This is just a wee test for Poster.app. I suspect that if you try to post to WordPress without categories, the title is dumped. Lets see.
Poster App Test
Reply
Author Archives: bluedepth
Late Night Drafts
I’ve been fiddling around with the Drafts app and configured all my actions so this can be sent to my Day One Journal, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, and Evernote if I want. Now, all I need next is this app available for my computer and I’ll be all set. 🙂
Jetpack Failure
I recently upgraded my installation of Jetpack for WordPress.org on my blog here and right after I did that the damn thing stopped working. Verison 2.2 with WordPress 3.5.1. Everything should be 5×5 but it isn’t. I’ve contacted Jetpack support and I’m waiting to hear from them what my next steps should be but I figured it made sense to blog about this since it touches on WordPress and well, here we are.
The first thing I did was disconnect my Jetpack from WordPress.com, that went very easy. Then I tried to re-engage with WordPress.com and got an SSL timeout error. I then went onto Google and found a bunch of others who were having this problem. After I engaged with the Jetpack support people they asked me to run the a href=http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/jetpack/branches/jetpack-compatibility-test.zip target=_blankJetpack Compatibility Test plugin/a. I did that, it generated content and I sent it off for analysis.
So I don’t have Jetpack running and I leaned back and wondered if things would be so bad without it. I mean, if an update breaks it perhaps it’s not meant to be used. So, if there is a solution, that’s fine and dandy, and if there isn’t, living without Jetpack is also fine and dandy.
I’ll be updating this post with new details as they unfold. What’s really irking is Jetpack worked for a long long time up until the last update, then poof.
strongUPDATE/strong: I tried to connect to WordPress on a lark and it worked. So, if the Jetpack support fellows did something, then thank you guys for your help!
**UPDATE 2**: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, the post-by-email bit of Jetpack doesn’t seem to like me. Sent several messages and nothing posted to the blog. Perhaps a sneaky firewall issue, or gnomes. 😉
Throwing My Shoes
Watching local news on Fox affiliate. I started getting grumpy and all agitated and yelling at the TV. Then I realized that watching local news is bad for me. Nothing good ever is revealed. Murders, rapes, shootings, all heavy drama or heavy scandal. I, as a rule, don’t watch this crap and when I do see it I am reminded just how toxic it is. The news is not good for you. What will knowing do for you? What benefits come in the countless sad revelations that are shamelessly paraded out for public consumption?
So, time to seek out something else. Anything but the worthless toxic news. News of what? A world slowly winding down. A world rotten and full of seams. Seek out sunnier skies, even if you don’t know what’s just down the road a pace, in the next city or even across town.
Sometimes it’s better to not know. Live in blessed ignorance. In the end each of us must answer the question “What good does this represent in my life?” and if you can’t figure out an answer, perhaps there is a lesson there.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique
Last August I was walking out of where I work and I just happened to glance down and saw this flower growing all by itself in a crack that had developed in the concrete stairway leading out of my building down to the sidewalk. It struck me that something so evocative would grow without encouragement in a place that really is unlikely for any flower to thrive. It didn’t really last very long as someone from landscape services (I assume) came along and plucked it. Now all that is there is a crack in the concrete stairway. A little bit of special was there only for a brief time.
Unique.
Cloze
Discovered a neat new site and I sent invites out to everyone who I thought initially might find it useful. The site is called Cloze and it combines email and social networking in one view. There are free apps for iPhone and iPad as well. So if you got some email from me and you weren’t expecting it, now you know who it was from. I had to use my work email because many of the addressees on the mail were work contacts and they wouldn’t know who I am if I used my gmail account.
Week 9’s Tarot Theme
This week the Two of Pentacles has appeared over and over again. Even after some mad shuffling and even shuffling and cutting I end up with this card. Sometimes it’s right ways up, sometimes reversed, but there it is. Always with the juggling.
Another series of cards that pop up are high-order swords suit cards, you know the ones, the ones with a lot of pain and unhappiness linked to them. My most popular cards are these: Eight, Nine, and the most hilariously bad card in the entire Tarot, the Ten of Swords.
Sometimes at work I think of my querent card is the Ten of Swords.
Help Yourself
I have to admit to really enjoying the web service IFTTT. The service stands for If This, Then That. It allows you to create recipes from a menu of popular services where there is a public API available and move data back and forth not according to anyones design but your own, with IFTTT’s help, of course.
