Tools – A Blog by Franklin Pettit

Linked June 1-3 2008

Steven Hodson of WinExtra posts what he calls the “From the Pipeline” of the best links of the day. That is a nice concept. It will be great to look back on a year from now as a history of what took place. These are my links for June 1-3. Not all brand new content but on my radar. Heard from the noise.

garfield minus garfield – Funny stuff.
Windows Live Writer CTP Released – LiveSide – News blog – A description and review of Windows Live Writer CTP
FriendFeed Blog: Simple sharing directly from FriendFeed – This is old post from February but still a good one. This shows you how to easily use the Share Something box in FriendFeed.
Lightbox 2 – This is an interesting javascript library for displaying pictures on your webpages.
Lightbox 2.0 for WordPress– The wordpress plugin for Lightbox.
A $10 Mosquito Net Is Making Charity Cool – NYTimes.com– 10 dollars can still make a difference.
World of Slippy: What’s Missing from Friendfeed?– FriendFeed has enthusiastic users. That can go a long way for a product.
Post Links and Messages on FriendFeed Directly From Google Talk– This is awesome with Twitter’s recent flakiness.
FriendFeed ‘Likes’ Compatibility Index « I’m Not Actually a Geek– FriendFeed statistics are geeky and cool.
SezWho: How it Compares to Disqus & Intense Debate – ReadWriteWeb– I still like Disqus but competition leads to innovation and the end user benefits.
How-To: Create a WordPress Theme in 5 minutes– I am still playing with wordpress theme development.

Excuses, WordPress, & Blogging

For the past 6-8 weeks I have been tech blogging. Well at least a little. I have managed to post sporadically with a quest to post regularly. Sporadically is probably the best I can do for now. I tried blogging before and had given up on it. But this time I think it has stuck. I will maintain this blog and try to post daily but at least once a week.

As a new blogger I have been working to spruce up the site. I have been researching many WordPress themes, many sidebar widgets, and lots of tweaks for the blog. Several months ago I added the Disqus plugin for threaded commenting. Disqus is great! If you do not use it for your WordPress blog you should really give it a try. Installation is easy and it works great. One of my favorite features is the commenting by email reply .

During the past week I have been looking at WordPress themes and wordpress theme development. The main process in a wordpress theme that displays your posts is called “The Loop.” The loop looks like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

//Code here would display and format the post.

<?php endwhile; ?>

All wordpress themes have the_loop but some have more than one. Some premium themes and magazine style themes may also display post excerpts in a sidebar or else where on the page. They have multiple loops. The following is a list of links that I have viewed as I was researching multiple wordpress loops.

I looked at ways to enhance my theme with category pages. I wanted a specific verbiage at the top of each category page. Here are some relevant links:

As I stated I have been looking at many different wordpress themes. It is good to choose a theme and stick with it. Here are couple places to take a look at themes:

I decided on Cutline by Chris Pearson for now. It is a 3 column theme. But I intend to tweak it further by changing the theme’s pages, categories, sidebars, and general setup.

Here a couple more general WordPress links:

One more thing. So you want to play with new themes, or just tweaking your site. One thing you can try is installing WordPress locally. So you do not have a Linux machine? No problem, XAMPP to the rescue.

XAMPP is a free, cross-platform web server, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.

XAMPP lite contians just what you need. XAMPP is zipped and requires no install. There is even a portable apps version of XAMPP. XAMPP contains everything needed to run WordPress. Check out the following link:

Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP

This link gives you step by step instructions to get your local WordPress install up and running.

I like this blogging thing no more excuses but to post.

Google Reader Gets Notes

Image by VoIPman via Flickr

Google Reader gets notes. The ability to annotate a note to a post is very cool. The ability to share anything from the web feed or not is cool. But…

I typed a quick note as I shared a Louis Gray post. But I misspelled a word. How do I correct it? This is just an example of many questions I have with these new enhancements.

Sidebar – Who else thinks this is too little too late? I am using FriendFeed so much this is almost irrelevant. FriendFeed allows more than a note. It is a real social network with conversation. I can comment and then edit the comment. – End Sidebar

I still love Google Reader it just seems like the enhancements are so reactionary. What happened to Reader being on the cutting innovative edge? It seems Reader is back on their heels.

Profy.com a new hosted blog/feed reader Google Reader competitor is giving much more flexibility for noting. Profy‘s free form way of letting you share a whole post and blog it in any way you want is much better. [For more on Profy see David Knight’s interview with Svetlana Gladkova, Profy Vice President.]

The Google Reader note is good idea. I just think buggy enhancements need to be thought out more. Do not put it in play and then fix it.

But now my first ever note has a freaking TYPO! How do I fix it? Geez. I wanted Google Reader to update already but the enhancements need to be clear and valuable. Get rid of the bugs and complete the enhancements. So here is my bug/completion list…

Combine Notes to remove duplicates – If one entry has a note and the other doesn’t I do not need to read both.
Show/Link original linker – If you read alot of shared feeds or just Scobles’ you will see notes and have no idea whom they came from. I suggest linking to that person’s shared feed.
Edit my notes – you can not edit a note once it has been posted.
Fix the double share process. If you note something and check shared it shares it once. When the note box goes away the share button is not selected. Make the check box on the note window flag an entry as shared.
Friendfeed can read comments separate from the entry. Question only: Can the notes be read in XML independently from the post?