Benny Ling’s Bling

Right, so maybe you liked them, maybe you didn’t. Maybe having a publicly-searchable archive of my tweets was a good idea, maybe it wasn’t.

Either way, the “Twitter Weekly Updates for week BLAH” posts have now been turned off. Frankly they were just annoying walls of text that (probably) no-one actually read, and they just cluttered up my search results when trying to look for stuff I’d actually blogged.

Not to mention the timer which apparently had a mind of it’s own – Sunday 3am is NOT Sunday at 10pm, and there was even that post which was posted on a Wednesday… Argh, what?! The time difference never seemed to be consistent, so I got angry and removed it altogether.

Maybe you’ll notice they’re gone, maybe you won’t. Either way, it’s gone, and I don’t plan to add it back anytime soon. If I feel like it I’ll also be removing the previous archives manually with WordPress’ bulk actions.

Much love for WordPress’ built-in bulk edit actions.

oEmbed, as described at oEmbed.com, is a specification that allows media providers like Flickr, YouTube and others to provide data for consumer applications like WordPress about media. So by including an Embed (Use the File uploader and choose “From URL” and paste the link to the page that contains the media, not the media file itself) in a post or page, WordPress can retrieve the relevant specs on the media file and formulate a properly formatted embed accordingly.

via 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9 — Technosailor.com.

You know, I probably couldn’t care less about oEmbed. So I can embed media from different providers, great. Sarcasm intended.

The thing is, I don’t work with media that much. Sure, I’ll stick in the odd YouTube video here or there, and I’ll also use pics once in a while to illustrate a point, but in those cases the standard tools just don’t cut it.

For example, I’ll Press something from a cool YouTube video, and while WordPress will automatically fetch the embed code for me, it’s usually miniscule and doesn’t represent the content I want. By using the custom embed options available to every embeddable video on YouTube, I get to customise things like the border, related content, and size – you’ll have noticed that videos seen on this website will have a grey border, show no related content after the video finishes playing, and, most importantly, are bigger than the normal YouTube size.

From what I understand about oEmbed, it won’t let me customise these options at all – “…and formulate a properly formatted embed accordingly.”

I’d say more about customisability and WordPress, but that’s for another time.

Posting by email does not support attachments and any attachments sent with the email will appear in their raw form in the blog post.

via Post to your blog using email « WordPress Codex.

FAIL!

I’ll just have to use a Posterous, then. Or the official WordPress iPhone app.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Many of the plugin authors I have spoken with throughout the community tell me that very rarely do they ever get a donation let alone a Thank You for releasing their work to the public. Based on the plugin authors feedback, end users demand more features, demand better support, and in the end, have this feeling of entitlement even if the plugin is available without a price tag. The reality is, that for a freely available plugin, you’re not entitled to anything. I don’t know about you, but I certainly would not like to be part of a community that is known as thankless.

via Is WordPress A Thankless Community? | Weblog Tools Collection.

I would err on the side of “yes, WordPress is a thankless community” with this one, but realistically, it could easily swing both ways.

I certainly don’t donate (but maybe I should), but I do try and help out exposure by blogging about awesome plugins/themes that I use.

To all those I haven’t mentioned, thanks. Thanks for all the hard work you’ve put in so that I didn’t have to.

So… Hopefully you’ve noticed the new theme by now.

If you haven’t, I have no idea what you’re doing here at this very second. You do realise that you’re on the internet, yeah? :S

I hated the old theme for a number of reasons -

1. Horribly commented code.
   One of my pet peeves has to be programmers (web or otherwise) who don’t follow good programming practices. In Satiorii’s case, it wasn’t just lack of comments – just a lack of readability in general. Ugh.
2. Sidebars at the BOTTOM of the page.
   Uh, hello? Sidebars at the BOTTOM of the page? That’s just not cool – it might have been had you included links to jump down quickly, but in any case, sidebar widgets looked like they had been hacked together, and ugly as hell – misalignment, horrible formatting, etc..
3. No search.
   See 2. Because search was so horrible, it wasn’t even worth using.

The previous theme – you could clearly tell it wasn’t designed to be modified. Plus it didn’t seem to be made by someone who understood how wordpress works – at least, not in the traditional blogging sense.

However, it wasn’t all bad – I chose to look past it’s shortcomings to focus on the good, because that’s the kind of guy I am.

I did like elements of it, otherwise it wouldn’t have stayed as long as it did – particularly the awesome header links that showed off my pages:

They’re quite nice – I love it how it placed those things front and centre, exactly where they should be.

Another thing I quite liked was the awesome typography of the blog name and sub-heading – under OSX, it just looked awesome. However, under Windows it was a different story – it seemed to be borked for most people anyway (or maybe just Chris). Maybe it’s how the two OSs render fonts, or how the anti-aliasing was waaaaay nicer on OSX, or something.

