Associated Knowledge

WordPress Easter Egg

desabol — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:04:41 +0000

I’ve been using WordPress for quite some time for my personal site and sites that I develop for my clients. I won’t get into the merits/virtues now, suffice it to say I find it extremely flexible and extensible. In my new job – more on this in a future post – I am lucky to work for a firm that feels similarly and we have used the platform to create a number of really great sites that extend well beyond what you may expect WordPress to be capable of. When combined we have 20+ years of experience with the platform and we have literally seen it all – at least so we thought – until last night.

As one of my many responsibilities I train and support our clients and make myself available around the clock to make sure that they are able to do what they need, when they need to do it. As onerous as it sounds, it’s actually a fun and fulfilling aspect of my job and helps me maintain a very customer-focused perspective. Last night I was watching Game 1 of the NLCS (go Phils) when I received two rather panicked email messages from one of our clients who is in the final stages of prepping her site for launch. She basically alluded to the fact that she was adding/editing some posts when she received a menacing message on her screen.

Danger!
Self-comparison detected.
Initiating infinite loop eschewal protocol.
Self destruct in… 3
2
1

Even for someone who has designed, developed and used the platform I had never heard of the problem prior to this. Not knowing exactly what was going on and suspecting the worst – a hack or some other type of breach – I was concerned. However, I was also a bit curious so I decided to try and replicate it myself on my own blog. All that I had to do was to create a post, allow a revision to be saved and then try to compare the older version against itself. Here were my results:

Now, I knew my own install was pretty secure – I keep up with patches and maintenance on a regular basis – and also host my sites on a different server from the affected client so I pretty quickly ruled out hacking. But I still wasn’t sure if it was a problem or something else. I turned to Google for some help. Turns-out that there is a documented, but very unknown “Easter Egg” for WordPress that has been present since version 2.6 (at least per Doncha – a source I really trust when it comes to WordPress).

Here’s what I learned because of this whole situation. First, even if you think you’ve seen it all you probably haven’t. Second, never underestimate the cleverness of a bunch of programmers with a little extra time on their hands. Finally, always, always, always (did I say always?) keep your WordPress installations updated. While it’s not a 100% full-proof way of keeping your site secure, it does go quite a long way toward that goal.

Blog Action Day – Climate Change: It’s All About Choices

desabol — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:45:49 +0000

The theme for the 3rd annual Blog Action Day is Climate Change and it’s a topic that I have a pretty keen interest in. Now I’m not going to reiterate what I said on Earth Day because my opinion on the importance of doing what we can to minimize our impact on the earth hasn’t changed – nor is it likely to – I’m just going to say that each and every one of us knows what he/she is or isn’t doing to make a difference. For those of you who take issue with the idea of climate change – I’ll simply ask you to apply some common sense – there isn’t a single place where humankind has touched that hasn’t been effected by our presence. Some times that presence has been positive and in others it’s been negative but we can’t take the credit for the good without accepting responsibility for the bad. Ultimately, however, the choice is up to each and every one of us.

For as long as I can remember I’ve made a conscious choice to do what I can. It’s mainly been by doing things like reducing consumption and minimizing waste. To be honest it’s not that hard – switching to energy efficient light bulbs, turning off lights, computers, and appliances when I’m not using them, recycling everything that I can, and driving a little less. Does it make a difference? I can’t say for certain but I firmly believe that the impact can be profound, especially if we were all to do it. In the words of the English Playwright and Poet John Heywood: “Many hands make light work.”

Whether you think that we are impacting the climate or not, consider this: we only have one planet to call home and it’s ours to do with as we see fit. We can leave it a little bit better than we got it or we can simply ignore the responsibility and do nothing. In the end, it’s all about choices. As for me, I’m choosing to do what I can. I want my son and all of the generations that follow to be able to marvel in this great place that we call planet Earth.

The Best Member Recruitment Video Ever

desabol — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:30:54 +0000

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus with my blogging due to a bit of instability in my life over the past couple of months. However, I’ve been itching to start writing again and I do have more than enough reasons/inspiration so I have nothing to do but get writing. I wanted to start off with a great video that a co-worker found earlier this week. When I saw it I immediately knew it was great fodder for a blog post.

