Monthly Archives: February 2009

WordMess

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Kelson

Must remember: No pasting from MS Word into WordPress. It’s faster to paste plain text and redo formatting than clean up Word’s mess. #

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Reclaiming BlogExplosion

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Kelson

I haven’t written much about BlogExplosion in a long time.  I participated a lot for a few months, then kind of left it alone for a while, until I came back to it last year when I launched Speed Force.

Sadly, in the last few months its owners seem to have abandoned the site to let it run on autopilot. Most of it is automated, but there are features that require administration: approving new blogs and banners, moderating the forums, etc. The few volunteers with the ability to approve submissions are swamped, the main page promotes features that no longer exist, and the forums are overrun with spam.

In the past two months the community has attempted to take back the forums by out-posting the spammers, and it seems to be helping, but it’s not enough. The next step is a letter-writing campaign to convince BlogExplosion’s owners to at least delegate some authority to community volunteers who are willing to put in the effort to take care of the site.

Rather than send the form letter, I decided to write my own, and sent the following this morning:

Continue reading →

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Spamisch

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Kelson

Excerpt from weird mixed German/English comment spam: “Dear me, that evil car sensibly stung out of this suspicious slot tipps.” #

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Snowy San Gabriels above Irvine

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Kelson


Snowy San Gabriels above Irvine, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Irvine in the foreground, Peter’s Canyon in the middle distance, and far in the distance, the San Gabriel Mountains covered in snow.

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Reading Comics on the Phone: Hexed on the G1

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Kelson

There’s been a lot of talk about digital distribution of comics lately, what with declining print sales and shrinking distribution channels. In particular, the idea of comics on the iPhone has produced a lot of discussion, with iVerse Media distributing a number of comics from small publishers like IDW and Boom through the iPhone Marketplace. Not having an iPhone, I haven’t been able to check them out, but they’ve just released their first comic for the Android operating system, which runs my current phone, the T-Mobile G1.

I figured, hey, this one’s free, why not check it out?

Finding and Downloading

The first problem I had was finding it. But that’s mostly the fault of the Android Market, which can only be browsed by hierarchy and sorted by date or popularity. Fortunately, there’s a search function, so I just searched for “Hexed” and it turned up immediately.

It took a while to download even over 3G, so I let it sit and came back to it when I had time to take a break.

G1 Hexed - Cover

Continue reading →

Posted in Comics, Computers/Internet | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

WordPress Mobile Validating Patch

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Kelson

I’ve been using Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition for a while to provide a mobile-friendly version of this blog, but haven’t really paid much attention to it since my last few phones were extremely limited in web browsing ability. Since I got the G1, I’ve been paying more attention to mobile access, including setting up WPTouch for a high-functioning iPhone– & Android–friendly version of the site. Last week I finally got around to testing the two plugins in combination, and determined that they do seem to work together with the right priorities.

I also ran the main page through the mobile-readiness evaluator at ready.mobi, and noticed that most of the issues it cited with the mobile edition of the site were really simple changes. Some were basics like fixing unbalanced HTML, and others were recommended practices like including a DOCTYPE and making sure that headings were nested properly. So I whipped together a patch for WordPress Mobile Edition 2.1a. (It’s labeled as 2.1.1 in the readme, but it shows up as 2.1a in the list of plugins.)

Changes:

  • Add XHTML Mobile 1.2 Doctype.
  • Fix unbalanced <small> tag.
  • Fix mising <ul> tags around list of recent posts.
  • Avoid empty class attribute on comments.
  • Add type attribute to style element.
  • Change non-standard value attribute on <meta> tag to content attribute.
  • Reassign headings so that h1, h2, h3 appear in order.

Download:

wp-mobile-validation.patch

The patch should be applied to the wp-mobile folder that you place in your themes folder.

Update: This has been completely superseded by more recent versions of the plug-in, which use Carrington Mobile instead.

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Hail Burst, Pride & Predator, DTV

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Kelson
  • Wow…just had a seriously intense burst of hail. ~30 seconds, but LOUD! #
  • This looks hilarious: Pride and Predator (via @breagrant). #
  • Just remembered it’s Digital TV Switch Day! Or rather, it WAS. Looks like a lot of stations are taking the new June deadline. #

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The web is still round

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Kelson

[Chrome Logo][Firefox Logo][K-Meleon Logo][OmniWeb Logo][Camino Logo][Flock Logo][SeaMonkey Logo][Opera Logo][Konqueror Logo][Opera Logo]

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La Mancha

Posted on February 15, 2009 by Kelson

Home from seeing Brent Spiner in Man of La Mancha. Very good. #

Update: Here’s a friend’s review of the production. #

Man of La Mancha

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Not In New York

Posted on February 15, 2009 by Kelson

Launchpad, originally uploaded by Kelson.

We went out to the “Great Park” yesterday to see if we could go up in the balloon. It turned out to be completely booked or the day (there was some big ice skating event going on) but we got in some photos on the ground, including a couple of pics with our copy of Scott Pilgrim 5 to submit to the contest.

More photos: OC Balloon set on Flickr.

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