Oct 30 I like commenting on blogs, and I also very much enjoy receiving comments. So I added some new plugins that I thought would facilitate that process.
The plugins that I have added and am now using on this blog are:
- Brian’s Threaded Comments which allows for comments to be in threads rather than just as a single list. This is nice because it can get confusing in the way that I used to just use an “@ user” type of response. The only drawback is that I’ll probably have to limit the number of levels that nesting will occur because it will make the comments unreadable as they get more and more narrow.
This code looks stupid and ugly on my current theme, but I’m going to change it very soon so I’m still going to post it. Most people don’t care about this, but I figured that I’d put it out there if anyone did find it useful and didn’t know too much PHP.
So is here is the change so that there will be no “Reply to this comment” link if the comments for a post are already closed:
<div class='reply'><?php global $user_ID; global $post; if ( get_option("comment_registration") && !$user_ID ) echo '<a href="'.get_option('siteurl') . '/wp-login.php?redirect_to=' . get_permalink() . '">Log in to Reply'; elseif ('open' == $post->comment_status) {?> <a href='#' onclick='moveAddCommentBelow("div-comment-<?php echo $c->comment_ID ?>", < ?php echo $c->comment_ID ?>, true); return false;'>Reply to this comment</a> < ?php } ?> </div>
I also added code from my original comments.php in my theme file so that if a user is logged in, it will not ask them for their information (name, e-mail, etc). Although I don’t think that there are too many people with accounts on my blog (go for it, it’s not so bad) I figured that it was at least a solution that I enjoyed more for my own sake. However the code change was too much for this so I’m not going to post it in this entry. Other than that it’s pretty super! I like the look, and I hope that others will appreciate it. And most of all I hope that it fosters more discussion!
- Comment Timeout lets me fight another problem on my blog. And that problem is spam comments. Hateful, despicable spam comments. They take at least a little bit of time to go through sometimes when people’s comments get caught in moderation. So I’ve decided that since it rather makes sense to close the comments on old posts, I will. It’s not as if people particularly post comments on my old posts anyways.
Additionally it has the ability to keep the comments active if the post is deemed “active.” The plugin is fairly full-featured with some customizable options such as the timeout period, etc. Not a bad plugin if I do say so myself. It was a better option for me than the very basic Close Old Posts plugin written by Matt Mullenweg and listed on the wordress.org site.
Let me know what you think of the new plugins! Does it make you want to leave more comments?
Oct 28 You know what is disconcerting? When someone is just looking at you. I’ve noticed this while being both the looker and the lookee. (I just made that word up but I could have actually made that into more proper English. Sometimes I’m just a rebel like that.)
So when you’re doing anything, whether that’s talking to someone, eating, studying, or anything in between it is quite interesting to suddenly look up and see that someone had been staring at you. You know that they’d been staring since they would not have been making a looking motion just as you’re looking. So if they look away quickly or even if they keep looking, it’s bound to make you feel a little bit uncomfortable.
Why do we dislike getting stared at?
I’d say that it’s likely because we, as humans, don’t like to be analyzed and have someone witnessing everything that we’re doing. We enjoy having some semblance of privacy and freedom to be who we are without being judged. That’s the deep reason. Practically, we just don’t like being creeped out. Or other people noticing our flaws. Like that booger in your nose that you can feel but can’t pick because that would just be obviously gross.
What to do?
Hard as it might be, I say stare back until they back down. This sounds like a childish game of chicken, but I still think that it’s part of a rather fun solution.
Well I suppose that a logical solution would also be to just be comfortable enough with yourself so that you don’t need to feel nervous or uneasy with someone following your every move. But not everyone is going to be able to get to that point.
Hmm…well you could also go the route of blatantly asking, “What’s your problem, buster?” (or some other suitable term for a girl if it’s a she rather than a he). But that takes some guts. And if you’ve got those guts, you probably don’t care a lick what they’re staring at because you have more important things to do.
So most of us are just going to suck it up. And not know what to do. And hope that whoever is looking at us is:
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Not a creepy stalker
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Someone who is attractive so that the staring is more of a compliment
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Not laughing at you on the inside
Yeah I don’t have a solution, I wish that I did. Because then I could utilize it! If you’ve got one, let me know because I’m no fan of this myself.
