now, ericbrake.com is just a redirect to the dot ws domain. I may use it separately later.
I use the Google Webmaster Tools to keep tabs on what Google is saying about the BrakeBlog as well as if there is anyone else linking to me. One of the things GWT tells me is that my meta description is too short. Right now it reads “All things are possible in Linux”. I’m thinking along the lines of a longer description like this.
I live in Hopkinsville, KY. I am passionate about Linux && { Free || Open || Libre }; Software.
A few things about this description are the keywords included like Hopkinsville KY, Linux, and software. The expression Linux && { Free || Open || Libre }; is a shell statement that means “Linux AND { Free OR Open OR Libre };”.
Edit: Darn it! WordPress won’t let me use all of the fancy ampersands and braces. I’ll have to settle for something less ambitious.
Go steal it for your own use I don’t care. If you make a better one let me know.