I think the message is pretty simple. How effective are your member recruitment efforts? Are they compelling and give people good reason to join or do they simply subject people to a relentless chorus of redundant information in an attempt to wear them down (Wanna be a member)? I’d love to hear your thoughts about the video and how it relates (or doesn’t relate) to what you are doing to grow your membership.

And for those of you who are curious, the flick is called “Bimbo’s Initiation”. It was created in 1931 by Fleischer Studios starring Bimbo and featuring Betty Boop. It was the final Betty Boop cartoon to be animated by the character’s co-creator, Grim Natwick. You can read more here: Wikipedia Entry.

A View from the Cheap Seats – Commentary on ASAE Annual 2009

desabol — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:34:34 +0000

I had planned on being in Toronto for the 2009 ASAE Annual Conference. My flight and hotel were booked, my bags were partially packed (they always are) and I even won the coveted Toonie prize for creating the first feed successfully submitted to ASAE for inclusion in their aggregated event feed. I love everything about Annual – from the build-up to all of the on-site activity and interaction to the post-conference buzz that I carry with me for weeks after – but for the past two years it simply wasn’t meant to be. Finances have been tight and the past year hasn’t been necessarily kind to me so I had to make the command decision to bail. It was probably one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make in quite some time, and while I am watching the event unfold without me from the comfort of my home office envious of all of my friends who are obviously having a great time, I know that my decision was for the best.

However, I also refused to let my distance keep me away from the action and have found that ASAE has done a pretty good job of laying the foundation that allows folks like me, who couldn’t attend, to stay tapped into the action and activity. I say “pretty good” because I am noticing things that could be changed to provide an even better virtual experience. This isn’t a rant on how ASAE isn’t meeting my individual needs – I think they are doing a good job at that – just a perspective of someone who had planned on being there but couldn’t and would love to be engaged in more of an immersive experience.

Here are some initial thoughts:

The ASAE Annual Hub rocks. This is great for physical and virtual attendees alike and I love the mobile integration – when I tested it a few weeks ago it worked perfectly on my BlackBerry and I heard that iPhone users had a similar great experience. However, one nag that I am seeing is the Twitter feed does not update in real time. Call me a zealot but if you go to the trouble of creating a “one-stop-shop” for all things conference related don’t make me have to (a) constantly refresh the screen if I want to see the updated stream or (b) have to go somewhere else (e.g. TweetChat or Twubs) to get what I want. It’s not to hard to integrate the technology to make this possible but for somebody who does understand the technology it’s somewhat of a glaring oversight. Again the Annual Hub rocks – refreshing does not.
Speaking of the Twitter stream, I applaud ASAE for embracing Twitter and all of it’s goodness for disaggregating content creation and crowd sourcing live coverage of the many events that comprise the conference itself. I do worry – especially given Twitter’s troubles over the past few weeks – that this is a huge risk equivalent to placing all of one’s eggs in a single basket. All that separates success from #FAIL is another #DDOS attack on Twitter and the stream would effectively grind to a halt. This would not only isolate virtual attendees who are monitoring the stream to stay as in-tune with what is going on as possible but it would also probably disrupt event communications as Twitter also serves a secondary purpose as a back channel for planning and coordinating attendee activities. It’s not always the first thing on the mind of technology folks but risk mitigation is tremendously important – always have a plan B and plan C.

I think an option for future consideration would be using something like Laconica – the opensource twin of Twitter that could be installed on a private server and could keep going even if Twitter went down. Identi.ca is a great example of a Laconica site (here is a good review too). And because Twitter and Laconica have an extremely similar interface and the API is pretty much identical, the Laconica-powered stream could serve as the primary, while still streaming updates to Twitter, it could serve as a very viable fail safe and still involve anybody who is interested. Sure it’s a bit more complicated than I have laid out here, but it’s not overly complicated and ASAE has continuously proven to be extremely proficient with technology so I have no doubt they could pull this off with aplomb.
I saw a tweet from ASAE announcing the fact that 70 of 115+ sessions were being recorded and were available on physical media in exchange for the coupon on the learning journal. This is, and has been a great value add for conference attendees. Let’s face it, it’s always tough to get to every session you want to attend and this allows you to get a whole lot more bang for your buck. But what about virtual attendees? There’s nothing here for us. Since the session are already recorded why not pick a few select (possibly highly attended or some other quantitative measure) and post them online for virtual attendees to enjoy. It’s not terribly expensive or time consuming to have someone grab the audio and slide deck and throw them into a tool like Articulate Presenter or Camtasia and produce a pretty-good quality presentation for online viewing. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough to make me want to buy the recordings later or at least know that this is a must attend event in the years to come. Logistically it could be done overnight and posted on the Hub site the next morning. To me that would represent a terrific value add.

Let me reiterate that I think ASAE is doing a fantastic job with Annual this year. I can see it based on my own experience with the tools and resources they have put in place and through the great feedback that I am seeing from others, I just wanted to highlight some areas that would make the virtual attendee experience even better than it is now. I’m sure I’ll have more to share as I continue to observe/participate from afar, but until then have fun!

Heading to the 2009 ASAE Annual Conference

desabol — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:26:49 +0000

This post is going to serve two purposes. The first is to allow ASAE to make sure that their feed aggregator is working for all attendee contributed content at the Annual Conference. Way to go ASAE for taking the initiative to make this happen! I think it’s a great way to capture the real-time user generated content in a way that is beneficial for attendees and non-attendees alike. Technically it’s not that difficult to accomplish, but the value that it adds far outweighs any trouble they may experience along the way. I’m psyched to be part of the conference coverage and will do my best to add my observations, insights and anything else that I find useful or interesting during my time in Toronto.

The second purpose for the post is just to send a shout-out to all of my association colleagues that have been so supportive for the past few months. It’s been a pretty tough period in my life – I have the battle scars and bruises to prove it – but in the end it was well worth the energy and effort to get to where I am today. I couldn’t have made it without you. I think it’s a great example in community and just how powerful having a shared purpose and common interest can be. And while it will be great to meet up with my old friends I am also looking forward to being able to connect with the many virtual friends I have made over the past year.

I already have a pretty busy schedule planned – including a Professional Development Section meet-up followed by our official meeting on Saturday and all of the great keynotes and sessions that are on the schedule during the rest of the conference. That’s the official part. There is also all of the extra-curricular activities many of which are being organized/coordinated by YAP that I am looking forward to. I know this is going to be an event to remember!

Lots to see, lots to do, lots of great people to meet. I can’t wait! I am arriving on Friday and will be in Toronto through Wednesday, so please look for me and say hi! I’m looking forward to meeting you.

Music Unites Us – Or What Bobby McFerrin Can Teach Us About Unity

desabol — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:41:08 +0000

Thanks to Maddie Grant for sharing this (link) and tweeting about it (link). My wife is a musician and music teacher and while I am not musical – except for having a strong ear for sound (almost abnormally so) – I have always felt the magic of music. It truly can unite people who don’t have a whole lot in common and is definitely a unifying force. This piece from the World Science Festival demonstrates that what unites us is so much more powerful than what divides us. If we can all join together for a common purpose – even for something pretty simple – imagine what is really possible.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo

This is simply amazing and a great object example of the power of people united for a common purpose. Think about it. What can a common purpose or unifying force do for your organization? I think the results could be amazing.

Is This How You Plan for Web Projects?

desabol — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:00:32 +0000

I’ve been doing a ton of freelance web and online learning work lately and this video struck a chord with me. It led me to think about how we work with and treat vendors/service providers. Thinking back to when I was working for an association and even before that when I was in corporate America, I was guilty of really pushing on my vendors and asking for the impossible. Now as a vendor I see it from a completely different perspective.

It begs the question: how do you work with your vendors? Do you treat them fairly or do you continuously try to drive a hard-bargain? Are your project budgets based on reality or just numbers that are either disconnected from reality or based on what you think is fair? Are you willing to give a little to get a little? Granted it’s a two-way street, but very often vendors lose out; especially if they are just starting out or are in tough markets.