Anyway, I hope you like the new theme. It’s (the somewhat popular) Grid Focus, by Derek of 5thirtyone.com – if you have a chance, head over to that site to check out more themes. I’m even thinking of using The Unstandard theme for the Radi8 website… Oops, probably shouldn’t have leaked that

The final date has passed and the following people have won a FlashMint WordPress Template: Benny Ling, Simon | Teenius and Amanda. Congratulations to the winners!

via Giveaway contest – FlashMint.com Premium WordPress Themes.

So it turns out that I’ve won a free premium WordPress theme. Cool, yeah?

What isn’t so cool is that most of the designs suck. It’s not the designs themselves, it’s just that the design’s aren’t me. For a personal blog, that’s important.

What to do? If I do choose a theme and it’s not customisable to my own requirements, then I probably won’t use it. If I choose a theme and don’t decide to use it, well, there’s not a whole heap I can do about that either.

I’ll probably choose a theme just for the hell of it – and use it on another site I’m developing at the moment. Radi8′ers, this one’s for you.

Free WordPress Counter Strike Web2.0 Theme Template, theme designed for first person shooting games blog. This is a fabulous theme, It has very interesting images, cool color scheme. Two columns and fixed width. This is an XHTML and CSS valid theme, tested properly on Firefox3, IE6 and IE7, works both well with WordPress 2.7 and older versions, and supports threaded comments coming with WordPress 2.7.

via Free WordPress Counter Strike Blog Web2.0 Theme Template » Free Web Templates and Themes.

I might install this for the lulz.

Ugh.

Have I mentioned before how much I hate choosing new themes for my blog? Or for any website, for that matter…

It’s difficult because of three reasons:

• It’s hard to find something that works for you. Being the admin of the blog, you know where it’s going. When you’re looking for a theme, you know exactly what you want – in the case of Benny Ling’s Bling, I wanted something that was simple but elegant – something that stood apart from the hundreds of other blogs out there.
• Free is good. Unfortunately, being the poor student that I am, I don’t have much of a web budget – especially for things like WordPress themes. It’s like a wise man once said: “Pay peanuts, get monkeys”, as well as the age-old adage of “You get what you pay for”. Don’t get me wrong, though – I’d totally pay for a theme if I decided that it was going to work for me, assuming it is reasonably priced. US $50 is not my idea of reasonable.
• Finding something that will require minimal tweaking is hard to do – especially when the theme is free to begin. It’s like the hardware and software problem – even though Microsoft make software that’s designed to work on every computer under the sun, sometimes it needs a little help. Apple, on the other hand, make both the hardware and the software – the result of which is that “it just works”.

With these three things in mind, I have managed to settle on Elegant Grunge, by Michael Tyson. I’ve had to compromise in some areas – while I haven’t given it a full test-run yet, I’m sure I’ll find something later on down the track that needs to be changed. So far so good, though – fingers crossed it stays that way.

UPDATE: No, I haven’t settled on Elegant Grunge. Instead, I’ve settled on Sator-ii, by Felipe Lavín. It’s got some pretty horrible CSS (no comments, c’mon), and has some funny spelling mistakes – but that’s okay, because I don’t think the creator is a native english speaker.

You may think I’m missing out something here – why don’t I just make my own theme? Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done – I’d have no idea where to start with a WordPress theme, let alone make a good one… Sure, I can hack my way around a CSS stylesheet, and I can diagnose and fix any formatting/styling issues with WordPress, but apart from that… Time constraints mean making my own them just isn’t feasible at this point in time. One of these days I probably should, but I’ll leave it to the experts for now.

Smiley images and the text used to produce them*:

In some instances, multiple text options are available to display the same smiley.

Why Doesn’t it Work for Me?

If smileys work for others at your site but not for you:

Type a space before and after your smiley text. That prevents the smiley being accidentally included in the text around it.

Make sure not to use quotes or other punctuation marks before and after the smiley text.

via Using Smilies « WordPress Codex.

This is just for personal reference.

Tis been quite a while since we had a “iA!” post over here, and inbetween all the CES/Engadget/1000 RSS items, it’s been quite insane. I guess that just comes about from trying to do 1 MILLION things at once.

Just between you and me, though, I’m heaps glad that I get to go to a place with scarce internet access. Although I hate to think of how my inbox and RSS feedreader will look like when I get back (over 1000 news items in NetNewsWire was not cool… I blame you, CES, Macworld, and Engadget!), it’s going to be great – no constant pressure to “do stuff”, just the constant “chill” of a (decidedly, well-deserved) holiday.

Anyway, today I’m here to talk about Google Analytics and why it’s awesome.

So… got a website? Need to have grossly detailed analysis of your website visitors, as well as such arcane statistics such as bounce rate, average time on site, browser capabilites, connection speeds, hostnames, screen resolutions, and literally all that jazz?

If so, Google Analytics is your friend.

Quick explanation: Analytics is a website monitoring tool. At it’s most basic level, it will tell you how many “hits” your website has got over a monthly period (you can adjust the time period), how many page views, how many pages per visit. In addition to this, the Dashboard tells you how long the average user spends on your site – as well as the percentage of new visits.

