Coffee heat rising

Blogging

FeedBurner in; Feedburner out

by

Very nice. I got FeedBurner ensconced on FaM, having discovered an error in the HTML snippet’s code and having persuaded a friendly IT guru to fix it, with sterling results.

Further observation, however, left the Beloved Proprietor of this website wondering. First, it became clear that the vaunted statistics we were to enjoy applied (duh!) only to those who elected to opt viewing the site in favor of having posts delivered to them by e-mail. Second, it quickly became clear that widespread complaints to the effect that stats were in error are probably correct.

Why, the Royal We asked Ourself, why are We doing this? The answer was simple: We don’t know. WordPress’s stats a) provide everything FaM needs to know and b) actually work, without requiring that one navigate to a different site. So, we decided to delete the Feedburner site, here and at The Copyeditor’s Desk.

The Copyeditor’s Desk, btw, now has its own domain name and concommitant URL: thecopyeditorsdesk.com.

Please feel free to subscribe to either or both(!), using your own choice of RSS feeds.

DANCE TO SPRING! (well…late summer)

by


A rose for WordPress

Funny is now officially part of WordPress! Hooorayyyy!

It was a project, because I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing, but the excellentsupport staff here at WordPress managed, with great patience and elaborate effort at explaining things in words of one syllable, to help me move the domain name over here. Thank you, Anthony and Douglas!

So, welcome to Funny’s new home. I hope you like the design, which was cadged directly from one of WordPress’s templates.

I’m now going to start publishing content that I copied-&-pasted over from iWeb. The result is that many of you will get pinged by posts dating as far back as December 25. My apologies — if there’s a way to turn off the ping function, I haven’t figured it out.

Originally I thought I should start from the beginning and work forward. However, slapping posts over here one by one is a time-consuming process. After a while it became apparent that it would be better to work backward from the present. As of now, I’ve got August and part of July uploaded, plus December and January. In the evenings while I’m sitting in front of the idiot box, I will keep moving copy, and so every now and again more outdated pings will go out. Sorreeee! 😳

Today being a workday, I must spend the next few hours editing feminist tracts. However, later today or tomorrow I’ll try to get FeedBurner onto the site. Be patient! It takes me a while to figure these things out.

What’s going on here?

by

Funny about MoneyatiWeb is down for the count, the Mac presently residing in Apple’s ICU. I’ve been planning to migrate funny to WordPress for a while, anyway, so this little headache presents an opportunity to get moving on that project.

It’s huge, and I’m still not convinced I want to do it. The amount of work involved is daunting–just capturing most (but not all) of the posts from the Net into Word takes about an hour for each month’s worth, and Funny has been around for seven months. Once I have the copy out of the Macintosh, it still has to be stripped of all the weird Microsoft tags and reformatted for republication. Augh!

Then I have to figure out how to migrate the domain name to WordPress, a complicated-sounding process,and then pay for the privilege, one that was included in the cost of .Mac. I wonder if this is worth the effort.

WordPress has some huge advantages, foremost among them that it’s accessible from any platform. With iWeb you have to be on a Mac, a killer of a restriction, since I can’t afford to own more than one Mac. Then you have to set up the Mac so that iWeb will access your site, and that is something I have no idea how to accomplish.

On the other hand,inserting graphics in an iWeb page is extremely easy, which can’t be said of WordPress; there’s no problem with pasting copy from Word into iWeb; and you can design your own page without having to know CSS. WordPress wishes to charge you if you put ads on your site; there’s no charge for that at Apple. While Apple charges for the use of its servers, in addition to space for your website you also can back up your data there. Alotof data. Taken together, all those are almost as big as the accessibility issue. Bigger, maybe… I don’t much care for the WordPress template I’ve selected, but I don’t see anything else that makes me happier. Plus–speaking of access–you don’t have to memorize passwords to get into your iWeb pages.

So the decision is not yet taken. If the Mac can’t be fixed, obviously I’ll have to go to WordPress. But if it comes back up…well. This is certainlynotthe path of least resistance.

Hank’s big giveaway at My Investment Blog

by

Hey! Speaking of what we’d do if we came into a windfall (as we just were), Hank is giving away money at MiB Smarter Money. He wants to know what you’d do if you had $50,000. In exchange, you get a shot an American Express card worth $150, $100, or $50.

Check it out, and check out the whole blog. There’s a lot of interesting posts here, the one that jumps to my eye being a long and informative piece on how to publicize your blog. Currently, Hank is doing battle with Comcast, a story that’s developed some interesting ramifications. More than worth a visit!

1 comment left on iWeb site

hank

thanks for the props!And best of luck in the contest!

WordPress project, continued

by

Turns out there’s an easy way to strip code out of word-processed text before pasting it into a WordPress page. On the extended toolbar there are two icons: one with a little W and one with a little T. Little W is for pasting from Word; Little T is for pasting as plaintext. Click on either, and a box comes up, inviting you to Ctrl-V into the box. From there you can click “Insert” and WordPress automatically strips out the annoying code and pastes it into your post.

Very nice.

Inserting images from the Mac is a pain in the tuchus, though, because you have to navigate the high seas of iPhoto, a very clumsy process indeed. And you have to rename the photo so it has no underscores, unusual characters, or blank spaces. Since my camera saves photos with a strange numerical code that always includes an underscore, this means any photo to be posted has to be renamed and then, from inside WordPress, searched out in the horrible iPhoto, to whom “organize” has a meaning known only to alien beings. In iWeb, you can simply copy and paste into your post, a much simpler process. Infinitely simpler.

