This clip has been making the rounds on the Internet, so odds are you’ve seen it. If you haven’t, you should watch it, preferably in HD at Vimeo. At the very least, click the title of this post to see it full size. 
The premise is simple: Matthew Harding took a trip to 42 countries to film short clips of him doing a silly dance, sometimes alone, sometimes with lots of local folks, often in beautiful locations. The result is this 4:28 video.
I’m proud to share the fact that this guy is from Connecticut. They don’t call us nutmeggers for nothing.
Update: The song is (called Praan) is available at Amazon’s MP3 store.
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Interesting feature. Might have to try this out.
Just messing around with the TwitterTools plugin from Alex King.
For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s best described via analogy:
It integrates with IM so you can update from your IM client instead of having to log in, fill out the form, etc. (though that’s pretty easy, too). If you’re an SMS junkie or have a Blackberry or iPhone, you can have it work with SMS, too. It’s a pretty handy tool if you have friends updating their Twitter accounts. Like most social services, networks effects do make the service more useful.
So, as of today, for the foreseeable future, FatMixx posts will also show up on my Twitter feed. Enjoy!
In case you get an error message like the one below, you can fix it:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 16 bytes) in /usr/www/users/scenic/fatmixx/wp-includes/cache.php on line 4
Other symptoms include a blank page when you try to post a new entry or edit an existing one in WordPress. The issue is that PHP 5.2 can be configured to take a memory limit and a lot of hosts set the limit quite low by default. My host upgraded PHP today to 5.2 and I ran into these issues.
Assuming your host allows you to, you can fix this by overriding the memory settings. 16M or 32M works well. How you set this depends on your host, but you can google .htaccess files or php.ini files. Here’s what I have in my .htaccess file:
php_value memory_limit 32M
That’s it. Hope this helps someone.
OK, I know I spend too much time changing the themes around on my blog, but this guy has done something amazing. He’s created command-line interfaces, in your browser, for his blog. Want posts categorized under slashdot? list the Slashdot directory. Check them out and be amazed. (via Boing Boing)
So, I noticed earlier today that none of my posts were showing up in Technorati. I’ve found that whenever this happens, and it happens relatively often, the problem stems from the HTML on this site not validating properly. Since I’m using XHTML 1.0 Strict, this means that anything the least bit unusual generally breaks the page.
I have a couple of custom fixes I’ve had to include to the WordPress installation which disappear every time I upgrade WordPress. I have to figure this out, by the way, because I can’t be the only one impacted by this, so I must be doing something wrong… or it’s one of my custom written plugins. Hmmm.
Anyway, I tried embedding the YouTube player today and that destroyed the page. First of all, the embed tag isn’t part of HTML or XHTML 1.0. So, I can’t include it in the post, which means I can’t let Firefox users see the player. So, I decided to use SWFObject, a JS-based flash embedder. It went downhill from here.
Between X-Valid and the default wpautop and wptexturize, the whole script tag was getting destroyed. The CDATA block was getting ripped out, the > in the CDATA close tag was getting converted to >, and there were <p> tags everywhere.
Even disabling wpautop and wptexturize (via the TextControl plugin) and disabling X-Valid for that post didn’t help. Everything was fine except something kept killing the final > on the CDATA close tag, which is supposed to be ]]>. After worrying about it, then thinking that I need to make another patch to my wordpress install (noooooo!), I just gave up and removed the CDATA blocks and made sure my JS didn’t have any characters that would break validation.
This isn’t a workable solution, so I’ll have to look more. A quick google shows that it might be the rich editor, but I’ll have to look later. Holy crap, though, this is an insanely annoying bug.
Update: And my custom fixes have been removed. CDATA elements still break validation, but the other issue I mentioned where I had to have a custom patch is now resolved. Turns out it was this ancient (by Internet standards) tagging plugin I was using to display the tags on each post. I’ve switched to Christine Davis’s excellent Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. This plugin should be held up as a poster child for well thought out plugins, at least from a user standpoint. It imported the tags from the old plugin and set them up. There was one problem with the + signs I used for multi-word tags, but a little SQL magic and we’re all set. Still looking for a fix for the CDATA issue, but that will have to wait. I need to get to bed so I can finish a spec tomorrow morning.
I’ve made another random, silly WordPress plugin, this time a simple plugin to let me turn on and off ads on different posts from the post edit screen. I also can override the AdSense channels for each ad position without editing PHP code. In fact, this isn’t really even tied to the Google AdSense system, so you could literally use it to toggle anything on or off or change a value here or there. As a result, the integration isn’t ideal, and I’ve seen better plugins do some pretty clever things, so there’s some work left. If you’re looking for something simple, though, this might help.
Otherwise, you can check out what I think is the fully-featured solution in AdSense Deluxe written by some other guy. It looks really good, though it isn’t quite what I want (very close, though).
You can find the “official” page (and the download) for the plugin over here.
As most of you know, WordPress is the software that powers FatMixx. While other big blog packages have had their annoying user annoyances (MoveableType licensing, anyone?), WordPress has been pretty solid all around. Good community, clear licensing, and great features. Well, like Google as of late, the shine is coming off the WordPress folks.
They were apparently hiding a link farm on the WordPress site. While I think it looks worse than it is, it’s still pretty bad what they did. Using invisible links isn’t very cool, and it’s unnecessary if he had just said, hey, I’m helping a company out in exchange for some cash to keep this going. I’m not super upset about this, but I’m just kind of bummed to have another one of the “good guys” marred. I realize no one is perfect, but, man, it still sucks when you find out they’re not.
