Zibblog » Blog

Sharing with Newsgator and FeedDemon

zibbler — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:41:17 +0000

Let me start with a plug for the Newsgator service. Their idea is to have an integrated one login system with client software that works well on every major platform. I used NetNewsWire on my mac for a long time and then switched over to FeedDemon since my work machine and main home machine now run windows. All my news reading at work and home are completely integrated and I find I like using a client app better than a web app for some reason.

Anyway, after reading Scott’s post, I wondered how I should share links with people. With the last release, FeedDemon’s newsbin feature got online sync and feed urls. Therefore, I can now create a newsbin that people can subscribe to if they want.

Here’s the link if you want to read the random items that I thought people might find interesting: http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/ClippingsRSS.aspx?uid=113427&fid=3421340

First post on the new blog (aka Intermittent lockups)

zibbler — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 07:47:58 +0000

I’m now running wordpress 2.0.2, and I’ve been pretty happy so far. It was running a little slow, so I tweaked some settings and I got it running a little faster. Hopefully, I’ll get some time to play around with it this weekend, but I’m probably going to burn most of Sunday getting my geek on at the Maker Faire. The blog is currently using the theme k2, which is an updated version of the wordpress default theme Kubrick. It’s got a lot of cool features, but I don’t think it’s quite what I’m looking for. I’ve also been looking at a theme called Leaves Revamped that appeals to the minimalist in me. I’m hoping to take some of the visual elements of Leaves Revamped and play around with the features of k2. In the end, this will work for now. I had been putting off the whole blog move until I moved the images on blogger to flickr, but I looked and I didn’t have any images from after September so I figured I might as well just move it.

In totally unrelated news, I spent the entire day trying to figure out why my new work laptop (a thinkpad t43p) kept suddenly locking up. After letting the IT department play around with it and not get anywhere, I ended up using the update software that came with the laptop update everything it wanted to. That included the bios, some firmware, and a few drivers. It hasn’t frozen up on me as I’ve been playing around on it here at home, but it worked fine over the weekend too.

100th Post

zibbler — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:01:00 +0000

My dashboard on blogger tells me that this is post #100, so I figured I’d celebrate it with a post in its honor. I’ve haven’t exactly been regular in my posting since I’ve been doing it for 6 months, but I hope that everybody has had some fun reading it. I just got back from my trip to Trinidad, so expect a blog entry and some photos really soon. I’m also planning on reviewing some of the gadgets that I’ve gotten recently. Most of my month of March is going to be spent on a hiatus from work since I didn’t take any time off after leaving Mercury. My parents are coming out here to help me work on my condo in the middle of the month, so there will probably be some in progress photos of that work. If anyone is interested in meeting the Zibmom and Zibdad, shoot me and email. There will probably also be a housewarming in April since I’ll have the condo in as good of shape as it’s going to be for awhile.

Starting the year off right

zibbler — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 07:46:00 +0000

Well, I’ve now entered the second calendar year for my blog, and I wanted to start off by saying thanks for reading. It’s nice to know that people find my odd little blog interesting.

If you haven’t seen it already, the short “Lazy Sunday” by The Lonely Island on SNL (available for free on iTunes) is well worth a watch. The graphic about how Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = crazy delicious is now available on Blue Collar Distro.

Content … you know you want some

zibbler — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 05:30:00 +0000

As I’ve been playing around with WordPress and fixing bugs at work, I’ve been thinking about content for the soon (depending on your definition of “soon”) to be launched coveringdistance.com along with a ideas for a theme to pull together the site. Given the name of the site, I feel like a running theme (or at least something with motion) is necessary. The first step is probably finding and customizing a WordPress theme. Themes.wordpress.net is a great site to try out different themes and see what fits. The site for the WordPress 1.5 Theme Competition has some nice info and spotlights some interesting themes.

Anyway, a theme and some fancy photoshopping is only part of the work (and the piece that will probably be left until my next trip home to Nebraska. The real goal of putting up my website is to provide some content that is at least somewhat useful and give myself an excuse to put something together. After some pondering, my first content will probably be a export of my rss subscriptions. Every once in a while I’ll be at work or at someone’s house and be unable to remember the url of some random rss feed that I read an interesting article on (happens mostly with comic book stuff). However, I believe that the real gem of my pondering is the idea of a Wiki for bay area runners. MediaWiki seems like it might be the best choice for the software, but I’m interested in any suggestions that people have for good free wiki software. I collect map images and PDFs for local trails, and I figured it could be a great resource if I can drum up enough interest. It’ll probably be the next piece of software to go up after I get the zibblog cut over to coveringdistance.

