2005 November | The Tlog - a technology blog

Monthly Archive for November, 2005

WordPress quick tip for multi-author blogs

Published

2 years, 5 months ago

. 1 Comment

My brother and cousin co-author a general humor blog, hosted on my server, and recently they complained to me that they couldn’t edit comments, which I’ve always been able to do in my own blogs.

Investigating a little, their problem was that they couldn’t edit comments in each others’ posts - even their own comments. Looking at the code, it’s written so that a user can only edit comments in other people’s posts if they’re of a lower level. In a way, it makes sense… but on multi-author blogs like that one, where both users have the same level, and trust each other, it’s better if you can also edit stuff from someone of your own level - including comments on their posts.

If you want to change it in your own blog(s), do the following: edit the file wp-content/functions-post.php. Search for the function user_can_edit_post. Inside that function, change the following line:

|| ($author_data->user_level > $post_author_data->user_level)

|| ($author_data->user_level >= $post_author_data->user_level)

Not rocket science, but it can save you a couple of minutes.

More on Firefox 1.5, and “release candidates”

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Browsers, Mobile phones software and Unix / Linux / *BSD software

. 2 Comments

I wondered why I didn’t get the auto-update prompt, and so I went and got the 1.5 final version from the FTP site. I installed it, and… the build number is exactly the same as RC3. Which means, apparently, that 1.5RC3 and 1.5 final are the same!

This is what a release candidate should be - a candidate for the final version, which, if no new bugs are discovered, becomes the final version (otherwise, those bugs are fixed, and a second RC is released). But I’ve got so much used to the fact that “release candidate”, to most software authors, means just “what comes after beta” or “we can’t keep calling them betas forever”, that I didn’t even think that they would be using the term properly here!

Firefox 1.5 final!!!

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Browsers, Unix / Linux / *BSD software and Windows software

. 0 Comments

Yup, it’s here, as everyone else has already mention (don’t these guys sleep? :)). Auto-update should trigger at any time (unless you’re still using that horrid thing that came with the computer, which you probably call “the internet”… but then, what are you doing on this site if you’re such a technophobe?). You can also get it from the official FTP site, if you’re in a hurry.

From the Mozillazine post:

Firefox 1.5 introduces several new features, including an improved software update system, faster Back / Forward page navigation, a new options to clear private browsing data, drag-and-drop reordering of browser tabs, a redesigned Options/Preferences window and more robust popup blocking. Standards support is also improved, with support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and additional CSS properties. Accessibility is much improved (including new DHTML accessibility features), security has been enhanced and Mac OS X support has also been improved.

As any regular reader knows, I’ve been using 1.5 versions since the betas (which came before 3 release candidates), and even then they already worked better than the 1.0.x versions. So go get 1.5 without any fears of “using bleeding edge software”.

ProBlogger: 20 Types of Blog Posts

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

I had mentioned Darren Rowse’s Battling Bloggers Block series before, but this particular part deserves special attention, as it is one of the most insightful posts I’ve ever seen there - and that’s saying a lot, believe me.

According to Darren, there are 20 common types of blog posts - many bloggers use some of them regularly, some exceptionally, and some never:

Instructional
Informational
Reviews
Lists
Interviews
Case Studies
Profiles
Link Posts
‘Problem’ Posts
Contrasting two options
Rant
Inspirational
Research
Collation Posts
Prediction and Review Posts
Critique Posts
Debate
Hypothetical Posts
Satirical
Memes and Projects

It makes a lot of sense - I could probably take any post of mine in any of my blogs, and tell, easily, in what type they fit - sometimes, it a combination of two or more, but it’s rare.

Darren, of course, goes into some detail about each type. So, without further ado, 20 Types of Blog Posts.

PHP 5.1.0

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Unix / Linux / *BSD software and Windows software

. 0 Comments

It’s out (saw it on André Costa’s blog). I’m already using it here; so far, so good, except that eAccelerator no longer wants to compile - I could try to muck around the source, but I’m in a lazy mood, so I’ll wait for a future version, and use PHP without it for a while.

EDIT: spoke too soon: Drupal 4.6.3 doesn’t seem to like it. Oh well…

More on SUSE 10.0

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Unix / Linux / *BSD

. 0 Comments

I’ve been using it for a while now, here at work. As I said before, it “feels” faster than 9.1, on the same hardware.