If I can copy and paste seven days’ worth of posts each evening, it will take me 28 days to move all the existing copy over. Not counting new posts. Argh!

Despite having waffled back in the stay-with-iWeb direction, at the moment I’m feeling peeved at Apple again. Discovered the reason all the cute little beeps and toots the Mac emits at various actions have stopped is that upgrading to OS X 5.x.x put the kaibosh on the sound function. It now will output only through the headphones. No option to output sound through the built-in speakers exists. There’s a way to fix this, from what I could tell online, but its too arcane for me. I had no idea what the guy was trying to say as he described the process on his site.

So I’m again figuring when this hard drive gives up the ghost, it’ll be back to the PC for moi. And if I wanna keep blogging, I’d better be in a Web-based program by then.

Dear Apple MobileMe team

by

An e-mail exchange, in the usual e-mail sequence:

Dear Jeremy–

Thank you for your response. I’m sure your entire team has been endlessly harassed! I appreciate the amount of work the Apple MobileMe team has had to do under stressful circumstances.

The Quicken backup to MobileMe is now working, although I’m also backing up to a flash drive and, as soon as I can afford it, will get an external hard drive and start using the interesting Time Machine feature.

iWeb is also working as well as iWeb works.What would be REALLY nice is if iWeb 09 could gain some of the functionality inherent to programs such as WordPress. In particular:

  • A decent hit-counting system would be really nice. Over the past four days I’ve had a surge in hits on the homepage; I assume someone must have Stumbled or otherwise flagged a post, but I have no way of identifying which post that might have been. It would be useful to know what content works effectively.
  • It would be even more useful to be allowed to install Feedburner. I’ve been afraid to try, after the failures with Technorati, Google, and StumbleUpon.
  • It would be nice if I could get the StumbleUpon widget onto posts and have it work correctly. Ditto all the other widgets out there that would help boost readership.
  • For that matter, it would be good to be allowed to register with Technorati and Google.
  • It would be excellent if “tags” and “category” features existed.
  • It would be good if when you went to enter an internal link, the list of “My Pages” would appear with the most recent first, instead of making you scroll (forever and ever world without end, amen) all the way to the bottom.
  • It would be good if navigation of the published blog resembled that of more standard blogs, so that readers would not complain about navigation issues.
  • It would be mighty fine if the RSS feed button a) were larger and more obvious and b) could appear on every page.
  • An easily accessible “preview” function in Inspector would be hugely appreciated…one that would show how the site will look online, not on PDF pages!!!!
  • And it would be good if the blog did not lose functionality in some versions of Firefox on some platforms.

Can any of these issues be fixed?

–vh
https://www.funny-about-money.com

On Jul 24, 2008, at 6:33 AM, MobileMeSupport@apple.com wrote:

Dear vh,

I’m very sorry for the delay in our reply. As you can imagine, we have been quite busy since the launch of MobileMe in both email and chat support. I will be happy to address your concerns about your website and your Quicken backups.

We did experience some issues with website access and publishing during the transition to MobileMe. All of these should now be resolved. I’m glad to hear your site is functioning as expected again, and I see that you were able to publish the blog entries from July 17 when you wrote in last, and several others since then.

About the Quicken backups… I apologize if the information we provided previously was not entirely accurate. Quicken did backup to .Mac and should continue to backup to MobileMe. I understand you have performed successful backups since the transition.

You can verify that your information appears on the iDisk by visiting your MobileMe iDisk (http://www.me.com/idisk) and viewing the file in this location:

iDisk > Documents > Quicken > Backup Files > yourID.dmg

That disk image (.dmg) should be your Quicken backups.

The previous MobileMe support agent was correct in saying that MobileMe support does not provide assistance with errors related to the Quicken backup to MobileMe. Because it is a feature built into the Quicken software, you will need to contact Quicken if you receive any error messages in the course of backing up your Quicken data.

A quick way to isolate if the issue is with Quicken or something larger affecting your account is to attempt to access your iDisk directly in the Finder (Choose iDisk > My iDisk from the Finder Go menu). This will show if your computer is able to connect to your iDisk. If it can connect directly, the issue is occurring within Quicken.

I hope this information is helpful. Thank you for being a part of MobileMe. Have a great day.

Sincerely,

Jeremy
MobileMe Support
http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/ww
http://www.me.com/help

2 Comments from iWeb site:

“I assume someone must have Stumbled or otherwise flagged a post, but I have no way of identifying which post that might have been.”

I stumbled your “Open letter to Steve Jobs” on July 14th (10 days ago).It was so sad and funny, I had flashbacks to a defrag debacle.I can’t find any way to search the Stumble database for your other entries. A six day lag before seeing volume seems unlikely to me

Thursday, July 24, 2008 – 06:18 P

Funny about Money

Thanks so much, AMD!

It’s true a lag of that length seems unlikely. At StumbleUpon I could see that someone had stumbled the post about the layoffs at the Arizona Republic [can iWeb read HTML? we soon will see]…but that also was a while back, I think

Maybe it was Steve Jobs himself, and all his minions! An Apple executive actually called me and left word on my voicemail while I was at work this afternoon. This could get more entertaining yet! ;-

Thursday, July 24, 2008 – 09:48 P