What’s All This Then!

A few weeks ago, an Arctic expedition to the North Pole took place for the sole purpose of calling attention to damages caused by global warming. On the agenda were calls to schoolchildren, pictures of deteriorating conditions brought upon by the warming of the Earth, and a swim in areas where the polar caps had melted. Unfortunately, the warm temperatures, which measured at 58° below zero inside the tents and exceeded 100° below zero at times outside the tents, shorten the life of the batteries needed for their equipment. Ultimately, the expedition had to be cut short when one of the explorers suffered frostbite to her toes. Members of the team did comment that they experienced temperatures that weren’t expected with global warming. One of the team organizers, Ann Atwood said, “But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability.” Personally, when I have a concern about the unpredictability of the weather, I generally look at the calendar and my location. From personal experience, I’ve noticed that there’s not a whole lot of warming taking place in north during winter. But then that’s me. And I don’t think the sky is falling as much as they think.

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Today I added Viper’s Video Quicktags beta version 4.0 as plugin to help me place youtube, google videos and the like into a post as I create my entry.

I’ve also added Viper’s WeatherIcon plugin which you can see in the sidebar. For some reason, I have yet to get the icons to work for this plug-in.

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Apparently, Google makes a distinction between www.rdesgr.com and rdesgr.com when computing page ranking. Since I’ve sent up this wordpress template as //rdesgr.com (in Options, General), I added a plug-in today that will make www.rdesgr.com count as rdesgr.com … If I understand this redirection correctly. Let me know otherwise, please!

The wordpress plugin is enforce-www-preference.php. The author says:

This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.

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<-- me?
In your browser, have you ever noticed those little icons that show up next to a website's title? They're known as Favicons, short for favorite icons. And today I figured out how to create my own for both my webpage and for my blog.

First of all, the file for icon picture is completely different from all other picture files. So the first thing I had to do was to select one of my JPEG or GIF pictures and convert them into an icon file, ICO. An easy way to do that was to go to DynamicDrive's site and use their FavIcon Generator, which is no big deal. I just used their form to pick my picture, click the [Create Icon] button and then use the [Download FavIcon] to send it to my hard drive. For the sake of this discussion, I created a file called animal.ico.

Since I have my own domain with Blue Host, I signed into my account and used the FTP manager to copy animal.ico to my public_html directory. I then put the address, rdesgr.com/animal.ico, into my browser to make sure it showed up. So far so good.

The next step is to get my icon to show up when anyone visits my website or my blog. Basically, all I had to do was place a link in the header section of my index.html file for my website, and in my header.php file in my template for my blog. The index.html file is in my public_html directory. Since I’m using wordpress for my blog, I found my header.php in [directory name of my blog]/wp-content/themes/k2 directory.

In both files, I looked for a line that had </head>. In my index.html file, I added

<link href=’http://rdesgr.com/animal.ico’ rel=’shortcut icon’/>

just before that </head> line. In my header.php file, I added

<link href=’http://rdesgr.com/animal.ico’ rel=’shortcut icon’/>
<link href=’http://rdesgr.com/animal.ico’ rel=’icon’/>

just before that </head> line.

And that’s all there is to it! Hope that you found this helpful look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Alright! In case you haven’t heard about your governments latest efforts to help you, tonight’s the night! Don’t forget to shift your clocks ahead by one hour. Although it has yet to be proven, this is somehow going to save us lots and lots of energy. So much so that the business lobby pushed hard to have this new daylight shifting implemented. After all, studies have proved that we will spend our extra sunlight in their stores. The candy manufacturers are thrilled to death about this new daylight shifting schedule. They went as far as to put little candy pumpkins on the seats of senators during the hearings for daylight shifting time. Why? Because Halloween will now have an extra hour of daylight. How many more greedy children do you think will take advantage of this?

I refer to this time change as Daylight Shifting Time because that is the actual term. “Daylight Savings Time” is the politicians spin to make their efforts sound noble. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And so far, not one politician has been able to justify this time change from hell. Way back in the 1970s, then President Nixon wanted to have this hour shift take place on a year-round basis. So he commissioned dozens of studies to make his case. Unfortunately, the only conclusion reached was that there was no energy savings to speak of.

Oh well. I think that it is great that we get to advance our clocks to keep from turning on our lights for an hour at night. Think of the energy that we will save as a result. I am so excited just thinking about it (’cause I can’t prove it otherwise)! We’ll have so much more energy available as we drive to stores, run our gardening equipment, fire up our gas grills – you know, activities that have been shown to take place with that extra hour of daylight. Thank you, Mr. and Ms. Bureaucrat for looking out for me and my fellow citizens. And a big thank you to those daylight-shifting lobbyist who were so persuasive.

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Have you heard about using bananas to justify the existence of Christianity? That’s what one of my favorite bloggers, Kat, came across the other day. Amazing!

Now I have heard about using bananas for a lot of things. I once read that bananas were great for cleaning out your colon. But when I tried it, it was a rather painful experience – not at all a-peeling. Then I discovered that I was supposed to eat the banana instead of how I used it – not that I’m a fruity kinda guy. Fortunately I’m a quick learner. The banana went in my mouth the next time (a fresh banana, not the painful one). That’s just goes to show you … some people take an object and misuse it to justify their beliefs, while others learn from their mistakes and use it for what it was intended for.

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This post is to help me track everything that I’m using to build this blog and my site. Hopefully, this is will others who have taken on this same seemingly daunting learning curve.

