About a month ago, Chris pointed me to a cool Wordpress plugin that formats your site for the iPhone.  I didn’t immediately jump on this because I don’t have an iPhone (so it doesn’t directly impact my life) and because the iPhone has the best (by far) mobile browser available.

Today I finally got around to installing the plugin and setting it all up.  Very impressive.  You need the plugin file as well as a theme.  (You don’t actually activate the theme; you just put it in the Wordpress themes directory.)  So yeah, if you’ve got an iPhone, now you can read my rants much more easily.

You can get this (pretty awesome plugin) here from ContentRobot.com

Verizon is changing its privacy policy to allow them to sell your personal information.  More information on it here.

Basically, you can opt out by calling 1-800-333-9956.

Thanks to Aaron for mentioning this to me.

I’ve been working on site concepts for a site redesign for a friend. He wants a ’splash’ type of screen at www.hisname.com with options for the different sections (4 total, counting the actual blog) of his site. The problem I had was twofold -

1. If WordPress was at www.hisname.com, the ’splash’ page would get in the way of WordPress using index.php. If I put WordPress at www.hisname.com/blog, then all of the other sections would live in /blog. Not what I wanted.

2. I need to be able to make it so that the sidebar navigation is different for each section. If I used a single WordPress install, I’d have to create a page for each section (with slug /section1, /section2, etc.). That would be ok, but I need the sidebar stuff to be different for each of the sections. (Like, for example, I don’t want the blog archive on /section1 or /section2, but I do want it on /blog.)

I started looking around for ways to make WordPress do multiple blogs with 1 installation. I found this site that has pretty straightforward instructions on making /blog, /section1, /section2, /section3 all separate WordPress blogs.

For a site like I’m working on, it ads some to the administrative overhead, but not a whole lot. All of the sections (except /blog) will be pretty static once it’s all setup and running, so administration shouldn’t be a big deal. I’ll make all four sections (which are really now 4 blogs) have the same theme, layout, graphics, etc. so that the users will never know the difference. Very cool.

The instructions on that site, like much open source goodness, aren’t professionally written; but if you have half of a clue what WordPress does and you understand symbolic linking, you can handle this.

The only thing that I really had trouble with was that it doesn’t support putting WordPress in its own directory. I usually put my blogs at www.site.com and WordPress at www.site.com/wordpress. You could probably change the code to make it support that, but I just opted to go with what works.

I’m not moving too far forward with development on this yet, so if some of you guru geeks know a better way to do all of this, I’m all ears.

Following the ways of Slightly Dorky Nerd King Penrod (the Cisco god), Uber Cool Non-Nerd Aaron, and Uber Cool Nerd King Chris, I am merely Nerd King Ron.

Today I learned that if you are running qmail with the SMTP Authentication patch through tcpserver, you have to invoke qmail-smtpd with 3 parameters:  hostname, check program, and subprogram.  If you don’t invoke it with those 3 arguments, it will successfully authenticate any user/pass combination.

I realize that this post means nothing to 99.5% of the people who read this blog, but I figured I’d throw it in a post just in case it ends up in search engines and helps somebody out of a tough spot.  Here is my source on this.

I had an issue tonight with a Wordpress site I’ve been working on.  It’s a new domain, and it currently only exists within my basement.  The problem was that every page view within Wordpress was taking about 20 seconds to load.  Not cool.

I did ping tests and looked for errors in packets, but it all looked normal.  I tested network connectivity with other software, and the system behaved as expected.  I thought my problem might be Apache, but some of my own code worked just fine.  (This didn’t make sense because there’s no way my code is worthy of comparison to Wordpress’ code.)

Finally (more hours than I care to count later), I added an entry for the new domain in the hosts file.  That fixed it.  Apparently, Wordpress uses that hostname for something, and if it’s not resolvable by the server, you’ll see some pretty substantial delays.

This was with Wordpress 2.1.3.  I found this documented somewhere in the Wordpress support forums, but I can’t find the link right now.

This site has been in desperate need of a fresh look.  That dark red theme (though I still like it) needs a break.  I decided a while back that I’d just design my own Wordpress theme.  Well, that went like you’d expect…I never got around to it and then ended up finding something that was better than I could have done anyway.

Today I tripped across styleshout.com and really liked the Envision design.  It wasn’t a Wordpress theme though, so I couldn’t (easily) put it to use.  After about 3 minutes of searching (thanks, Google), I found this site that had the Envision design in a Wordpress theme.

I’ve got a few tweaks to do, but I wanted to give credit where it’s due.  Thanks to those guys (and, really, to the Wordpress folks as well) for such awesome free stuff.

We saw the Google Dance today. Granted, it’s not the official Google Dance, but it’s still a dance…

Google Dance Video #1
Google Dance Video #2

Dear Symantec,

I fixed it myself. Thanks for nothing.

Dear Symantec,

I really like the Corporate Edition of your software. It works great - when it works. Why, oh why, is it that even a minor upgrade never seems to work, even though the README is followed precisely? Tonight finds me not watching baseball but rather working with your software trying to make it work again.

Maybe some R&D dollars spent on upgrading software would be a good idea. I know one customer who would appreciate it.