Humanize the Earth!

upgrading wordpress

I’ve been meaning to change themes on this site for a while now. The colors aren’t great and there’s that problem where single posts often show a whole bunch of whitespace at the top before you get to the post down below the sidebar. I’m working on that upgrade now. I thought it would be best to document what customizations and such I have in case something goes wrong.

• akismet 1.14
• brian’s latest comments 1.5.9
• local names 1.0
• optimal title 1.0
• wordpress database backup 1.7

I’ve now backedup the plugins and the database and downloaded the new version of wordpress (2.1.2). Wish me luck!

Update: Everything seems to be working.  Unfortunately, I still have this theme I want to swap out.  Oh well.  Another time, perhaps.

empty email inboxes

Before I left work today I finished emptying my email inbox for the first time since I started work there over 5 years ago.  Tonight I did the same thing for my gmail account.  I’ve been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done this week and it’s made quite an impression on me.  The gist of it is that our “stuff” when not organized, keeps our brain active.

For example, when reference material is mixed with personal coorespondence is mixed with impending crises is mixed with long articles I intend to read someday, I have to review all of those things all the time to make sure I’m catching the crises, and I’m never quite sure.  So my brain has to put energy into that worry and remembering instead of into doing meaningful work and being creative.

So both my email systems now have categories for “actions” that I can take, as well as stuff I want “to read” when I have the time, reminders about things “waiting for others”, etc.  This way I can review those different categories as often as I need to, but can stay on top of the actions I want to be taking on my various projects.  I still have lots more “stuff” I need to get into these various electronic systems or paper-based systems I’m also toying with, but it’s already a vast improvement.  Just having fewer messages in the inbox as I was clearing out gave me the emotional space to respond to some personal emails that have been waiting for a long time.  More to come, and easier to handle now that they’re in the “emails to send” folder.

Yay!

learning about themes

Don’t be alarmed if the site looks strange for a little while. I’m playing with themes and they’ll need to be customized once I settle on one.

Okay, I’ve settled on this red one for now.  The recent comments is giving me fits.  I don’t know how to fix the colors for the commenters’ names.  And the actual most recent comments aren’t showing up.  It’s lagging behind, somehow.  Hmm.

test 2, please ignore

globalchicago

test, please ignore

test, please ignore

test of my online status indicator

If this works, I’ll figure out how to put it in the sidebar somewhere. It’s an online presence indicator, which will tell you when I’m online and available for a chat through jabber (gmail does this automatically, without you needing any software, or there are tons of other jabber clients). This is like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ or other chat programs, but jabber is an open standard, so there’s interoperatibility, like we have with email and telephones. Imagine if you could only email people with your same provider? Or phone company? That’s mostly what we have right now with instand messaging. Hopefully this is changing with google getting into the chat business and doing in openly. Anyway, when I’m online, you should see a yellow lightbulb.

Okay, that works. Now I’m trying to figure out how to make that lightbulb clickable so you can send me a message.

license on this blog

I just noticed that the Creative Commons licence I’ve been operating under before today, the “by-nc license” is not the one I want. (This article has lots of reasons why not to use a non-commercial “nc” license.)

Maybe I should back up. Copyright is bad because it locks up content and doesn’t allow others to use it. In the digital age, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. So what I want is to retain ownership of my work while allowing others to use it, provided that they give away the result as well (the NC doesn’t allow them to make money, but I’m changing that to allow for commercial use, as long as they give it away).

So as of today, I’m switching all current and future works to by-sa once I figure out how to change the code at the bottom of each page here.

new linking policy

As of today, I have more than 60 links in the sidebar. These are either to friends or people I read regularly or organizations I find important. The list is a bit unwieldy. So over the next year or so, I’m going to semi-regularly highlight those site, alone or in groups, and put those posts in the new “links” category. As I do that, I’ll remove those sites from the sidebar. Eventually, the links category will have everything that’s over there now. The big advantage for you is you’ll have more than just the link; you’ll have the short post about that link as well. Hope this will be helpful.

DNS (geeky post alert)

I just sent this email to Michael Herman. Anyone else want to take a crack at it?

Do you know how DNS works? I’ve been using free service at zoneedit.com for a few years for situations when I want to forward a domain name somewhere, like right now with chicagohumanist.org going to humanistcenterofcultures.org/wiki

They only allow a certain number for free, however, so I’m trying to figure out if any of my hosting packages allow for this type of thing.

tedernst.com is hosted with go-daddy and registered elsewhere - what’s it going to take to have chicagocoop.info pointed to tedernst.com?

Edit: Michael rightly pointed out that my registrar should have a free forwarding service. So I’m all set now. Thanks!
edit to add links: Chicago Coop Chicago Coop Chicago Coop

admin note about trackback

WordPress seems to use a non-interoperable standard called pingback. This means auto-trackback only works between WordPress blogs (like Michael or Doug, both of whom I’ve already tested, or Diana).

For other blogs, we have to manaually put their trackback address underneath the post, which seems to work [1] [2]. Michael and Doug had a problem tracking back between their blogs. I’m hoping that this post helps them, except that maybe it won’t, because I can’t seem to find the trackback URI for a WordPress post. Is it just the post address? I’ll see if I can find out.

update: The trackback URI for this post is: http://tedernst.com/wp/wp-trackback.php?p=318 (will vary depending your your WordPress setup. I was able to modify my php files to include some code to display the trackback URI whenever someone is looking at the comments. I can’t figure out how to write that code here, so email me if you’re interested.