My New Favorite Album

Ok, not really. I put this together on a dare from a friend to go to this page and do what it said: http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/wikipedia-names-your-band. Basically, you generate some random results on a few sites and throw them together into the next “album of the year“. My random amalgamation resulted in this album cover. Why Wikipedia chose Ciales for me, I’ll never know.

Go try out your own luck.

By the way, that big Aviary stamp at the bottom is because I made this in Aviary while taking a five minute break at work. If you are interested, Aviary has some really nice online image editing programs. I assume if you have a paid account, they won’t put their logo on everything you make.

I’m sure I’ll be getting some interesting search referrals on this post.

I was hoping that advertising might help offset some of the costs of hosting this website. I’m not paying too much to host it and it wouldn’t take that much advertising revenue to pay for it. Why not give it a try?

The Scientific Method

Being an experiment, I’d better pull out some of my 6th grade science reports to make sure I document this properly. Feel free to correct me on my methods. Especially if you are currently in elementary school and therefore have the scientific method fresh in your young sponge-like minds.

Hypothesis

I’ve always had text ads in the sidebar and recently I’ve started to see a trickling of change come in each month as a result. My very official hypothesis is the following:

Adding an additional adblock in the main content area of my site will result in more advertising revenue.

Seems like a logical assumption to me.

Procedure

I added a new advertising block to the main content column of my site. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of ads, so I tried to place the new block as discretely as possible. It slipped into the related entries block just below each article.

The block is in a good contextual location where users are likely to look after finishing an article. Ads here lead the user to content related to the page they are on and thus enhance the user experience. Like I said, I’m not a big fan of ads, so if I am going to use them, then they are going to be as un-annoying as possible. A bit of an oximoron, I know.

Observations

• Total advertising revenue from January 1st to January 29th: $0.01.
• Total articles posted from January 1st to January 29th: 0.
• Number of American presidents inaugurated from January 1st to January 29th: 1.

Conclusion

It’s been a bad month.

There are a lot of things I could blame the lack of advertising income on. The continuing global economic collapse. The fact that more Presidents have been inaugurated than I’ve posted articles this year. Either way, that extra ad block isn’t pulling its weight. And it’s annoying.

Unless there is a sudden spontaneous spike in revenue, he is going on the chopping block. Who or what will take his place? Perhaps Mr. Empty-light-blue-box will get his spot back. He certainly looked better there.

This concludes our experiment.

SwfObj is overdue for an overhaul. As I stated in my original release announcement, the purpose of this plugin is to take the pain out of uploading and embedding Flash media in WordPress. Right now it makes it easier to embed content, but you still have to upload the Flash files to the server manually, figure out their URLs, and then type out the shortcode. This falls far short of being painless.

Today SwfObj is taking a step in the right direction. Expanded features now make uploading and embedding Flash content into WordPress just a little easier. Still not painless, but closer.

Upload Flash directly

When you install and enable the latest SwfObj release, a new media button will appear in your post editor. This allows you to upload new Flash content to your WordPress Media Library for embedding. Additionally you can view all of the Flash content currently in your library and insert it into your post. Simply click on the “Media Library” to see all of your Flash objects.

Inserting Flash content from the library injects the proper shortcode into the post or page you are editing. Currently it only embeds the “src” and “alt” properties. Any additional properties such as dimensions have to be added manually. Future releases will auto-embed more properties.

Multiple language support

This release also adds international support for the SwfObj plugin. If anyone wants to translate this into their native language, please do. I’d love to have this available in several languages.

Try it out

If you use Flash a lot in your posts and are looking for an easier way to upload and embed them, this plugin may be something you’ll want. Feel free to download the latest version of the SwfObj plugin and try it out. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I’d love to hear about any features you’d like to see, or problems you have encountered while using it. All feedback, good and bad, is welcome.

Yesterday, while driving across town with my wife, we engaged in a little conversation. It’s something we like to do to pass the time. Usually I can’t remember much of anything that is discussed during these activities. I could try to blame this on the fact that I am concentrating on driving. However, that theory fails to explain why I have the same time recalling conversations that have happened when I was sitting on the couch at home.

However, yesterdays discussion is still replaying in my mind today. Even stranger, I think my wife’s comments might actually motivate me to take action. This is very odd indeed, when considering the proportion of times she’s asked me to clean up my mess to the times I’ve cleaned up my mess.

So what was it that she said? I believe her exact words were:

No offense, but your site is kind’a boring and ugly. Maybe you should put some flowers on it.