I’m fortunate that most of my clients have a pretty good appreciation of the value of the work I do, but every now and again I run into one that I have to educate a bit. As a vendor I provide the highest quality service for the best price that I can, but I also add-in a lot of value and often go well above and beyond what is expected of me? Do I have to? Not at all, but I know my clients appreciate it. I view our relationship as a partnership and investing in the relationship tends to help it grow. Do all service providers act the same way? Sadly no, but I think when you are looking for someone to work with it’s one of the first things you try to determine.

Just think about it.

First Blog Post Using the New WordPress BlackBerry App

desabol — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:24:37 +0000

For the purposes of this post we’ll keep things short and simple. Set-up and installation of the app on my BB 8330 (Curve) was quite easy. The application is pretty polished and intuitive and I haven’t experienced any technical issues yet.

There are one or two issues that I have note specific to adding categories to the post (e.g. I couldn’t move into the category field directly rather I had to access it via the BlackBerry menu key. And once I was in to the category selection dialogue it wasn’t really clear how to select the categories that I wanted to assign to the post – I did finally figure it out and you have to use the “Change Option” menu option to toggle the checkbox on or off – which seems a bit kludgy).

Other than those two usability issues, which aren’t really major, I am extremely impressed and am definitely going to continue to experiment with the app.

More to come…

Wordpress Application for BlackBerry

desabol — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:21:44 +0000

For those of you out there who can’t use an iPhone and all of the goodness associated with it, you know how frustrating it is to find good usable apps for your SmartPhone/Smart Device. While I can’t commit with 100% certainty, I’d probably give up my trusty BlackBerry Curve for a iPhone if Verizon ever offered it, but until that point (I’m not holding my breath) I am pretty happy with what I can do with my BlackBerry and the range of apps that have come available lately for it.

However there is one area that was definitely a sore point for me. I really never found a usable application for connecting to my self-hosted WordPress blog so I could post on the go and manage what I needed to. Sure there were other ways to get content to my blog, but it left a lot to be desired. A month or two ago Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automattic the creators of WordPress) announced at WordCamp San Francisco that his team was committed to creating an application for the Berry users. Of course it was well behind the release of an iPhone app that served the same purpose, but the word was finally official. What wasn’t clear was the timeline and a lot of us were left holding our breath and hoping it would be sooner rather than later.

It appears that it was sooner rather than later after all. Earlier today, the WordPress BlackBerry client launched in a public beta of a new open source BlackBerry WordPress application borne out of a collaborative effort between the folks at Automattic and the folks at Danais, who led the MoPress Open Source project. You can read more about their work on the project on their blog (WordPress for BlackBerry):

Here are some things to consider while taking a tour of this new BlackBerry app:

* The app is for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress version 2.5.1 or newer
* This app should work with any of the new BlackBerry devices such as the 8700, Pearl, Curve, Bold, and Storm
* BlackBerry OS requirements are OS 4.2.1 or newer

Being a public beta, it’s important to realize the large amount of potential bugs that can occur, before writing this app off as not what you want. If you’re not interested in trying a pre-release version of this software, you should wait until 1.0 is out.

To install the beta application: Point your BlackBerry browser to http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install and follow the instructions.

I’m going to be putting it through its paces for the next few days and will report back on my impressions. Stay tuned for more.

Multi-feed RSS Consolidation

desabol — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:51:31 +0000

While I normally keep my posts a little less technical I decided to jump into the technical realm based on a number of questions that I have seen on Twitter and particularly due to a request for help from a friend.

Many pundits have proclaimed that RSS is dead but I firmly disagree. I think RSS is still one of the easiest and most flexible medium to get information how you want it when you want it. However, with everything information related there is always the challenge of managing the barrage of information that everyone of us is dealing with every single day.

The purpose of this post is to illustrate an easy way to merge multiple site feeds into a single source to make it a little easier to manage and maintain. One perfectly good reason to do this is if you are an association who offers multiple/many individual feeds from your site and would like to offer your members a consolidated feed – but the utility doesn’t end there. It’s really only limited by your own need/imagination.