A great practical example is Twitter. On Twitter there is an account, MichiganDOT that is the public twitter mouthpiece for Michigan’s Department of Transportation, those folks responsible for the roads and rails and such. This twitter resource is valuable for many reasons the least of which is that MichiganDOT tweets about road hazard conditions and the presence of crashes or construction that would otherwise hamper movement within the Mitten. On its own Twitter is something that you have to grope for, you’ve got to start an app and page around to find what you are after and it’s all very manual — and annoying. I hate annoying. So how can you beat MichiganDOT, for example, into a service that sends you alerts? IFTTT.
The recipe in IFTTT to make this work is clever if you know the way to run around the back-end of Twitter. Several months ago Twitter closed their API to IFTTT making it difficult to create any new IFTTT recipes that use Twitter data to do automatic things. Twitter left a back door open, in that every Twitter account has an undocumented RSS feed associated with it, and all you need to know is the trick to get at it. IFTTT can consume RSS data, Twitter produces RSS data, so it’s kismet. The code you start with is this:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=michigandot
This plugs into IFTTT’s Feed source, then you connect that to IFTTT’s SMS destination, set it to your mobile phone number and the recipe is done! Just like that. Really easy and straightforward and now the very moment that anyone who staffs the MichiganDOT twitter account posts ANYTHING the RSS link lights up, IFTTT notices, copies it over to an SMS message and ships it out to my phone.
With the undocumented API backdoor from Twitter, MichiganDOT, and IFTTT I am able to recast the MichiganDOT twitter account as a “Michigan Road Conditions Alert Line” and I don’t need to sign up for anything or ask anyone for anything or cajole some developer to make something to make it work for me. In many ways, it is a clever way to have my cake and eat it too. I don’t have to schlep around in Twitter missing things, I get alerts, bam, as they happen.
The nice thing about IFTTT is it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can send any channel data anywhere you want. Twitter to Evernote, Twitter to Pocket, Facebook to Evernote, Facebook to Pocket… there are about 20 channels you can fiddle around with and you can shop around for other people’s recipes and adopt them and make them work for you. If you don’t have IFTTT, then you are missing out on a huge potential of DIY convenience. The best part is, nobody is the wiser. MichiganDOT has no notion, Twitter doesn’t care, so why not use what’s out there and make it work for you?
When Silence Falls
I’m only a little dismayed that my blog post about my shirts and possible bow-tie combinations just passed unnoticed by everyone who I share things with. So, without any input I’m just going to make my own choices on what I should get. Today I’m wearing the only bow tie I have, my green one I got for Christmas and everyone comments on it. Bow ties are coming back in style I tell you. Thanks to the eleventh Doctor! 🙂 Bow ties are cool.
Importing Plain Text into Mountain Lion Reminders App
I have created a new project to enrich the tags in my WordPress blog using the WP Calais Auto Tagger that I mentioned in this previous blog post. To do this I am working on pages of old posts in my WordPress dashboard and so I wanted to track just which pages I had completed and which ones still need my attention. I’ve got 48 pages of blog posts and so this is going to take some time to complete.
The first step was to create a list of text lines going from Page 48 to Page 1 like a countdown. I did that in OpenOffice using the Spreadsheet app. All you need to do here is type in two lines where the number series example can be made and then you can select these two cells and then grab the autonumbering control on the spreadsheet and draw it down, this is a great way to quickly create very repetitive lines where the only thing that changes is a number at the end. With this list, I copied it into a plain text file with each line on it’s own and saved it as “tagging.txt” on my desktop.
The next step is to use AppleScript to tell the Mountain Lion Reminders app to create entires automatically based on the file you just made in OpenOffice. Technically the Reminders app has an import mechanism but that’s only meant for ICS files, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth as far as I care to pursue it as a solution. Here’s the AppleScript:
set theFileContents to read file "Users:andy:Desktop:tagging.txt"
set theLines to paragraphs of theFileContents
repeat with eachLine in theLines
tell application "Reminders"
tell list "Tagging Project"
make new reminder with properties {name:eachLine}
end tell
end tell
end repeat
The only part you’d have to fix is the file location part and the list name part. Otherwise it works well. The only gotcha is it doesn’t seem to import the tasks in order, but at least they are in there.
Here are some helpful sites where I got a lot of this code and hints on how to talk to Reminders instead of iCal: