Category Archives: Web Finds

WordPress Jetpack and Post By Email

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Several days ago, when I had all that trouble working with Jetpack for my WordPress.org blog I couldn’t get stats to work. I sent a support ticket to the developer of Jetpack and it turned out that it was a problem with my web host, iPage. Once they fixed the problem on their side, the stats worked again. There was another problem, one that hasn’t worked for a very long time and I gave up hope almost. There is a feature of Jetpack called “Post By Email” and this feature should work, but never has. I once again opened a support ticket with the developer of Jetpack and told them what was wrong.

Late last night I got an email from a WordPress.org Forum [Post](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/jetpack-post-by-email?replies=13#post-3952121) that I’ve been commenting on stating that the issue is solved if you upgrade your installation of PHP to 5.3 on your web host. So I logged into iPage, found the PHP settings, pushed them to 5.3 and then tried again. My test post worked like a charm!

So much so that I am sending this post via email. It should arrive in moments and then I’ll publish it. Hooray! I love a fix. What a great way to start the day!

FBackup: Free Is Good

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At work I was asked to put together a server on the cheap which I’m fine with as long as everyone understands that doing so has some implicated risk. A server cast on a desktop machine is a risky proposition. You don’t have power support from redundant power supplies, you don’t have RAID which can protect you from hard drive failure, and the machine is not designed to be a very robust server in any stretch of the imagination – it just lacks the processing and RAM that would really answer the need strongly. However, once I covered those risks, everyone was still on-board with me moving forward. I rolled a server out, used an Operating System that would be best to not speak about and set up the software.

Being a part of the technology from the great beast, of course it didn’t work well at first. There were hidden requirements, annoying requirements. Requirements with “dots” in their name. Once I figured out the how and got the thing running I took it down from the lab place I was working on it in and moved it to its permanent home in our machine room. From the point of deployment which was a few days ago I’ve had a niggling worry that the thing is going to fail, as any machine could when it relies on just one hard drive. I needed a backup solution.

The built-in backup solution in the “product” that I was “using” as an “operating system” was just not going to work. I needed something that would work well and be free above all else. I went to the great sage and eminent junkie Google and eventually ran across FBackup. It’s not glorious, it’s not complicated, but it is exactly what I was looking for. So now with that software installed, and it’s quite good in fact for the “operating system” I was using I don’t have to worry so much about that “server” going down. If it does, eh, who cares, at least the data will be safe. For those that wonder where I put my backups, I have a NAS, a handy dandy DroboNAS that isn’t the fastest tool in the shed, but at 16TB, it certainly has a lot of space and it’s RAID means that I don’t have to worry so much about hardware failure with that box.

So, hooray for FBackup. It’s free, and while I can’t spare any change for it, what I can do is recommend it. If you are looking for something handy and you can’t get your hands on a native installation of ‘tar’ like you should be using, this is quite good. It’s not Backup Exec of course, but then, I would rather chew a lightbulb than even hear the words “Backup Exec” spoken aloud.

Jetpack Failure

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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. 😉

Cloze

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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.

Help Yourself

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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?

Importing Plain Text into Mountain Lion Reminders App

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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:

Benguild.com Page

MacScripter Page

Tagging

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I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.

My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.

Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.

True Colors

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I’ve got a series of shirts that I wear frequently and these shirts are the ones that I’m trying to pair with various bow ties. I prefer more bluish colors and always vertical stripes if they have them. What I need help with here is matching three bow ties that will work best with the most number of shirts. There are many ties in my list, but I want to start small.

I would really appreciate a list of shirts and ties that you all think go well together. I’m looking for ties that can be used with multiple shirts if possible. Any input at all is welcome. Thanks in advance!

Shirts:

Ties:

Empty Nests

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I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.