Let’s get started.

For the purposes of this brief tutorial we are going to use Yahoo Pipes largely because I believe it is the most flexible and easiest to use of all of the similar services available. If you have a Yahoo! (think Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, etc.) account it is really easy to get started. If not, the first step is to sign-up.

Once you are signed-in, click on the “Create A Pipe” link in the top menu bar:

You will then see the following screen which is the Yahoo! Pipes main stage where you can work your magic:

While the myriad options can be overwhelming, we are going to keep things simple and get right to the task at hand. We’re only going to be scratching the surface of what is really possible with Yahoo! Pipes so if you are really curious I’d encourage you to check things out in greater detail at some point in the future.

Our first task is going to be to add a few modules to the main stage. The first one we are going to add is the “Fetch Feed”. To do this you will have to expand the “Sources” menu on the right side of the screen and then “drag-and-drop” the module on the stage.

Above you can see that I have added three “Fetch Site Feed” modules to the stage. This is because I am going to be merging feeds from three sites into one. Once you have the modules on the stage, simply enter the URL’s from the sites that you want to merge. Because we are using the “Fetch Site Feed” module, not the “Fetch Feed” module, all that you have to do is enter the URL of the site(s) that you want to merge. However, the process would be the same if you knew the URL’s of the feeds and used the “Fetch Feed” module instead.

It would be tempting to simply try and merge the feeds together straight away, but we are going to hold off on that for a moment and add a few other modules that provide us with more control of the output. If you look at the navigation pane on the left you will see an option labeled “Operators”, you will want to expand that to gain access to the next two modules that you are going to want to add to your stage.

Click on the “Operators” option and that will reveal a new set of modules.

As I alluded to earlier, you can see that you have a bunch of options. For those of you with less of a technical orientation some of the options may sound like they are in a different language, while others may appear to be much more intuitive. Fear not. We are only interested in two of them for the next few steps: “Truncate” and “Union”

The “Truncate” module allows you to control the number of feed items that you will “fetch” from the feeds that you are merging. The “Union” module is where the true magic of this tutorial takes place and what is responsible for the “merging”.

Using the drag-and-drop method we used previously, you are going to want to add the “Truncate” module to your stage.

You should add as many of these modules as you have “Fetch Site Feed” modules. For the purposes of this tutorial you will see that I have added 3.

Once those modules are on your stage, you can fill-in the amount of items. I have chosen to use 10 from each feed.

The next step is to add-in the additional module from the list in the left pane that I referenced above: “Union”. Again, simply drag-and-drop this module to your stage. Once it is added, your stage should look similar to what I have below:

Take a deep breath! You are almost done. There are only a few more steps left to complete. You have all of the components on the stage that you need to merge your feeds into one. Now all you have to do is “Pipe” them together. To do that all you need to do is literally “connect the dots”. Simply place your cursor over the circle/bubble at the bottom of the module and you will see that cursor transforms into a hand. Drag the mouse to the top of the module below it. It sounds more complicated than it is, so just give it a shot. Below is an image of the modules on the stage, piped together.

Once you have everything “piped” together you will want to save your Pipe. To do this simply click on the “Save” button located on the top-right portion of the screen.

Doing this will enable you to “Run” your pipe and generate the output – which in this case is your merged feeds. All you have to do to “Run” the pipe is click on the “Run Pipe” link that will appear at the top-center of the screen if your pipe saved properly.

This will open a new tab/window and you will be presented with the results of your merged feed. Mine looks like this:

At this point all that is left to do is get the URL for the newly created RSS feed. You can see that you have plenty of options. However, if you are planning on offering it as a link on your site the most obvious choice is RSS.

Here is a link to the Pipe that I created for this tutorial: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=EsPef6lq3hGOG39MKX1_0w. You can take a look at it to see everything in completed form and also can clone it if you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating your own merged feed from scratch.

I hope it helps. Let me know if you have any questions or run into any problems in the comments below.