Diving in a little further, or just scrolling down the Dashboard reveals even more info – Map Overlays (where all your visits come from, drilled down to city), Traffic Sources (where all your visitors come from, eg direct traffic, search engines, referring sites), and Content Overview (which tells you what pages got how many hits).

But wait, there’s more!

Much, much, much more. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t use the vast majority of Analytics – there is a LOT of as-yet unharnessed power in it. Stuff that I wouldn’t bother with.

For instance, in the Visitors drilldown, we have an absolute plethora of information about your visitors, from what web-browser and operating system combination they used to visit your website, how many colours their screen could display, what resolution their screen was, as well as what version of flash and java they had.

In addition to this, there are Traffic Sources, Content, and Goals drilldowns as well, with the same level of in-depth information as the Visitors tab.

In a way, Google Analytics is scary. It manages to collect all this information from a small JavaScript embedded in a web page, which of course has to be embedded in all of your web pages that you want tracked.

As you may very well know, WordPress powers both freshbytes and this website, Benny Ling’s BLING. With WordPress, you can’t directly manipulate the HTML of a webpage, as it is automatically generated by the WordPress engine iteself. Instead, you have to add a Plugin to WordPress – for both freshbytes and this website, I’m using the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. Using this plugin couldn’t be simpler – install, put in your Tracking Code (Analytics will supply you with this), and boom, you’re done. This plugin will also track any outbound clicks, as well as any downloaded documents.

It’s thanks to Analytics that I can see that this website has seen a 275% increase in visitors over the past month, with a 337% increase over the past week. That’s not a bad effort, actually.

So, how did that happen? Massive, massive pimpage. Ever since the introduction of Press This, blogging has actually become enjoyable. Wading though the crap to see what is, and isn’t bloggable still isn’t as enjoyable, but Press This makes blogging… easy. Write interesting articles on your website. Get people to read them by pimping them wherever, whenever possible. Share the link in Facebook. Stick it as your status message. Tweet it. Whatever.

Last but not least… I still cannot figure out why the article I blogged about a while ago about the wife who set her husbands genitals on fire with metho (the husband, unsurprinsgly, died as a result) is still the most popular article on this website. Wait – my apologies. It seems that that article has now been pipped by the Seven reasons the Palm Pre is better than the iPhone article I did. The Macworld 2009 keynote summary I wrote (at 6:15am, right after the keynote itself ) was also pretty popular.

Google Analytics is highly recommended if you run any kind of website yourself, or for a client, or whatever. Get it, you won’t regret it! Can’t argue with the price either – the best things in life really are free

Well, I figured there was something wrong when my website was taking over a full minute to load.

I used Safari’s Web Inspector to narrow it down to one file: load.php

Now, that file is a part of DoYouFeed.com’s wordpress plugin.

For the uninitiated, the DoYouFeed plugin allows wordpress users to activate a iPhone/iPod Touch friendly version of their website – using specialised User Agent calls and so forth.

Unfortunately, the plugin was making my site lag like hell – freshbytes, too – so I have disabled it for now.

If anyone knows any wordpress-friendly iPhone/iPod Touch friendly content formatters/aggregators, then get in touch with me, either via comments on this post, or the Contact page.

Ideally, I’d like something like the tumblr-optimised iPhone/iPod Touch specific version, ala Adam D’s tumblelog in iPhone format. That’s seriously ultimate.

Well, I’ll be.

Maybe I want WordPress to be more like Tumblr, with it’s different kind of posts (videos, images, quotes, links), and all that jazz.

So anyway, in WordPress 2.7, they’ve added a QuickPress option. That covers just the text posts that tumblr offers.

The rest? What about quotes, links, music and videos?

Well, that’s where Press This comes into play. From any website, I can select some text, and hit the “Press This” bookmarklet on my bookmarks toolbar. The text that I had selected is now quoted, the title of the page between the tags of the post, and the URL of the webpage is now stuck as a “smart link”, i.e. <a href=”webpage URL”>title of webpage here</a> like so.

But until then, I haven’t been able to insert any images from blog posts, or anything. It was the one thing that really annoyed me about Press This. My first two gripes I had already dealt with – the links from Press This posts now open in a new window, and the text that I’ve selected is now stuck in <blockquote> tags.

Images had me stumped – even though the PHP file had the actual code for images, I didn’t have the faintest clue about what it did. I managed to figure out what the code for flash videos (like YouTube) did through pure experimentation, but the images? I had no idea.

Until today.

Today, I posted the story about Senator Conroy’s plan to filter the Australian Internet. I really, really, wanted to include the image from that post in my post – but I had no idea how to do that via Press This. So, I screenshotted the image using Skitch, intending to insert the image as a normal image in the post.

But, no. Press This automatically showed me a list of all the images that it could find on the page – I found the image that I wanted, clicked on it, and that was that – the image was now inserted in my post.

I <3 WordPress.