John's Blog » Weblogs

categories v tags in WP?

John — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:43:45 +0000

anyone have good pointers on how to collapse tags & categories in WP? seems like the admin UI in 2.7 is emphasizing tags more, and it’s probably a better way to do things anyway — is there some way to combine the 2?

The sapphire mines of Madagascar – The Big Picture – Boston.com

John — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:10:07 +0000

The sapphire mines of Madagascar – The Big Picture – Boston.com.

As alwys, the Big Picture has an amazing, amazing installment, and as usual, there are serious implications here. One of my very favorite blogs.

WordPress 2.5

John — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:06:30 +0000

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5, so let me know if you notice anything wackier than usual happening on the site…looks great so far. Most of the upgrades are in the admin UI.

oh, and if you’re using Firefox 3 builds…

John — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:44:54 +0000

…to look at this blog, apologies. something weird going on with something in my wordpress css and how firefox 3 wants to display fonts. as a result, my fonts here for firefox 3 users have been, um… suckified. working on addressing, but maybe not until next week. fwiw, checking out this blog on an iphone now looks decidedly better.

[anyone know what's going on?]

3 random, unrelated things

John — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 15:50:02 +0000

3 random thoughts for the morning:

1) i’ve been cool towards getting a first generation iPhone, not wanting my pants to catch on fire. that’s not fair, of course, as not every Rev A piece of Apple hardware catches on fire — it’s more like a 50% hit rate. but these commercials that i’m seeing every night on whatever it is that i’m watching — ESPN? FX? Comedy Central? I don’t know exactly, but i’m suspecting that maybe i’m precisely their target demographic. anyway, these commercials are fantastic. they show off user experience, they highlight UI innovation, and they really clearly, provocatively, show off the things that this phone can do. they’re amazing. i don’t care at all about the music & movies bit, but it’s still really compelling. anyway, i don’t know. i know i’m not willing to stand in line now, so that means an early one is out of the question, but maybe in the fall. we’ll see.

2) at starbucks this morning, probably half the people there were monkeying around with their blackberries/treos/windows mobile thingys. it felt to me like the weight had started to shift away from everyone bringing their laptops in towards working on mobile. it’s a bad sample set for a couple of reasons (1: it’s practically in the middle of the Googleplex, so nerd-friendly territory, and 2: morning time is “waiting for your meeting to show up by reading mail on your phone” time, at least for me & people like me), but still, feels like something is happening in the US now, in spite of our stupid, closed carrier system.

3) i have noticed that i really, really like it when other people are using wordpress for their blogs, because for every post, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comment stream. so if something interesting happens in a post, i can use what’s essentially a time-expiring single use feed to track the (often more interesting) comment threads. that’s a great use for feeds — throwaway sources of time-relevant information. they’re not like the other feeds that i track, but still really useful to throw into newsfire.

akismet is fantastic

John — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:15:05 +0000

i have to say that since turning on askismet for blog spam filtering, life’s been great. it’s from automattic, makers of wordpress, and it’s just fantastic at dealing with all the blog spam. couldn’t be happier with it. between that & wordpress stats, automattic/wordpress.com is aggregating all the usage information from my blog & others, but it’s a fair trade for me, at least.

still monkeying

John — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 03:57:20 +0000

starting to understand wordpress, css & this particular theme a little better. definitely not finished yet — not happy with the colors or layout quite yet, and realized that the Hemmingway theme is using some moz-specific stuff to make the text look better than it does on Safari & IE, so still have some work to do.

colors, layout in flux

John — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:33:55 +0000

lots of monkeying around with layout & colors still. the blog is going to be unstable for a while, so bear with me if i introduce some unreadable schemes….

Blogging from ScribeFire

John — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 22:29:06 +0000

Experimenting with ScribeFire, which is the new instance of a Firefox extension for blogging, formerly known as Performancing. Seems to work great — going to see if it increases my frequency of blogging.

test post for wordpress

John — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 23:57:09 +0000

just putting in a test post to see how things look on the hemmingway theme — there are clearly some issues when images are too big…

moblog test

John — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:36:31 +0000

Testing out moblogging from Beijing, as I’ve turned on data access this time around. Obviously, this picture isn’t from China, but from my office on Saturday, where SPL loves the dried fruit & sitting in the inflatable furniture.

kid privacy

John — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:39:47 +0000

i seem to be talking a bunch about moving my blog over — and in fact, i think we’ll move mine and kathy’s over in the next few weeks. one of the things we’re a little stumped on, though, is what to do about the kid. more specifically, we obviously post a ton of info and pictures about him for our friends and family — and when we write about him we usually use his name. but as he gets older, i guess we’re getting a little more concerned about his privacy, and, more importantly, his safety.

some friends of ours just use their kids’ names next to pictures in blogs. other friends of ours only refer to their kids by an alias, so that any potential lurkers won’t be able to connect names to photos. we’re not really sure what to do. on the one hand, better safe than sorry, even though it’ll make the writing seem a little stilted. on the other hand, we live in a pretty hyper-connected time, and it’s probably a losing battle ultimately, although he doesn’t have his own myspace page yet, thankfully.

so we don’t know. any opinions?

jub.net?

John — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:52:46 +0000

seems to be either lillyhowe.net or jub.net. i sort of like JubNet (spelled jub.net). any opinons here?

rats. i think jub.net isn’t actually available. stupid instantdomiansearch. jubjubs.org? jubnet.com? jubnet.net?

i hate this part…wah.

domain name

John — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:57:07 +0000

so the main reason that i’m stuck on moving my blog is figuring out a domain name. all my favorite jubjub-related names are, of course, taken on .com, .org, .net.

i keep thinking that i’m going to be hit by divine intervention to come up with a cool domain for our family, but think it’s not happening.

so here are my current options:

lillyhowe.com
lillyhowe.net
lillyhowe.org

chortling.org (look it up — “chortled” is probably the best way to look for it)

jubjubX.org/net/com
jubjubOne.org/net/com

(jubjub is my preferred name for, well, everything.

any preferences? i know they all pretty much suck.

blogging from flickr

John — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:46:28 +0000

DSC00415
Originally uploaded by John Lilly.

i’m pretty sure i’m the last person in the world to decide that flickr is probably the best place to put my photos online. (better than hosting on my own server, better than any other galleries.) interface isn’t great for viewing (as opposed to organizing & tagging, which is pretty great, but it’s as good as anything i guess. anyway, these are daikon radish plush dolls, a picture taken at kiddieland in tokyo last year.

moving to wordpress

John — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 03:03:22 +0000

okay, i’ve decided to move from typepad to wordpress (hosted at dreamhost, which seems fantastic so far), and am making a few decisions. my experimental blog is here for the moment, but it’ll change. (the hardest part so far seems to be finding a domain name. yikes.)

anyhoo, the thing i’m wrestling with now is where to store pictures. kathy’s put a ton of sam’s pictures on sam’s typepad-hosted blog, but that’s part of the reason we’re moving — their options are super-limited for how you display photos. part of me thinks we should just put everything on flickr or photobucket and link from the new dreamhost site — but part of me thinks we should host all our own stuff, as there’s really no practical size limitation on dreamhost’s plans, and then use gallery or some other photo sharing server software.

anyone have thoughts?

(incidentally, i’m thinking that getting all our photo links moved over from typepad, and the photos as well, is going to be a big pain.)

tough to watch

John — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 18:34:34 +0000

i’m not an overly emotional guy in terms of reacting to news on the web or tv. but the story of james kim, a 35 year old father in the same industry & location as me, is just incredibly tough to watch. it’s hard to even think about. they had to make some of life’s most challenging decisions as a family last week, and what he tried to do blows me away. here’s a video about him that cnet posted.

typepad

John — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 17:41:59 +0000

i’m finding typepad harder & harder to love lately. the web-based UI seems like it’s always slow, the photo uploading for sam’s blog is about 2 years behind anyone else, and it costs money every month to run as well. starting to think about moving, but it’s a little stickier than i want, to be honest. i’ve got about 3 years of posts in typepad now, not to mention nearly a year and a half of videos & pictures of the little guy. but it’s still just hard to stay on typepad. i’m taking a bit of time off next week; think i’m going to do the evaluation. any ideas? (and if you’ve got suggestions, would really like suggestions on how to move the mass of content that i’ve got, too.)

basic requirements, though, are this:

- want to be able to run my own blog, plus sam’s blog

- want to have a feature-rich, easy to use + gallery-ize picture capability — with easy integration to iphoto

- want to make it as easy as possible to put up video from our DV camera — videoegg currently is the easiest to do importing; it also has integration with typepad

and free would be nice.

thoughts?

totally sidetracked today…

John — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:17:30 +0000

sometimes it happens. 2 from john maeda’s blog (which i stumbled on from diego’s):

- on technologist v humanist

- on freaky MIT trees (by my friend Ben Fry)

enough with the bloglinking. going to finish cleaning out my mailbox & go home.

back to blogging

John — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 17:09:47 +0000

okay, it’s been about 3 weeks since i’ve written anything, but i’m going to try to write a bunch more in the coming days. been thinking about a lot of things lately across the board, have a trip coming up to Tokyo, and just a lot going on. so watch this space.

in the meantime, here’s a bit of a speech by Ted Stevens, my favorite cranky, crazy Senator from Alaska about the Internet. it would be really funny if he weren’t in charge of the committee who’s regulating it.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially…

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.