Oct 25 Hard drives consist of many bits, configured in a particular way (of which the explanation is far far beyond the scope of this blog post). But needless to say we like to view the hard drive as a block of space that we can store things in. The hard drives each have partitions setup on them, the most common case being a single partition for the operating system and all of the data.
However this is not exactly what a lot of people want. Sometimes they want different partitions because they want different operating systems on the same computer, but more often it’s just because they want some kind of division between their data and their operating system, applications, etc. For more reasons, check out the purpose of partitioning according to wikipedia.
When you install an operating system for the first time, it has a partitioning tool that allows you to choose how you want to partition your new hard drive. Well often if you buy your computer retail then they’ve already set it up for you. But if you were to actually go through the entire process yourself, then you’d likely partition the hard drive with the operating system installer’s tool.
But then, what if your hard drive is currently set up differently than you want? What do you do once your data is all over your drive? Well you have a couple of choices. You can either completely format (and erase) your hard drive and start from scratch. This is obviously not going to be your first choice if you have data on your hard drive already as that would involve backing up and restoring all of your data. That seems like a rather long process unless you’re having serious errors and really do want to start from scratch (which is sometimes the desired outcome). So the other option is to use some software to re-partition your hard drive while maintaining your data.
Norton PartitionMagic Replacement
Many people know about Norton PartitionMagic in order to do exactly this task. But after eschewing that (in my mind) expensive software, I would highly encourage everyone to check out the free and open source Parted Magic. That is what I used! It’s a LiveCD (which means that you download it, burn it on a cd, insert it into your computer, and boot off the CD. It utilizes the Gparted application for the partitioning duties.
It was a snap to use when I recently upgrade my Ubuntu installation from Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) (don’t you love the alliterative names, I know that I do).
In order to use just:
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Defrag your hard drive
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Download the .iso image
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Burn to a CD as a disk image
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Insert into computer
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Boot to the CD (you might need to change a BIOS setting or two in order to do this)
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Create, resize, modify your partitions and keep your data intact!
Oct 22 With Google increasing the size of Gmail to a bit less than 4 GB last week, I got to thinking about them as a company. They’re ubiquitous to anyone in a developed country because they are the de facto standard for search engines as of today. And they’re good at what they do, they’re real good.
However they’re obviously not all knowledgeable or almighty. They’re not God. Although I suppose that they could be a god to some. Anyways, not everything that they do is superior. But the fact that there is so much Fanaticism about Google that you should get an indication that something is up. And I’m not down with that. (Ha…ha…I guess that I still get amused by things like Up Or Down, Same Difference.)
Whatever the case, I know that for me they’re taking over more and more of my Internet profile. They have my e-mail with Gmail, they are starting to get some of my documents with Google Documents, they have a lot of my searching (although as of late I’ve been trying to be Winning With Blingo instead of going directly through Google), search all over the place with Google Maps, and I use Google Reader to peruse my RSS feeds. Update: I forgot about the obvious Google Analytics, Google AdSense, and the now Google-owned FeedBurner that I use for this blog. That’s a lot of Google products if you ask me.
But even more than the fact that Google is being used so often, they scare me for other reasons. The fact that they are creating portions where you are required to have a Google login (such as collaborating on documents) is understandable but at the same time rather monopolistic-leaning if you ask me. I’d wish that they’d allow create methods by which to create opportunities for people without having to create Google logins (easy as that may be). People need/want/love choice. And some people choose not to have a Google account. Arguments that they don’t need to use shared collaboration ignore the fact that they might need to. And then there are even scarier things like Google Web History (where they keep track of everything that you access from their site) and impinge on my personal life while also laying down the path to even scarier types of behavior.
I can see how as they get bigger and try to innovate, they could tread on territory that I’d much rather they stayed far away from. Somethings are more important than having perfectly relevant ads or a computer that can predict what you want to know.
Their well-known unofficial motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” I can’t help but get the feeling that the change of evil increases as corporations do. And Google is getting to be the big boy on the block. As big of a proponent as I might be for capitalism at work, that doesn’t mean that I always need to support the entities involved. I’m keeping my eye on you, Google.
Oct 18 …is abnomoly.
Invented by Derek Wong while on the phone with a client at work. Use this word sparingly for best effect.