Pulling images from Blogger

zibbler — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:49:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about how the move to WordPress simply left the image links pointing to photos1.blogger.com. When I was clicking on images in WordPress on zibbler.com, I was getting some random errors talking about a failure to retrieve the image from the cache that were coming from the blogger image server. After a little bit of trial and error, I realized that if I viewed the image first using zibblog.blogspot.com, I could view it by clicking on it from zibblog.com. My only explanation for this is that the webserver for blogspot is reading for img tags as it serves up the page and makes those images ready to be served up. Images that are on blogspot pages that haven’t been looked at for awhile, therefore, wouldn’t be in the cache. It would be interesting to know how they’ve structured their serves to know exactly what this is optimizing around, but it isn’t hard to guess a few schemes where this makes a lot of sense. This will make writing something to pull down the images a little more tedious, but it still probably not too bad. However, for the moment, the zibblog will remain here.

On an only somewhat related note, I’ve been playing around with the “DreamHost Control Panel”, and I’ve got www.coveringdistance.com/zibblog pointing at the new zibblog. In all seriousness, despite the fact that I put it in double quotes and italics, the DreamHost admin features have been really nice. They put a nice gui around a lot of good features while still allowing you to do whatever you want. I used their automated install for WordPress and it worked really well. I’d highly recommend it for anyone wanting to set up a permanent domain without too much trouble and still have a good level of control.

CoveringDistance.com

zibbler — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 01:47:00 +0000

In my search for the domain name that screams “Zibbler!!!!”, I’ve settled on CoveringDistance.com. It works as a running reference and it embodies some of my opinions on life and the zen of running. It will be the final home of the zibblog and all things zibbler. I’ve got some ideas for non-blog content that I’ve been wanting to put up for awhile, so we’ll see how it goes. Thanks to all of the suggestions from friends of mine that included

s.az
shawnoftheneb.com
ilikepastries.com
zellerziggurat.com (based on a random joke about my opening up Zeller’s Ziggurat Bar & Casino some day in Korea)

The Great Migration

zibbler — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 01:26:00 +0000

In between waiting for my development server to redeploy and restart (anyone that has worked with me knows how long that can take), I’ve been playing around with the migration from Blogger to WordPress. I found a nice tutorial with some updates to the standard import. It works by having you modify your blog entry template and set up your blog to deploy to your wordpress installation. It had problems about halfway through the deploy transferring with sftp, so I switched it to normal ftp and it went through fine. There’s a few little things I’m probably going to change before the final move, but you can look at the results at zibblog.com. The biggest problem is that blogger has some nice support for uploading images. However, all my images are now on their server and I need to figure out some way to slurp them down and rewrite the links. I may just need to write some php or something since that is what the wordpress importer is written in.

Domain update madness

zibbler — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 22:30:00 +0000

While I was at work waiting for code to compile and deploy, I decided to play around with some domain registration. zellerfurniture.com is working and displaying a site coming soon message that dreamhost puts up. In preparation for a move of the zibblog to a “real” hosted solution where I can put up photos and other web pages, I registered zibblog.com and pointed it at the current zibblog. Scott swears by WordPress while other people that I know (like Rus and Dave) currently use Movable Type, so I’ll probably end up needing to do some research before I finally take a plunge. What was kind of funny was that I looked to see the current state of zibbler.com and found that it is currently registered to Tucows and they have some sort of coming soon site up. I’m currently trying to come up with some domain that really screams at me for a more permanent url.

Coming soon to a blog near you

zibbler — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 21:53:00 +0000

Joe’s comment to the previous blog entry has started me realizing that I am about 15 years behind on blog entries (the first 12 years of my life didn’t contain much that I really believe to be blogable (is that with 1 g or two? (can you really nest parentheticals like this?))). That is why I am throwing this post open to all of my friends that have blog entries they just can’t wait for. Some possibilities include:

the end of JAG
wasn’t Tom Cruise supposed to be in Batman Begins?
Zibbler’s guide to Zibbler’s movie ratings
CDs currently in Zibbler’s car

Feel free to put your ideas and/or votes in the comments.