Archive for On Being a Blogger

It is, it is!

Thanks to AddThis and my print-friendly CSS stylesheet, this blog is officially ‘Print Friendly’!

Remember what I said about the AddThis Printing feature printing out entire blogs instead of specific blog posts?

Well, I found out from the AddThis support team – thanks! – that AddThis has a specific Printing function called Printer Friendly which can enable a specific blog post to be printed out of a whole page of blog posts given the proper setup.

If you click on the ‘Share’ button at the bottom of this post, you will notice a Print Friendly option. If you click it, it will open up the blog post the button is associated with in a new viewing window/tab and will allow you to print that one post rather than doing the default ‘Print Whole Web Page’ function.

Pretty neat, huh?

At least… I think so!

Thanks again AddThis team; I really appreciate the tip and I’m really glad you implemented the Print Friendly functionality!

~ EMG

So I’ve been getting a crapton of completely illegitimate ‘PORNO!’ and ‘VIAGRA!’ type of comments which get stuck in Akismet’s spam queue.

Because each of these comments is literally a full screen’s height long and mostly contains text which I cannot read (language, huge blocks of text and links, AND tiny font sizes), shuffling through more than a pageful to make sure legit comments make it through to me is honestly a serious pain on my EYES and can trigger migraines on a bad day.

In an effort to cut back on this sort of spam in my spam queue and in an attempt to not alienate any of my potential commentors, I have installed a plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA.

What this plugin does is this: If the Akismet spam identifier identifies a comment as a potential spam (yes, the plugin works alongside Akismet!), it will present to the person who is submitting the comment a fill-in-the-blank/text-based CAPTCHA.

The commentor will be asked to identify and type in two digits (eg: first digit and third digit) from a string of text-based digits and if they type in the right ones, the comment will pass and if they type in the wrong ones or don’t type at all, the comment gets auto-deleted.

It is not an ideal solution, but as I struggle with a status migraine, it is something I am going to implement until I can find a better alternative.

If anyone has any ideas or comments, please share them!

And to reiterate: The CAPTCHA ONLY shows up when Akismet has already identified the comment as potentially spammy.

~ EMG

After my last Bulletin Board update, I think my Bulletin Board is going a bit… overboard.

I initially created the Bulletin Board post to serve as… well… a bulletin board for people to catch up on the most recent administrative updates without having to dig through my blog.

I still like the idea, but…

Look at how long the Bulletin Board post is getting!

I don’t want it to take up a third of my blog page, but that’s exactly what it is doing. On the other hand, I also still want to serve up my most recent administrative updates all in one post block area.

Ideas?

One of the more feasible/do-able ideas I was considering is to code a WordPress-specific PHP loop that would list posts from my Administration category and then display the list in the block that I currently label as Bulletin Board.

This would offer visitors to my site a listing of all the most current administrative posts while also cleaning up some textual clutter.

The downside would be the necessity to alter a theme file in order to insert such a post as the Sticky Post I am using now would be replaced with a permanent ‘post’ that posts according to a PHP loop.

Hmmm…

~ EMG

… is it…?

Over here it sure isn’t!

So after a few long months of having very empty Rabbit Hole and Giving Props widgets staring at me in the face asking me, “Why haven’t you worked on your links yet?”, I finally sat myself down to wrangle around with them and only them.

Three hours later (actually five, but the first two hours were kinda scattered around)…

Behold – my Giving Props list! *points to the sidebar Giving Props widget block*

What do you think?

The list isn’t fully finished yet as there are a few people and things that I need to add on, but you get the general idea, right?

Maaan, but the list ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be and it also ended up taking up more of my time and concentration than I thought it might!

Initially, the list was going to be a simple list of text-only links like the list of links in a typical Blogroll widget block (to maintain cohesion with the rest of my site which is very minimalistic in terms of graphics), but after thinking about ‘giving back to the community’…

I decided that maybe I could turn my simple Giving Props link block into a personal project to ‘give back’ to the people, services, and places who/that have helped me along my journey as a WordPress junkie, front-end web developer and designer, and blogger.

And that’s where all those icons/buttons come in.

To show my appreciation for these people, services, and places, I ended up creating sixteen – 16 so far! – unique slimline buttons for each and every one of these people, services, and places and boy oh boy, but did I have one heck of a blast doing so or what!

There are still more to come – there are still a few people yet whom I want to put in the list, but haven’t decided on the graphic for – but I think I’m doing good so far.

After I get the others done, I will officially send them off to their ‘owners’ and hopefully, I will hear back from some of the people and get some feedback on what they like or what they don’t like.

*crosses fingers*

… I hope nobody takes offense to what I’ve done.

~ EMG

So I’m using AddThis to Print that one blog post right there between that one post and that other post and… WHOOPS!

You know what happened?

I ended up Printing the entire blog – ACK!

Thankfully, I was only printing to PDF and the blog in question was my own and I have my blog settings set so that one page can only display a certain number of posts at any given time.

But… still.

The whole blog!

Man oh man.

I sent a support ticket to the AddThis team; hopefully I’ll get some sort of answer or workaround for this issue.

I can’t imagine that I might be the only person to have this issue unless… I’m the only person who tacks on the AddThis feature to every blog post on a page of posts?

We’ll see.

I’ll post again with more news when I find out what’s going on, but I figured I should let everyone know what’s going on in case someone else wants to try and Print a single post.

~ EMG

You would think that most of the possibilities are more than obvious and a matter of common sense…

But apparently not.

Apparently, despite how obvious the hatred for spam is all over the world wide web (except amongst spammers, of course!), the best way to get yourself noticed and your actually legitimate website/blog/whatever linked is to spam the hell out of it in all sorts of irrelevant places!

Geeebuz, people.

You know, compared to a lot of my peers in the community, I’m a bit more tolerant of ‘maybe related’ spam commentary. I mean, at least the spam that falls into the ‘maybe related’ category means that the spamming is actually a bit ’smarter’ than the average spam.

So if someone actually took the time to craft a semi decent spam commentary (but I guess then it wouldn’t be spam anymore now would it?), I might very well just let it through with a, “Oh what the hell?” as long as the person weren’t linking to some Viagra or porno or ‘make money now’ site or something.

Legitimate site, slightly spammy but still relevant commentary, okay. Fine.

But a legitimate site combined with irrelevant spammy commentary which I find out has been spammed to hell on however many other sites is a no-can-do.

I don’t want to be associated with a spammer, thanks!

I also don’t want to be giving the spammer a free link to their site, either!

Links are earned in my book, not spammed.

With that said, regardless if anyone cares or not, I will just say upfront that in spamming me with your actually very legitimate website link, you give me a poor impression of both yourself and your site and you have just about guaranteed that any future comments from you will be thrown out with the spam.

If you have a legitimate website, then spend some time building legitimate links!

Please, thank you, and NO thank you to more spam!

~ EMG