Ulysses 18.7 and WordPress 5.4

Aside

I just had a devil of a time with my Ulysses to WordPress integration. Something underhanded happened on the way to the Forum. Either it was something that WordPress tweaked in 5.4, or my host did something clever to get in the way and didn’t tell me. Someone left a very important bit out, which broke Ulysses, my editor of choice for blogging.

The solution was to be found in these two sites:

David Bosman’s Blog – Ulysses and WordPress and

Hans Bruins’s Medium Post – Ulysses and WordPress

So if you were using Ulysses all along, and it suddenly crapped out on you with WordPress, these instructions seem to do the trick, it did so for me!

Interlude: Social Justice Warriors

Posted on March 22, 2019 by bluedepth

The end of the Doctor Who panel had a thick conversational thread strongly tied to classic social justice warrior monologue. I did write about it, but then I self-censored my writing because it is not a topic that is open for discussion. It is violently dangerous and maximally hazardous. Right up there with abortion. It is flight worthy.

So there won’t be a post, or any writing about SJW. There is nothing to say. It is too dangerous, too hazardous for even any commentary. It makes jihad look disneyesque. There is no room in that magic kingdom for anything but blood and bloody ashes.

So, no comment. Nothing. Just stand up and run away. As fast as you can.

Assert The Win

Posted on June 10, 2016 by bluedepth

Sometimes it’s the best thing to assert you win and walk away from a toxic problem. So far today I’ve done that quite a bit. What have I abandoned?

I’ve walked away from Facebook. It’s been four days since I even logged into Facebook and since then I haven’t missed it. I’ve been catching up on my news; the Spiceworks Community board consumes a lot of time. Then after that, I turned my attention to my Pocket list. There just isn’t enough time anymore to deal with Facebook. When I logged into it, I had eighteen notifications, and I frowned and realized that I didn’t care that much. I’m writing a lot of my thoughts into my journal after coming to the realization that sharing with others isn’t going to be a positive experience. Now nearly everything on Facebook is an unpleasant experience. So, abandoning toxic things seems to be a good thing for me.

Another toxic system is Office365. Microsoft and I go back for a long while, right along with my almost palpable hate for that company and their products. Going into just how Office365 lets me down is very dull. Nearly every interaction has me wishing I could just close my laptop, put it in my backpack and run away from my life. Everything that has some Microsoft technology associated with it has me frowning in deep disappointment. Alas, there is no way to escape the Great Beast of Redmond, so we gnash our teeth and endure the horrors.

The final horror is WordPress itself. I use a stock theme, Twenty-Twelve. It’s not a custom theme. It’s not slick or responsive. It’s just a dumb theme. So while reading my blog, I realized just how much I wanted to change the line-spacing for my post entries. This is where my expectations fork, there is an Apple fork and an “Everything Else” fork. The Apple fork has been proven time and time again, that the answer is simple and shallow and easy to get to, understand what the change will do, and make it work. Then there is everything else. Here we have WordPress itself. I wanted to change the line-spacing on my theme. So I go to the Dashboard, and I spend ten minutes blindly stabbing at possible places where this option might be hiding to no effect. Then I do a Google search, which is the first and last place that most possible solutions are born and die. A good Google search almost always results in the answer you are after. So, “WordPress vertical line spacing” led to a place that eventually had the solution in it, but the theme didn’t match what I was expecting. This is the core of frustration, so I modified the search to include the themes name itself, and that helped. I found the setting, and it was in a CSS stylesheet file. I left the WWW when it was still HTML only. CSS irritates me. But anyways, hack CSS, that’s the answer. It’s a dumb answer, but that’s it. So I find about 130 places where line-height is an option. I laugh bitterly at the number. Which section to edit? Are you sure? So I gave it a shot. I set the line-height to 2.0 and then looked at my site. I can’t tell if it improved or not. But the most adaptive solution is to assert it did what I wanted. Mark the win as a notch and move on. Do I care? Well, I wanted to do something. I did something. Did it work? Probably not.

But then we get back to that first fork. That’s why I love Apple so much. Nearly everything they touch MAKES SENSE. I don’t have to struggle with some labyrinthine mystery. Maybe my edits will work, maybe they will break whatever it is, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe any setting I change will be overridden somewhere else, by something that was never documented. That’s the core design principle of both WordPress and Microsoft. I suppose we should just be happy that the most basic functions work. Much like the Internet itself, the fact that any of this works is a daily miracle.

