greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Wavatars in, Tags out

    Thanks to Gravatar’s new support for Shamus Young’s Wavatars, and thanks to the Easy Gravatar plugin, not only are Gravatars back but each commentator gets an auto-generated Wavatar (which they can, of course, replace by registering a user icon choice with Gravatar).

    I should whip up a colophon page listing all of the neat bits from hither and yon that go into making this journal work. Some day. Yep.

    In other news, the tags have all gone away because I got sick and tired of fiddling with them. I didn’t actually delete them but, other than in the handful of postings in which I used them, they won’t appear anywhere at all. (Even in those posts they’re barely noticeable.) (EDIT: Oh look, there’s a mass delete function for tags built into WordPress 2.5! They’re gone for good now!) It’s for the best, really: I went batty at times with trying to figure out what existing tags fit a given post and having to create new tags all the time because none of the existing tags fit. Forget it. If tags are what the cool kids are doing, I’m okay being uncool. The last thing I need is something else slowing down my posting output!

    Of course, crossposts to LJ continue to be automatically tagged… with the category from WordPress. Go figure.

  • Guaranteed Unfunny

    Every week in the bathroom at the office there’s a new brand and/or scent of handsoap. I don’t normally pay too much attention to the labels, but today’s new bottle decal startled me a bit by claiming that the contained product is non-comedogenic.

    I’m sorry, what was that? Are you telling me that washing my hands with your product won’t make me laugh? Is The Joker involved in the handsoap industry somehow?

    It turns out that non-comedogenic means that the product won’t block pores. I suppose that acne could be considered funny under certain circumstances, eh?

  • No more calls, we have a winner.

    I tried out several new themes out over the last couple of days, but this one’s the winner: Mandingo. It sports a 1024x display option, the ability to use two or three columns, two options for banner height, a built in banner image rotation mechanism, and plenty more bells & whistles besides. What’s more, all of them can be managed from its options page, integrated with the WordPress admin interface. I don’t have to fiddle directly with the theme code at all. People, this is sexy. Oh, and it actually displays my category hierarchy correctly! No matter how hard I fought with the old theme I just couldn’t make that work. Oy.

    So. All I have to do now is… er… build a whole new library of rotator images. Ahem. I’m long overdue for working on the rotator images libraries anyway, so some extra incentive doesn’t really hurt.

    (A note to my WordPress clientèle: If you’re interested in a conversion to Mandingo I can make it happen in a jiffy. Mari, especially, would benefit greatly from the upgrade to a theme which supports modern WordPress code and features.)

  • Two Point Five

    My hosted server rebooted spontaneously some time around 7am Pacific Time. I’m not absolutely certain but I believe that this has to do with DNS problems at the hosting facility causing massive churn in the mail processing chain. Infinity Internet is still working on the problems (it looks like a complex cascade-failure situation, partly resolved as of this writing) and Duckpond is ticking along on a borrowed nameserver setting.

    To torture-test the newly-restarted machine, I decided to upgrade greyduck.net to WordPress 2.5. So far only one of the important plugins gave me any trouble, and that was remedied with a one-minute hack to the plugin code. (The LJ crossposter, if you’re wondering.) Almost all of the updates seem to be in the admin interface and the backend code, not in the frontend or the database structure itself.

    The admin interface looks very different, it’s true. I don’t actively dislike it, and I’ll probably get used to it. Such is the way of things.

    Every time I do one of these upgrades I think about getting a new theme. Is now the time, do you figure?

  • I’m doing it wrong?

    Apparently I didn’t do it quite right yesterday. Perhaps this whole phenomenon is beyond my abilities, but I’d like to give it one more try.

    I guarantee a rick and at least one roll. If that’s not enough for you, I’m afraid I’ll have to give up for good. Stupid Internet pranks, anyway.

  • You want a rickroll? I’ll give you a rickroll.

    Apparently half of the pranks on the Internet this year involve something called “rickrolling,” and I guess there’s some 80’s pop star involved. Apparently you’re not one of the cool kids until you’ve “rickrolled” somebody.

    Fine. I can do that. Here you go. I’m getting it over with. This is a one-time opportunity, so enjoy it while you can.

    [audio:Rick-DanceThisWorldAway.mp3]

    I feel dirty now.

Calendar

October 2025
S M T W T F S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

My Links