While there won’t be any flowers added, there will be some changes coming to the site. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the current layout. I’ve added a lot of content since it was first pieced together and most of that is hidden away in the archives. That and it’s “kind’a ugly”.

So if you notice things moving around, or colors changing randomly, now you know why. I’ll be hacking things out spontaneously over the next little while until I get the site to a place I’m happy with. At least until my wife stops mocking me.

Maybe I will put some flowers on it.

Tag Posers

Since WordPress 2.3 tags have been enabled in blog posts. Being the lazy guy that I am, I never took the time to implement them here.

Prior to the 2.3 release, I had been using Categories as a form of tags. I ended up with a bunch of random categories, most of which were only used once. Not an ideal system.

Tag Bliss

With this latest upgrade, I finally went through and removed all of my wanna-be tag categories and added tags on all of my posts. Much better.

Now I can finally move on with my life.

Rather than directly hacking into WordPress to get the latest blog entries, I’m using the lastRSS PHP class to pull the feed data in from Feedburner, reformat it and put it on the page. It is a little round-about, but removes the need to code up specific hacks into my blog back end which runs separately from the rest of the site. This way if I ever change my blog engine, I won’t have to recode up the main page. Another point for web standards!

I used lastRSS because it was the first functional PHP class that I came across late last night. It works great, but doesn’t support Atom feeds. Looking around today I came across SimplePie and I think I’ll have to try it out. The documentation alone makes it look promising.

Toddlers

My toddler loves to get his hands onto everything. Once in his ruthless grasp the fun begins. He squeezes, pokes, pulls, scratches, pounds, rips, stomps, and head-butts until something happens, sometimes with hilarious results.

Through this experimentation he’s learned a lot about how things in the house work. When he bangs on the glass door it makes the dog bark. When he pushes buttons on the remote it makes the television do weird stuff and has the added bonus of making the lazy parents get off the couch and chase him.

Tantrums

Things start to get ugly when he is unable to get his expected outcome. For instance, when he mashes buttons on the VCR remote (yes, we still have a VCR) nothing happens on the television. His reaction to this is to smash the remote until the batteries fly out, then chuck it across the room while yelling at the top of his lungs. That at least gets the parents off the couch.

Design

As a web designer I am constantly trying out new things. “Mashing the buttons” of a new CSS layout scheme, or poking at another Javascript library. After a while, I usually find things that seems to be consistent. Those becomes the expected behavior. Then I try them out in a different context, and nothing happens the way I thought it should. Rational people might rationally stop at this point and undo. Not me, I keep bashing at the problem until it does what I want, no matter how much collateral damage is caused on the rest of the site.

After my last CSS tantrum a couple of weeks ago, I tried to put the pieces back together as best I could. Sorry for the mess. I hope to fix it someday.

Turns out my son and I have a lot in common. Apparently I utilize the same learning techniques as a toddler. The only difference may be that I am mature enough not to do this on any of my clients sites, my son has no problem breaking things that don’t belong to him.

Are there any other web design toddlers out there? I know of at least one illustrator with a similar problem.

Merry Christmas!

In the meantime, I put together this little winter scene to remind me that somewhere in the world there is snow on the ground. Here in Arizona Christmas is more brown and poky than white and fluffy.

WordPress Plugin Shout-Outs

I just installed WordPress from scratch and already I’ve found a couple of plugins I can’t live without. Thought I would share the love so someone else could benefit.

WordPress plugins I’m addicted to

• Feedburner Feed Replacement: The best WordPress feedburner plugin I’ve found. Crazy simple. It magically forwards all feed links to Feedburner without the need to edit anything by hand.
• Text Control: WordPress kept inserting p tags around everything I put in my posts: images, Flash objects, lists, whatever. It didn’t matter whether I inserted the html by hand, or used the WYSIWYG editor, it all got mangled. I was about to strangle the WordPress, burn it and flush it down the toilet, but then I found this plugin to tame the autoformatting beast and all the anger dissolved.
• WP-SlimStat: An absolutely beautiful WordPress statistics engine. I can’t say enough about this plugin, so I’ll shut my mouth and let it speak for itself.

Being relatively new to this, I’d love to hear what recommendations more experienced WordPress bloggers have. What plugins are worthy of your love?

New site, new blog

I have been running things out of orange-splotch.com for three years now. But the free three year hosting offer at 1&1 is coming to an end and thus it is time to move to a new host. And this time I’ll actually paying for it.

So it is out with the old and in with the new. A nice clean start in a new home. Maybe this home won’t end up so cluttered (ya, right!).