So instead of writing a huge rant, one that nobody wants to read and nobody cares about I will assert that I won, psychologically move forward and be able to forget the conditions that led me to those particular experiences. The blog doesn’t work like you want? Don’t go there. Facebook a cesspool of ugly humanity? Skip it. Microsoft? Ah, if only it would burn to the ground. But we can’t have what we wish, even if we’d do anything for our dreams to come true.

So! Hooray! A Win! Facebook, WordPress, Office365! Just stop worrying about the bomb. It’s “Someone Else’s Problem®”

Medium

Posted on December 23, 2013 by bluedepth

This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Slogger

Posted on July 12, 2013 by bluedepth

Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

BlogLogger
facebookifttt
goodreadslogger
lastfmlogger
pocketlogger
rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

fitbit
flickrlogger
getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!

photo by:

Silvia Viñuales

PAD 4/16/2013 – Million Dollar Question

Posted on April 20, 2013 by bluedepth

Why do you blog?

I enjoy blogging because it provides me a way to share more, which has become after a manner of speaking, somewhat of a therapy for me. I can express thoughts and feelings and that’s the primary thing, that they are shared actually is quite incidental. If I have readers, then I have readers and if not, that’s just as acceptable to me. I feel like these posts are letters that I write, and the writing itself helps me explore my feelings and in some cases helps me vent my frustrations, and then I leave the open letters just lying around for others to gander at if they so desire. Before the advent of social networking I used to blog on LiveJournal and there was a vibrant community and I had friends there that would comment on my blog posts. Alas, time and conditions change and LiveJournal is no longer appropriate for me nor is it a place that I feel safe to share my thoughts or feelings. WordPress, a much better platform for writing actually wasn’t such a great move because the community on WordPress is absent. I got to wondering why I wasn’t getting anything but spam comments on my WordPress blog and it struck me that people have organically decided to move their commenting to the social networks of Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. That’s where all the comments are to my WordPress blog posts. Twitter is dead to me, I pretty much just link dump there. Facebook is only slightly more useful and I haven’t posted on Google Plus without the aid of a “oh yeah, hit the Google Plus option…” in about a year.

It’s actually quite fine because comments actually aren’t why I blog. Over time I came to understand that on some social networking systems the only people who I would find willing to engage with me were people who were trolls – making obtuse obnoxious comments just to get a rise out of me. That’s when I learned that in some situations the best retort to a trollish comment is to not make one at all. So the absence of comments actually became a blessed silence. Trolls ruined it for everyone, and once you go without that sort of engagement, the experience does actually improve.

There are things that I write that aren’t meant for open-letter-on-the-table distribution. Those I put passwords on and only hand that password out to people whom I value enough to trust with everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Not to say that if I don’t share the password with someone means I don’t value them as much as the others, it’s just that I write some things that I feel I should protect the people who do not have the password from having to be exposed to. Usually the password protected posts are written in times of distress, and it’s better this way for everyone – those who know and those who do not.

In general the platform on which I blog, which used to be WordPress.com and now is WordPress.org is a tale all to itself. I used to make heavy use of WordPress.com until I ran afoul of one of their well-meaning automatic protection systems that ended up accidentally censoring one of my blogs. It was a misunderstanding and a poorly designed automatic system that led to the falling out, but I no longer trust WordPress.com with my blog. In many ways, the shift to WordPress.org, self-hosted, became more important to me in terms of control and liberty to write what I truly think and feel. I am no longer beholden to a company like Automattic with risking my thoughts and feelings, instead, it’s all on my own recognizance. I thank Automattic for contributing to WordPress.org, and for me it’s the perfect combination of power and liberty.

So in a way, all these posts amount to cheap therapy. One of the added values is that I won’t fall in love with my therapist. In some ways, therapy this way is ideal. I can be brutally honest with an absence of someone than I ever could if there really was someone there playing that role. If nothing more, therapy with an absent therapist is wholly more hygienic and extremely more convenient. As a value added extra, these blog posts also get added to my Day One Journal, so at the end of my life, I won’t have to worry about encroaching Alzheimers or senility robbing me of my memories, all the very best will be written down. For someone who will die childless, this is my bid for some form of immortality.

