I keep meaning to reinstate my blogroll on thedeadone.net, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. But then I hit on an idea, have a “friends” page on thedeadone.net, like on LiveJournal, that shows the latest posts from blogs I read (including LiveJournal ones). It’s easy to do: FeedWordpress will grab the posts from my friends’ blogs’ RSS feeds and then use Advanced Category Excluder to prevent the posts appearing on the frontpage and RSS feeds. Along with a blogroll, this would be a much better way of promoting blogs I read.
What does anyone think? Would you like your blog prompted on my site this way?
I’ve finally added a forum to the site. Yea, I know what your thinking, do I really generate that many hits that I can support a forum? Well actually, not really. However I’m finding it hard to track conversations and feedback on a number of posts, specifically TDO Mini Forms Wordpress Plugin. We’re up to 239 comments so far and it’s hard to keep track of discussions. So for me to maintain support for this and other plugins, I’ve decided a small forum is the way to go. It was easy enough to install and it easy enough to add new forums as they are needed, if they are needed. So, em, go discuss!
I know I bullshit a bit (okay a lot). I mean that’s part of the fun of this blog-conversation-web2.0-social-networks isn’t? But I don’t see how it affects my intelligence or performance in bed? Do you?
LAW of BULLSHIT BLOGGER IDIOCY: The more dumbasses that get on the internet, and then create their own blogs like “thedeadone.net” and then go around judging things, some of which they haven’t even watched, and then type a bunch of bullshit onto their blog and onto the internet thinking that everyone else can’t see right through it, the more the dead one blogger bullshit factor increases.
Corollary: A blogger’s bullshit factor increases, as his IQ decreases. And is proportional to the amount of bullshit they repost in their own blog that they got from reading some other bullshit blog on the web and thinking that if somebody posted it on theirs, then it must be true, when in actuality, it’s simply geometrically spreading blog bullshit like thedeadone here by idiot blogsters sitting at home in their old underpants who dont know wtf they are talking about.
Probability of thedeadone blogster being an idiot and that his wife gets bored with his own lack of plot in the bedroom within about 2 minutes, an apparent certainty.
This lovely piece of constructive criticism comes from a “Randall Brougham, Ph.D.” I assume the Ph.D. is important here. (The original comment here). Perhaps he felt the need to indicate that he’s educated. Certainly I found no grammar or spelling mistakes in his comment, which is impressive for a troll.
I know I should just laugh about this, delete the comment and move on but I didn’t. It upset me, left me annoyed for the rest of the day. I followed up the comment, but the guy is probably troll so I don’t expect a response. He left his email and I’ve very tempted to contact him directly, however I’m also tempted to just ban his IP. I did some sniffing but I couldn’t find anything on google about this “Randall Brougham, Ph.D”, not even where he found the post (I checked my logs). It reads a little like a bot but his insults directly use the content of the post, so it’s not.
I’ve been trying to find the right analogy to sum up how it felt. It’s like a stranger hears your conversation in a public place and then decides to shout insults at you for five minutes before running off and not giving you the chance to respond. I did briefly pull the post, but then, part of me said, no, fuck Randal Brougham, Ph.D., I can’t let the trolls win. Even if Randal Brougham, Ph.D. is just some random asshole and it means nothing, its still disturbing to think that some stranger that I’ve never meet or talked to can be so venomous towards you.
This is my reply comment, in case he comes back here some day.
Hi Randall Brougham, Ph.D., thank you for your comment and I will now avoid bullshitting and having opinions and displaying those opinions online. From now I will just write about the pretty little flowers I drew, the new wordpress plugin I wrote or my new baby.
Come on! Yes it’s a little bullshitty. Writing one’s thoughts is mostly an act of bullshit. I obviously hit a nerve but you don’t really elaborate on why, instead you just call me stupid and impotent. How witty of you to rip through my bullshit with such an insult. Seriously, I can just delete your comment now and ban your IP but why bother? The probability is that your just a troll who has some issue with bloggers in general. And if you do reply, I hope you actually say something instead of being offensive.
Yes, I haven’t read Harry Potter and I’ve haven’t seen all of Lost. I’m not even saying that they are crap, only that my perception of them diminishes over time despite how good they are.
And also, this bullshit is mine alone, thankfully. I’m not re-posting it from somewhere else. I doubt anyone else will re-post it either. Cartographer was talking about her feelings about the current Harry Potter and how her view of a good novel has changed from when she was a teenager. The whole of this post is in relation to my view.
Thanks for your attention.
Update (24/08/2007 9am): Google seems to like me. Within a few minutes of this post, I did a new search for Randal Brougham, Ph.D (the troll). Look what hits the number 1 spot:
So if anyone does a search for Randal Brougham, Ph.D. They’ll find this post calling him out as a troll. It was unintentional. I wonder did he really use his real name?
For a long time I’ve considered removing the bits and pieces of drawings I’ve upload to this website. I put them up here, less as a show case for my talents, but more as a place to manage, archive and possible share them.
I don’t really consider myself an artist and I’ve allow my skills and little talent to languish for a long time. Sometimes I pick up some pencils and draw (such as scenes of Chargey, a holiday home we go to in the summer), but I never produce anything in my opinion of quality.
This morning, I check my blog and find this “lovely” comment on an image I did quite a while back:
“This was plagiarized from a 1 19th century etching. You’re a hack.”
He’s right about one thing. I did “copy” the image of the Jabberwocky (off the wonderful classic John Tennial Alice in Wonderland illustrations). I did a whole rack of “copies” (and original stuff) based on Alice in Wonderland as decorations for my wedding, oh so long ago.
I never thought that anyone would take my drawings seriously enough to accuse me of a plagiarism! I’ve since updated any other “copies” that I’ve done with a note about the original work in case that I potentially get accused of being a plagiarist again. I don’t make money of these images.
It just drove home that perhaps it’s time to cut the images from my website. They only get hits from trolls and wandering surfers. They don’t increase traffic or readership of my website. To those who read my blog, do you want to see my artistic “hacks”?
I’ve just finished tagging my website. It’s taken me quite a bit of time, a few weeks of trawling my posts going back to 1994 (no I wasn’t online then but I did post timestamp it the time I wrote them). The most important thing I learned was I hadn’t realised how much utter crap I’ve written. It’s true. It’s not even just bad… it’s boring.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure a way to organise my website using categories and tags for a while. The problem with my website is that it’s not very focused. (Apparently you need a tightly focused blog to be good). I write about anything that comes to mind, from roleplaying to my family.
Categories just don’t cut it for this I can’t just keep adding new categories with every post. They are very static and inflexible. So, what I had hoped was that I’d use categories to distinguish between “types” of posts. My short stories would go under one category and software downloads in another, for example. I’d dump anything else in a catch-all blog category. I’d then use tags to create a more organic categorisation structure with a limited number of tags that were easy to expand, easy for readers to navigation and mix-n-match.
After about ten posts, my tag list had utterly exploded. So much for ease of navigation. Tags aren’t really that useful. They don’t add any value to readers of your blog or website. The only nice thing is that you can use them to create “sets” of posts that cross many categories. For example the TDOMF tag cross software and my blog and covers any news related to one of the plugins I’m working on. Tags are useful to the author, not the reader. I can point people to the tdomf tag, and the rss feed for that tag, so that they can get the latest news for the plugin. I don’t have create a new category for it. Which is the main point for me to use tags.
The really cool thing, well I thinks so anyway, is the “tag cloud”. A tag cloud is just a list of the tags on a website but tags with more posts are bigger. You can see the full tag cloud for thedeadone.net here. It’s such an interesting way to present information about your website, what interests you the most, in a single visual snapshot. Sort of like a memory-map of your posts.
On a small sidenote, I see a lot of LJ blogs list all their tags in a sidebar, even the tags with only one or two posts. So you get this really ugly long list that scrolls right off the bottom of the page. Can’t you just specify to list only the top 40 or so tags? It really looks awful, I think. I prefer them listed alphabetically myself as well, so that there is a certain random feel to the size of the keywords. You can see a copy of my current tag cloud afer the cut/more link below.
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It’s already been over the blogosphere about how Wordpress 2.1.1 has been hacked. It’s pure laziness on my part I didn’t upgrade to 2.1.1 and also because it drove me up the wall when I did the initial upgrade of my site. Lucky me. For anyone on Redbrick, I’ve updated the install script so you can now safely install Wordpress 2.1 on Redbrick. See the wiki for details.
Now that I can setup a 2.1.2 blog on Redbrick, I guess it’s time now to start work again on my Wordpress TDOMF plugin. I’m getting about 1-3 emails/comments a day, asking for 2.1.x compatibility for it, so please everyone, hold on a little while longer before you kill me!
Did it. Done it. And you shouldn’t have noticed anything, unless you happened to be gawking at thedeadone.net on Saturday 4pm.
I had setup a duplicate of my website, did a test upgrade, so I knew exactly the problems I encountered, which were really only one, once I had gone through all the modifications required to get up and running on Redbrick. Besides upgrading all the plugins, I also had to change my code syntax plugin (using now SyntaxHighter). It’s nice. The previous one suited me fine too but it was incompatible with Wordpress 2.1. Still suffers a similar problem though that if you edit the post, you lose all your tabs and inline spacing. Pain in the hole.
The biggest difference I’ve noticed, so far, is the built in spellchecker (uses aspell locally) and that you can choose to write your posts in “code” (i.e. html) or a fancy visual editor.
(This post also suffers a dual purpose. It should also cross-post to livejournal to confirm all is up and running! 
)
Update: Arg! First bad point. It seems that if you have a “more” tag (i.e. the “Read More” link you see on posts on the frontpage), it won’t include anything after that tag in the RSS feed! That sucks. I’ve always included the complete text of posts in the RSS feed. I know some folk like just the extracts, however I’ve turned off some blogs just because, all I get is that extract in their feed. Damn. Have to see if someone has written a plugin to “fix” it…
Update #2: FFS! The admins had to shut down my wordpress because it was causing a huge load on the webserver. I believe this was due to this bug in Wordpress 2.1. Hopefully it’s okay now. I guess I won’t be creating a wordpress 2.1 install script until 2.1.1 now even though I’ve fixed it locally (fingers crossed). And now, bugger it, my old posts are pingbacking other posts on my site. Wordpress 2.0.x never did that. I’m getting rather annoyed by this “upgrade”!
Update #3: CompleteRSS plugin solves my RSS complaints.
Update #4: AJAX is quite funky in action. However it sucks when your trying to find which PHP files are being executed.
Created from scratch and all sparkling original web2.0 stuff. Yep. Been working on it slowly for a while now. Of course if your reading this post somewhere else than thedeadone.net, you won’t notice a difference. That’s why I’ve included lots of images in this post. (Now if your feed reader removes images well get a better feed reader!)
My previous theme (which I’ve made avaliable here) was a bit limited and, to be honest, I was beginning to find it more ugly each day. However it was an exercise in data-hiding and trying to control visitor flow. (I don’t think I succeed, did I?)
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Since my foray into LiveJournal, I’ve started writing more for my website (which is more and more becoming like some sort of blog). However the way entries are organised on my webpage (I’m talking about thedeadone.net and not livejournal) means that most of my writing gets filed under the general category: “News, rants, opinions and general thoughts”. Not a clever way of doing it. So I need a little feedback on it…
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