Don't Back Down

With version 3.31 of Movable Type, the product began shipping with feeds.app lite, which allowed some simple abilities for republishing the content of other feeds on your site, through the use of Movable Type template tags. This plugin was a great step forward, and expanded on earlier plugins that did similar things, but in fact, it is the less-capable sibling of the (much) more powerful feeds.app from Appnel Solutions.

The primary difference between the two is that feeds.app lite allows you to pull some basic information out of the feed, while feeds.app allows you to get anything at all - it's much, much more powerful (and it also has a price tag associated). Unfortunately, feeds.app, while insanely powerful, also has caused some signficant hair-pulling to get things working from time to time. It's a shame, because it's a good plugin. Some of the problem is a conflict between the default feeds.app lite plugin and the full-featured feeds.app plugin. Some is that there are a lot of requirements (that ship with the plugin), and it appears that many systems just don't support everything that you need to get it working. Because of that, I have recently been looking for an easier solution, and I think I've found one in Feed Digest.

Read "Using Feed Digest to Republish Feed Content on Your Site" »

In my job, I am often called upon to solve problems - in fact, most of my job is less about writing code or making things pretty (no comments from the gallery, please) than it is figuring out how to make things work the way that they are supposed to. Often, the issue is actually to get everything back the way it was before a wayward upgrade skewed the normal operating procedure to a point where everything went slightly haywire.

Over the weekend, for instance, against my better judgment, I took on a job to implement an upgrade. With steps in hand from the company who supplied the software, I felt mostly confident that we could get the job done relatively quickly. Unfortunately, as we were nearing the end of the process, everything went absolutely nuts. Suddenly files were inaccessible and nothing would work. I still have to admit that I just don't know what went wrong - it's like there was a forgotten uninstall process that someone just left waiting to explode. At that point, the most useful skill was not knowledge, but being able to figure out how to restore some semblance of order.

Read "The Lost Art of Thinking Critically" »

I just received an email telling me that I only had a limited amount of time to accept (or decline) a potential review for a site called Web Hosting Bluebook. This is interesting for two reasons - one, because I don't remember being asked to review the site and two, because it's actually the first time I've been asked to review a site. In the interest of disclosure, this is a paid review, but I will give you the full details on what I find out. Ready? Here goes.

Web Hosting Bluebook bills itself as the #1 Web Hosting Source (their claim) - which is interesting, because it makes it sound like they actually provide web hosting (something I don't think they do). The site has a clean look to it, and I suspect they would be better off telling you that they are the #1 Web Hosting Research Guide or something along those lines. Whatever the claim, I think you'd be hard-pressed to put either to a test and have it proven with hard facts, so it's probably better to look at the site to see what you do get.

Read "Web Hosting Bluebook" »

An interesting comment was raised on my review of Web Hosting Bluebook. Someone by the name of "Internet Marketing Blog" (if you follow their link, you get a blog by the name of "Money Maker Jobs", and someone posting under the name of "admin", so finding out the real name isn't easy) mentioned that "this is the internet" and we're here to sell people BS. I think that this is an interesting comment for many reasons. Most notably because, as I mentioned in my follow-up comment, that the commenter himself mentions on his own page that "money is not everything" - so if money is not everything, what else is there?

I certainly have a number of thoughts on the subject, but if we're all here to sell people BS, that implies that money is, indeed, everything. Looking at the monstrous page offered by our commenter, we see 12 posts spread over three months and eight categories, along with four Google boxes. So obviously, our friend is all about the money. But without much content. And I'm wandering now, so let me get to the point, which is that much of what I do is offer reviews. I offer reviews of products, such as keyboards, I've reviewed many pieces of software, including downloadable software and services (most recently TypePad). I also review our government. This site is full of reviews, in fact, and I'd venture that all of them are pretty honest.

Read "The Dilemma of Paid Reviews" »

If you've been a subscriber to the Microsoft Action Pack, then you might know of a couple of changes to the plan this year. First up is the requirement that you pass an assessment course. I figured I could do this when I had a chance, and so I pretty well blew off all those notices that they kept sending me and didn't bother to read much on the subject, so I finally got around to checking out the details today. I found out that the subject matter is a little bizarre. Mostly to do with sales, which I absolutely hate, but still, I figured I could stumble may way through.

I eventually settled on Designing, Deploying, and Managing a Network Solution for the Small-and-Midsize Business, which is described as "This course teaches you to design a network solution, install and upgrade to Windows Small Business Server 2003." I figured that wouldn't be too hard, right? So I registered. Of course I was in the middle of about three things, and still wasn't paying attention, and so the first thing I noticed was an assessment of my current skills, to see if I was able to take the test. I found that odd, but oh well. So I answered the 15 questions, and passed with 80%. That's cool. Then I spent a while trying to figure out how to actually get to take the real test, and I couldn't find it.