Bandinage in Robin Hood’s Barn

Posted on April 19, 2013 by bluedepth

Wow, what a long strange trip that was! I’ve got a lot of my amateur photography and I’ve been kicking around the notion of placing it all on my host and sharing it through my blog somehow. I started this sad trip with Pixelpost, then looked around for other LAMP scripts that could work after Pixelpost belly-flopped and died on impact. The issue I had with Pixelpost was trying to mass-import 218 pictures of my two cats. The software just couldn’t cope. So after a while trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole I just gave up altogether.

Then it struck me that I could use my WordPress blog maybe. I had a dim memory about something about Galleries. I can store as much as I like on my host and there’s no bandwidth issues so why not? So I did some reading in the Codex and well, there you go! Create a new Page, add Media, create a new Gallery and it’s EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. Then I happened to notice JetPack and looked in there and it has Carousel feature which improves the standard Gallery control for WordPress. WOW! It was everything I wanted and it ate all 218 files without blinking and making new pages is a snap! Adding and removing pictures from the Galleries is just as easy.

So all that way and all that time blown out trying to get a weak system to behave itself and the answer was just under the covers in WordPress all along! I am exceptionally pleased. 🙂 Thanks all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen at Automattic! Thankee-sai!

You can find these galleries on the main menu of my Blog, under the title of Photo Galleries. I hope you enjoy them!

photo by:

Nicholas_T

IP Filter Plugin – Blacklist Page

Posted on April 18, 2013 by bluedepth

I came across two great plugins – WP-Blacklister and IP Filter for WordPress. The first lists all the IP addresses for all the spam comments that a blog gets. The spam is identified by Akismet, I grab the IP addresses and then put them into TextWrangler. I sort the lines, find the really obnoxious networks, the ones with the same three octets over and over again, so something like 5.5.5.1 and 5.5.5.2, and 5.5.5.3, these, depending on how they resolve in an IP lookup get a block, either 5.5.5.* or 5.5.*.* or 5.*.*.*. From the left to the right there you block off more and more of the network. The more *’s in the block, the more stations are simply thrown off.

And then there is IP Filter plugin, I assemble a list of naughty IP’s and then fill in the details for this plugin. If an incoming IP address matches any of my blocks, they get no content and a short blurb stating that their network was either a source of spam, malware, or otherwise is unwanted traffic. I applied this list to all my blogs and I had spam comment rates which were about 30 per hour go to zero.

I will be creating a new page on my blog that lists these bad networks and IP addresses. Feel free to get this plugin and enter these blocks for yourself if you wish. I’ll be updating it as I find more spam or Limit Logon Attempt Plugin lockouts.

There is a wee part of me that is toying around with blocking the 141.218 subnet. We’ll see. 🙂

photo by:

The Tire Zoo

Limit Login Attempts Plugin

Posted on April 18, 2013 by bluedepth

I recently added to my WordPress blog security now that blogs like these are being targeted by botnets. I’ve found a great plugin called “Limit Login Attempts” which allows me to set lockout values to people who try to guess what the ‘admin’ account password is.

First, lets just say that the level of entropy in my admin accounts is so high that there isn’t enough time left in the Universe to try every combination – but that being said, my values for this plugin would make this a non-issue. I give people 4 attempts to try the ‘admin’ account, after that they are locked out for 1440 minutes, a day. If they lockout twice, the lockout penalty goes to 720 hours, or a month. There is 4320 hour span until retries are reset, that’s 6 months.

Of course, the filter also captures the IP address, so I’m going to look into getting a IP blacklist plugin and adding these captured IP addresses to that blacklist. They’ll never be allowed to my blog. This line of reasoning led me to think about an immune system for the Internet. If an IP does something wrong, it is blacklisted and that fact is then sent to every other site and they blacklist it as well. One false move and you are suddenly banished from the network. I think this would radically change how people behave online. There would definitely be a lot of noise raised when people are suddenly unable to communicate with any host whatsoever because their systems were filthy, compromised, or malevolent. That would add a certain value of responsibility. It would only be a little bit more to establish a site like Digg where people vote on the malevolence of comment traffic, putting trolls right along with botnets and black-hats, out in the cold, banished where they all belong.

I can smell an RFC forming. 🙂

photo by:

katerha

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PAD 4/16/2013 – Million Dollar Question