Wordpress

A personal website has just been a thing I’ve never been able to let go of. I’ve been horrible about updating them, but I’ve always kept a site around. As such, I realized recently that I’ve had a website continuously for almost 30 years. I got my first website around 1995 or 1996 when I headed off to college. Let’s just say, none of us knew what we were doing. We coded our sites from hand and filled them with every animated gif we could find and no background image was too busy. The flaming logo still remains my personal favorite touch on my websites.

It’s with mixed emotions that I retire my home on the web for the last decade. When I purchased radicalwacko.com back in 2001, I was a young, aggressive Libertarian, who thought that he could and should change the world. In other words, I was an insufferable, young, recent college graduate that you wanted to avoid making eye contact with and save yourself from the pedantic lecture that would inevitably ensue.

Now as an older, crankier libertarian - who increasingly doesn’t give a damn - it starts to be embarrassing to give out a domain like radicalwacko.com. If you are over the age of 35 and still think of yourself as a radical or a wacko, you are either deluding yourself or you really probably should be on a watch list. I actually blush every time the Best Buy clerk asks me for my email address. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself why keep a domain name that you refuse to acknowledge.

Thanks to the excellent help of the guys over at WordPress, the feeds are back. Besides this little set back, 1.5 is a great product. The theme system alone is enough to make it worth while. I’m still evaluating looking at a .NET product, such as DasBlog, so that I would be in a better position to edit the system, but for the time being I’m shelving any conversion for the time being.

Sorry folks, but there are some blog issues I’m working through right now. While the upgrade to WordPress 1.5 seemed to go fine, all of my RSS feeds are returning 404 errors. My php skills are very poor so it may take me awhile to get them back up and running. If I can’t, I’ll have to switch of a .NET blog engine where I can understand the source code. ;)

This is kinda amusing to me because my buddy Peter and I were just talking this morning about how it was inevitable that Google would have to weigh in on the comment spam plague. Today they announced on their blog that they will be implementing an “nofollow” tag that will allow you to block links on your site from being used for ranking purposes on Google. The same rule applies to MSN and Yahoo searches. From the blog post:

I should preface this post by saying I am not, in any real way, an open source developer. I feel no compulsion to distribute the source of my work for others to modify and distribute on their own without proper monetary compensation. In fact I am revolted by anyone who suggests that I have a moral obligation to do so. This is the talk of looters who wish to steal the works of others for their own purposes without the producers consent. However, my feelings on the politics of GNU style open source are well known and not the purpose of this post.

This is a little technical post for all of you geeks out there. I’ve really appreciated some of the features of the WordPress blog engine. One of the really unique features is the ability to attach latitude and longitude information to a particular post and for it to display a link to one of the various mapping sites out there. However, I also really appreciate the various blog posting clients (Azure, wBloggar, Zempt) for creating and editing my posts. But none of these clients has the geographic tagging ability built into it, which is especially important for mobile blogging. The following hack lets you enter latitude and longitude as XML tags within the post content and they’ll be stripped out and turned into the standard GeoTags.

If you are looking for a great windows blogging tool, I’ve found it. Up to now, I’ve been using w.bloggar which is really a nice product. However, it is primarily designed to support users of Blogger.com. However, with this new product called Zempt, I can take advantage of the advanced options of the WordPress system such as multiple category posts and editing the post date/time. If you are a blogger, check it out..

Well that didn’t take nearly as long as I had anticipated. Still a few wrinkles to work out but all in all everything seems to be back to normal. I gave the site a slightly more “standard” blog look. The latest version of WordPress seems pretty nice but does seem to run a little slower than version 0.72. However, it’s nice to have this outstanding upgrade out of the way. Let me know what you think.

Well, at long last the new site seems to be up. A few of you may have to wait longer for the propagation to complete, but from what I can tell, everything is running smoothly.

Most the the site will look the same, however there are a few minor changes. First of all, I have heard several complaints about the amount of clicks necessary to move around the site. In that end, the galleries, writings and movie review sections have removed all paging from the listing of articles. This may have to be replaced as the site grows, but I’m sure I can do a better job than before.