Read "Microsoft Action Pack Assessment and You" »

The fourth annual Don't Back Down Tournament Pick'em has arrived. You can make your picks now. Thanks again to Yahoo! Sports for providing the brackets, which make it awfully easy for me to keep track of things.

This year, the contest is even better, because you can win $5 million for a perfect bracket (not from me, unfortunately), so get those brackets filled out to see if you can win the big prize. There are a few more readers around than last year, so hopefully we'll have a few more competitors - but no matter how many people are in the contest, I'm sure that it will be a good time for all! In order to sign up, you'll need a Yahoo! ID, along with the group ID (69931) and the group password (which, as usual, is dbd). So visit the Tournament Pick'em page and sign up!

A while back, I purchased some CORSAIR Dominator 2GB Dual Channel Desktop Memory for a computer I was building.

The main reason I bought was because they just looked cool, and then because the reviews on Newegg were pretty decent. While I have mentioned before that I often shop at Amazon, I'll usually read the reviews at Newegg because they are just better. This was no different. This CORSAIR Dominator 2GB Dual Channel Desktop Memory was a bit more expensive, but they seemed to do the trick for me at the time, and ran well - unfortunately I kept running into a problem where I'd be running along (on my overclocked E6300) and something would lock up. This was invariably at the least opportune moment.

Read "Crucial Ballistix 2GB vs. Corsair Dominator 2GB" »

As I'm recording information for taxes this year, I realize that once again, I've managed to forget to update the account information at PayPal, and the 1099 form has my personal Social Security Number on it, rather than the company's Employer ID Number, which means that I personally will be paying taxes on any interst in the account, rather than the company. To make matters worse, the company taxes are already filed, which means that they have accounted for interest income, so it's like a double whammy. About the only good news is that it's not a huge amount. But still.

I figure I need to take care of the problem. The only issue is that there is no easy way to do it. The interface at PayPal, while not difficult, doesn't seem to have a way to figure out how to change this information. In fact, there's no obvious place to change your Social Security Number/Employer ID Number anywhere that I can find. I do manage to find a couple of places where you can contact them directly - both a local area code and an 800 number - so I try both. No such luck. After spending at least half an hour on the phone with various reps, being transferred more than once and being disconnected twice, I was still stuck with the same problem: My 1099 for next year was going to have my personal information on it, not the company's.

Read "Change Your Social Security Number at PayPal" »

Back in January (the 18th, I think, in case Amnesia comes calling), I ordered up a Leatherman Skeletool CX from Amazon. The price at the time was $79.85, with free shipping. I was happy, though for perhaps the first time in the history of times I've ordered from Amazon, I was going to have to wait for a while, since they were low on stock. I figured it would be worth the wait for this sweet little tool.

As it turned out, the wait would be a long one. On February 5th, I tweeted about how the product was delayed, while the price had gone up (the page at Amazon now shows another company not Amazon, as the primary supplier - though Amazon still offers it at $79.85, with free shipping, on the alternative link). On February 8th, I tweeted that now it was shipping earlier than expected, but it was still to arrive by March 18th. Guess what. Still not here.

Read "Amazon Really Blows it with the Leatherman Skeletool CX" »

When Six Apart released Movable Type 4.1, with it they released an entirely new commenting architecture. And technically, the foundation was laid with MT4 - but let's face it, until 4.1 came out, MT4 was a bit lacking. So I'm sticking with 4.1 for this example. Sorry.

In any case, if you install Movable Type 4.1 for the first time, you'll probably be set - because you'll be starting from scratch. But if you take an existing installation and try to upgrade your site - specifically your comment process - so that it will work in 4.1, you might have some issues. Luckily, it's a really easy fix. It's just not particularly apparent how you should make the fix, which leads to a very frustrating process to get them working again, and that in turn leads to a whole mess of time wasted. Hopefully this entry will help you get things on the right track again.

Read "Upgrading Movable Type Comments to 4.1" »

It's been a monstrous fifteen months since I last updated the Bloglines Toolkit. Frankly, there just isn't that much of a reason to do so. Unfortunately, the Bloglines Notifier API just hasn't changed that much. Ever. And since it hasn't, there just isn't that much to be done with the toolkit. I did have a branch of the tookit at one time that offered an unread count in the status bar, but since there was so much trouble getting the icon to look right in the first place, I eventually decided against releasing it, and figured I'd just stick with things the way they are.

So why is there an update now? For several reasons. First and foremost, to get some updated languages out there. Some of you may be interested to know that the extension is now available in 13 languages, thanks to the fine folks at BabelZilla. This release includes Danish (da-DK), Italian (it-IT), Korean (ko-KR) and Polish (pl-PL). Second, I wanted to see if things would work in Firefox version 3 (it does), so I updated the MaxVersion string, and made a couple of other tweaks as well. Finally, I updated the copyright dates and web site links.

Read "Bloglines Toolkit 1.7.0" »