• since Fantastico is a part of bluehost, here is their forum
• tutorials from w3schools.com on PHP and CSS
• since I’m using wordpress’s K2 theme: here are
  • essentials,
  • John TP’s how-to-customize
  • Paul’s how-to-customize K2
• Firefox tools:
  • Aardvark
  • Web Developer
  • Firebug <--- one of the best tools!!
• Google Webmaster Tools

Let me know if you find other, more productive tools.

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The question was raised whether it is worth keeping a PayPerPost affiliate badge on our blogs given the recent draconian changes in their system. Randy, their newest sale guy, responded with the company’s mantra: “The more bloggers we have, the better quality advertisers we will be able to attract to PayPerPost!” Implied there of course is that all posties will make more money. With the new segmentation program in place for a month now, we all know that it just ain’t so.

Yes, I understand that this is a numbers game … get your existing bloggers to
1- attract more bloggers so that you can then
2- shift through them to find a few highly specialized blogs that are PR’d over three, Alexa’d under a hundred thousand, so you can then
3- tout the numbers to attract better quality advertisers who will
4- pay more for opps by requiring bloggers who are
5- PR’d over infinity, Alexa’d within a gnat’s butt of one, have a domain that happens to match the advertiser’s name, and a focus that’s this side of a shrine to their business, so that
6- the rest of us, quality bloggers and not, can hold our heads high knowing that our efforts made everyone else money while we
7- battle each other for the crumbs of a five dollar opp just so we can
8- force a post of not less than 300 words about loans or cell phones into our blog that is almost topic related, and do all of this for the umptieth time ’cause that’s all we’re allowed to do.

You know, considering that we have some excellent advertisers now, things should be working quite well on the PPP side of the equation!

And the folks at PPP wonder why posties asked themselves, “Do I really want to make taking opps even more difficult and less rewarding by attracting more bloggers?”

Of course, you understand that I’m venting right now out of frustration.    Both of my sites have a constant daily flow of traffic.  I know that I can do a good job for the advertisers to get my readers’ attention.  I base this  on favorable comments and e-mails that I have received from past work.  So I see opps that I know could write a good pieces for, I feel that the advertiser has lost out.  It bothers me that the both of us are in a lose-lose situation simply because of seemingly arbitrary requirements. Yes, I know, in reality the advertiser has lost very little.  But I care.  And perhaps the other factor is I have come to enjoy working with PayPerPost more than I should have.  This is their way, in a manner of speaking, of reminding me that I’m nothing more than a replaceable blogging resource for them.

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On Friday, I learned that the creators of WordPress discovered a serious security flaw in version 2.1.1. They recommend an immediate upgrade to 2.1.2. Even though I’m at 2.1.0, I started going through the upgrade process shown at their website but ran out of time. Today I thought that I would use my Bluehost’s Fantastico for an easier upgrade process. Unfortunately, they still at 2.1.1! Tech support said that they are waiting on Fantastico to upgrade at their end. For now, I’ll just sit tight.

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I’s might not be the smartest feller in the bunch but I’m not a complete nose-pickin’, booger-eatin’ mo-ron like some. My friends and I’s has been accused of witchcraft ’cause we’s been usin’ com-pu-ters an’ a fig’urd how to make better our Alexa scores. Been told that we’s is playin’ with them evil spirits on our mo-chines!

Let me say this here and now, we’s don’t know nothin’ ’bout no witchcraft. Shucks, I done thought that the chicken lips and lizard gizzards were enough to keep this ol’ com-putin’ machine from a crashin’. But nooooo! Now we’s had ta wade off them Alexa demons. Brotha Billy Bob came by and took to a layin’ he’s hand on my com-pu-tar an’ screamed, “Out damnedth Alexa, Out I says” Then he took to a singin’ “farmer in the dell” but said “Alexa out of the dell” … ’cause I gots one of them fancy dell. But it done no good. Someone says somethin’ about sacrificin’ a virgin. But I’s looks over at the fool and says, “You idiot. You knows we had to cancel that there christmas paradie ’cause we couldn’t find us a virgin …. or three wise mens for that matter.” So’s I reckon’ we is stuck with that Alexa demon in my dell. Maybe we could call one of them thar exorcists. Nah, can’t do that. One time we’d called one for my brotha. The exorcist done a real good job but when we couldn’t pay him, my brotha got repossessed. Now, if’n you’ll excuse me, I gots to pray over my mo-chine to turn it off. If I pray long enough, the screen goes blank, just like my thoughts….

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The 216 cross-browser color palette was created to ensure that all
computers would display the colors correctly when running a 256 color palette:

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“Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.” William of Ockham (1285-1349)

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Two days ago I started working with the cascade style sheets (CSS) on my blog. I also changed the WordPress template to this one that you see now which is known as K2. Unfortunately, I somehow disabled or hid the login option to create posts on my blog. It’s not like I have tons of time to surmount the learning curve of any template, let alone this K2 one. So it took me until today to find a way to create posts until I can figure out how to undo what I did.

Damn! For some reason I have lost the ability to edit posts after I’ve placed them. So I’ve have gone back to the default WordPress template for now. Is it the K2 template or just me???

Anyway, if you are using Firefox, I highly recommend you get a hold of the extension known as Firebug. With it, I’ve been able to explore different websites and play with the CSS parameters to get an idea of what controls what on the page. I had started learning about CSS when it first came out. But it was a difficult bugger to get to work proper from website to another website. It also had issues with how it display pages in different browsers. So I gave up on it. There were better walls to beat my head against. Now it looks like the standards have been worked out because almost everyone seems to be using them. If you have a myspace account or just visit the site, you know what I mean.

Okay! The weather is getting a little rough outside. And I can see that my area is now under a tornado watch. So this is probably good time for me to shut all electronics down, get my goodies together, and enjoy nature’s show. Catch you on the other side…

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