A couple of problems, though:

no MP3 support by default. Not a huge problem, since I always transfer my CDs to Oggs instead of MP3s, but most internet streams, such as Magnatune, are encoded as MP3. Stupid patents.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 crashes if I close it using the “X” at the top right, instead of using “File -> Exit”. No data loss, since it happens after it asks you whether you want to save, but it’s still annoying to have a KDE dialog box saying that an application crashed.
Amarok, the media player, had some problems, which were bypassed by changing the audio engine to Xine. It used to stop playing (but without any error messages or complaints) after playing a few files.

On the other hand, the bluetooth support was great. I was able to easily transfer files to and from both my phones (an N-Gage QD and a 6630), without having to install anything extra - it simply detected both the bluetooth USB dongle and the phones.

Making money with niche websites

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in AdSense and World Wide Web

. 1 Comment

I’ve just found an article at My Blogging Tips called “How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites“.

The author’s suggestion is not related to blogs at all - instead, he suggests discovering a niche that has few or no websites about (as a Groo fan, I’d suggest cheese dip, myself :)), then making a simple but useful (and static) site about it, with good SEO techniches, promoting it, then… forgetting about it!

He suggests that, if the niche is well chosen (something people want to know about, but which there are few sites about), after 3-6 months (allowing for getting out of any sandboxes and everything) the site can steadily earn you $1-$2 a day. Now, as that site was probably put together in a week or less (but it’s still supposed to be better than the competition, which, the author suggests, probably consists of just a couple of unprofessional sites made with FrontPage or Word… yuck!), and needs no further attention, you can create another next week. And another, the following week. And another.

50 web sites (doable in a year) would give $50-$100 a day. Without requiring any further work from you. Not bad, huh?

And, as you do them, you’ll probably get better at it, be able to do another site more easily and more quickly, have increased knowledge about which SEO techniques work better, and so on.

The only bad point: you have to search for those niches all the time, and then quickly learn enough about each one to make a decent, informative, useful website - and they’re probably subjects that don’t particularly interest you.

As I said, these are not blogs. You’ll get virtually all earnings from first time visitors, as the sites won’t be updated (unless you get “attached” to a particular one, whose subject actually interests you). Besides, return visitors tend to ignore ads a lot more than first-timers, whether it’s a blog or a static site.

I may try something like this in the future…

Read the article, it goes into a lot more detail.

Blogging tips #20: Using social bookmarking to increase traffic

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Blogging and Blogging tips

. 1 Comment

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

What is social bookmarking? It’s no more than a fancy name for a combination of the following:

a place to store your browser bookmarks (what Internet Explorer calls “favorites”) online, instead of using your browser’s bookmarks feature (which saves them locally, on your hard drive) - this allows you, among other things, to access your bookmarks when away from home, no matter what browser or operating system you’re using. It also allows them to survive even if your hard drive is destroyed and you have no backups.
bookmark sharing: while you can optionally set some bookmarks as “private”, by default they’re “public”. There’s a page (usually the social bookmark site’s front page) that shows new bookmarks as they’re added, and which a lot of people read. You can also click on any user’s name and see his/her (public) bookmarks.
usually, there’s also some way to rank bookmarks - by seeing how many people added them to their own list - and/or rate them.

I find all of this quite useful, both to store my bookmarks and to find interesting stuff - for instance, someone who’s bookmarked something I like may also have bookmarked other stuff I’ll also like. I mostly use del.icio.us, but I’ve also found some very interesting links at Digg. If you want it, there’s a longer list of such services here.

But there’s more - you can also use these services to drive traffic to your site.

Continue reading ‘Blogging tips #20: Using social bookmarking to increase traffic’

ProBlogger: Battling Bloggers Block

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

Darren Rowse has a new series, called Battling Bloggers Block. 5 parts already, and it’s been fascinating so far. It’s one I couldn’t have written yet, as it really requires a lot of blogging, and writing, experience. Darren has been blogging for years, and blogging full time for a while now, while I’m not there… yet.

The current parts of his series are:

1. Change your Blogging Environment
2. Keep an idea Journal
3. Free Writing - Just Write
4. Read what other Bloggers are Saying
5. Combine Two Disconnected Ideas

Those are just the titles - it’s what he writes about each one that’s great.

New “Add to Google” button

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Blogging and Google

. 4 Comments

Seen on ProBlogger: Google now has an “Add to Google” (Homepage or Reader, that is) button, and a page for generating HTML to add a button with your feed.

Note that, as of now, their HTML is slightly invalid, as they forgot to close the <img> tag with a / before the >. That’ll make it fail on XHTML validators. Until they fix their code, you should do it yourself.

(this shows, by the way, the importance of validating your site whenever you add something to it - even if it comes from a “big” source such as Google)

This is how it looks, by the way: