all things me

Via: Jafer as usual

1) Why do you keep your weblog/blog/online writing thingie: for fun, for fame, for money, for popularity, or for another more obscure reason? What about the weblog gives you what you want?

For fun, for memory (not memories, as such), for an excuse to tweak a design to no end, for not forgetting how to type.

2) Imagine that your weblog becomes wildly popular: your hit counter skyrockets, your comments are overflowing, and everyone is emailing you about everything you post. Name 3 positive things that could come of this, and 3 negative things.

Pros:

1. I’d know my writings are of use (or amuse) to someone else besides me
2. I’d know what other people think of things that I’ve cared for enough to write about
3. I’d get some useful and interesting information off the comments

Cons:

1. I’d worry about my bandwidth
2. Replying to all the comments and mails
3. I’m sure the people are just looking for page ranking for themselves

3) What’s the worst possible result you can imagine (short of being electrocuted or having your computer take over your brain, and who says it hasn’t already?) from keeping a weblog?

Family coming to talk deep about the few “personal” things I’ve written about.

4) What do you do to prevent that worst possible result from happening?

Nothing really. Just keeping my fingers crossed.

5) List 5 reasons that would make you stop keeping your weblog for a period of 6 months to a year.

1. Uneventful world
2. Busted computer
3. Having no money for the internet connection (oh, but there’s Uni or libraries — well then, having graduated, moved out, and not bothered to wait for the brats to get off the library computers)
4. Getting tired of it
5. Being too busy

6) List 5 reasons that would make you stop forever.

1. Dying
2. Not being able to type (either motorically or mentally)
3. Getting too old for/tired of it?

7) Describe your definition of a ‘successful weblog.’

A site where people like to comment, posts have something important-ish in them.

8 ) Is yours successful by your definition?

No. But that doesn’t bother me. I don’t blog for the world.

9) What pisses you off most in other weblogs? What pleases you most?

Pisses: reckless spelling, ads, 2+ column layouts, mile long link lists, too tiny text (I’ve committed that crime myself in the past, and still on a couple of sites), the necessity to comment on the same things everybody else comments on, iframes when the basic page won’t fit the window either
Pleases: nice layouts, interesting links to check out, funny memes/quizzes, interesting news…

10) Make a list of 10 weblogs/journal style websites that you wish your weblog/website/writing site was like.

I don’t really want to list any, and 10 is a lot. First of all, I don’t know that many (although I check out quite a lot because of hanging out at the WP forum) and if “being alike” means layout-wise, I don’t want to be like anysite else. If “being alike” means the writing abilities, then I wouldn’t be myself anymore. I write what I write, how I write and I can’t really do anything about it. And if my writing was alike someone else’s, I’d probably have way more typos.

I don’t remember being this terrified of an exam before. My heart’s racing like I’ve had too much coffee (but I haven’t… well, a mug 5 hours ago, but not too much).

I know why I’m terrified. I don’t have a feeling that I’ve read enough. But the problem is, there wasn’t enough material! Just some vague links to different sites, so I only know finite-state automaton systems well enough, but not (plain, augmented, or recursive) transition networks or artificial intelligence or that damn mysterious acronym SM which I couldn’t figure out. No, it doesn’t stand for sadomasochism.

These sort of comments just make my little forum volunteer heart flutter.

With the help of my new hero “Minna” over at the WordPress forums I have a new navigation look. I grabbed the necessary css from Michael Heilemann at Binary Bonsai. Minna helped me step by step with changes at the forum.

Thanks Minna!

WWIFL IWAWOTWA? IWRSA BONOWUOA. MPSTLMA, AESTFY WNAMD. TOTI, NEBTGUTK. NTISFAEODM ICSMH TTRWEGOLSF. *S*

(To demolish this one-of-a-kind reading experience and make my hard work a complete waste of my time go to the post’s individual page.)

Whether or not anyone would ever trackback me, trackbacks are back. However, only genuine trackbacks are let through the moderation, I won’t allow site advertisements that really have nothing to do with my post specifically.

22 minutes into the new WP version and I’ve got it installed. Yay.

Only one thing:

That’s the plugin list and green shows which are activated. I mean, GAG! Look at that green! And blue links! I don’t like blue, but if it’s gotta be blue (I KNOW there are a few admin “themes”) then it can’t have green — at least not that kind of green.

*goes to tweak the admin stylesheet*

Ah, a bit better. I thought about leaving all the rows as plain grey (or white) but figured maybe distinguishing activated plugins comes in handy when I’m in a real hurry or suddenly can’t read……….

Now, where was the other green ghastly thing I caught a glimpse of…

Note to self: The next time you upgrade, remember to save a copy of admin quicktag hacking… AND remember to check which plugin files are in wp-admin

Damn tax hogs. I have to pay residual tax for last year. They better pay me back for this year because my percentage got bloody high.

What a weird dream I had. I — in the shape of Felicity Porter (from the tv show) — was at a university cafe for lunch. I took the normal meal plus a banana and a bag of some sort of candy, and when I went to the cashier. The lady there handed me some change, and I saw that the meal had cost 179 euros. I couldn’t believe it so I asked the lady to check it. She asked me if I had made sure what each thing costs and I told that the banana is only a 1 euro, the meal is 2,10 so can the candy cost 176? I was getting really annoyed and wanted to buy only the normal meal but for some reason I couldn’t return the others. As a compensation the lady offered me a couple of licorice bars which I found really offensive because there was an dark skinned man working in the kitchen.

Then I woke up.

A weird character in Jafer’s pingback title (or site title, actually) messed with my comment feed, so I decided to exclude pingbacks (as I won’t allow trackbacks) from my comments feed. I tweaked wp-commentsrss2.php file (found in the root WP folder), around lines 36 and 44:

AND $wpdb->comments.comment_approved = ‘1’ AND $wpdb->comments.comment_type != ‘pingback’

Comments are of type ” (null) and trackbacks are ‘trackback’, so I think putting comment_type = ” would work as well and you wouldn’t have to put a != (not equals) for both pingbacks and trackbacks.

[edit: May 9] That was a short-lived hack. WP1.5.1. solves the problem with odd characters causing grief for RSS feed readers [/edit]

I made a random header image script for

<?php // Random header image
/* there are 3 pictures to choose from, so number is either 0, 1 or 2 */
$i = rand(0,2);
if ( $i == 0 ) { ?>
  <img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/header_01.jpg” alt=”Caramel Ears” />
<?php } else if ( $i == 1 ) { ?>
  <img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/set2/header_01.jpg” alt=”Caramel Ears” />
<?php } else if ( $i == 2 ) { ?>
  <img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/set3/header_01.jpg” alt=”Caramel Ears” />
<?php } ?>

Anyway, this post wasn’t about my amazing coding abilities but the pictures: GO SEE! [site has been removed]