59ideas

WordPress 2.8 to be released in May xxth

Ken — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:43:04 +0000

Accidentally bump into this WordPress 2.8 page on WordPress Codex. The wording seems to imply WordPress is getting ready to release 2.8 sometime in May.

On May xxth, 2009, WordPress Version 2.8,
named for xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, will be released to the public. For more
information on this enhancement and bug-fix release, read the Development Blog and see the Changelog for 2.8.

AdAdvantage R9.0 released

Ken — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:49:00 +0000

After a few weeks of using the update without noticing any problem, the files are packaged and available for download at Google Codes.

More information about the AdAdvantage theme can be found here.
Please report any bug or issues.

Enjoy!

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Offline Blogging Tool for MacOSX and Ubuntu?

Ken — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:08:12 +0000

Since moving to MacOSX and Ubuntu, I’m missing the very useful BlogDesk offline blogging program.

BlogDesk development seems to have slowed or stopped but it has enough features to satisfy. I especially loved the ability to insert and resize the image directly in the program. The image is then automatically uploaded together with the post. Simple and effective. For those that are (still) on Windows (which I know many of you are), do yourself a favor and try it.

ScribeFire has been around for sometime and I had tried it in various stages with disappointment. Unfortunately it seems to be the only offline blogging tool available that is availabe for both Mac and Ubuntu.

Mac has a few paid tools with Ubuntu seems to have a total lack of offline blogging client that is still being actively developed. Let me know if you know of any recommendation, preferrable opensource or free, works on Mac and Ubuntu.

In the meantime, I’m going to give ScribeFire a go to see if it has gotten any better.

Here’s using ScribeFire in Ubuntu.

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Update to latest K2, fixed layout problem

Ken — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:16:32 +0000

Finally got around to update AdAdvantage to the latest K2 nightly build (k2-1.0-RC7.3-revision-778). This just fixed the layout problem which has existed since the last post.

There had been numerous changes in the K2 code since my last sync with it. I would say the code actually got much better organized. This makes syncing and maintaining the code to AdAdvantage easier.

There are some interesting development in the header and footer blocks and hooks. When I have some time, I like to take a look at how to make use of those.

Otherwise, things seems to “just works”, after the update which is great. The code changes is already in Google Code svn. Will be letting the theme run here for a while before making a package and publishing to Google Code.

Broken blog layout, WordPress 2.7.1 upgrade

Ken — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 02:34:39 +0000

Updating to WordPress 2.7.1 seems to have broken my layout. Please bare with me while I try to fix it.

Broken layout aside, I am very impressed with the auto-upgrade feature in WordPress. It just downloads the file can upgrade the site and database in place. Amazing! A very big congratulation to the WordPress team for this excellent work.

Now, if only there is backup and roll back feature. Would that be too much to ask?

Do you use Knol, Squidoo and Wikipedia?

Ken — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:20:35 +0000

An adage today is that it is not about knowledge, it is about finding and filtering knowledge.

One of the ways to find and filter knowledge is to have someone authoritative do that and presents the result to you in a digestabe quanta of knowledge.

Knol, Squidoo and Wikipedia represent three such approach to presenting knowledge that you can turn to. Each with their interesting ideas and twists to it.

While surfing this afternoon, I first learned about Knol which reminds me of my post about Squidoo before. So I went on to explore closer to see how these user-generated-content sites differ.

Knol was launched not too long ago by Google with the aim of encouraging people to contribute knowledge. How to do that since other sites are also encouraging, even depending, on people to do that?

Google called the quanta, or in their term, unit of knowledge “knol“. The approach is to highlight the author instead of the content. In this way authors get recognition for what they write and there will be multiple articles on the same topic by different authors.

Google is smart to play on the on the idea of attention economy. How do one get people’s attention and motivate people to contribute? By offering a way to be an author and draws attention to themselves. On top of that, authors can also choose to earn revenue by allowing Google to serve ads.

Squidoo has a very similar idea to Knol. Launched earlier than Knol, Squidoo also encourage user to create pages of information which they termed as Lenses.

A lens is, as described by Squidoo, one person’s look at something online.

Beside just textual content, Squidoo provides modules to pull images, videos, books, links, rss, maps, together into a single page.

Squidoo’s approach applies the ideas of meshup that became prevalent in this web 2.0 era. Taking peices and reassemble them into new distilled infromation.

I tried some Lenses on Squidoo when it started but soon lost interest.

Wikipedia is the well-known site that allows many of us to dump the volumes of encyclopedia sitting on the book shelf collecting dust.

The idea of collecting and filtering knowledge is an old one, dating even before the first encyclopedia was published or the term coined.

Wikipedia puts the collective of the web to work. The idea was deem counter-intuitive to begin with but it succeed in putting together the largest volume of knowledge available.

Though Wikipedia does has its many criticism, it is still my first source of choice when seeking all kinds of knowledge.

Whether it is Knol or Squidoo or Wikipedia (as I found out later also Hubpages or Helium), they are all competiting for the attention of the knowledge seekers as well as the providers.

Also, in order to be useful they had to be around for the user. Which means they have to survive, whether through posting ads or asking for donation.

Which model would succeed?

Do you use these sites to learn a new knowledge?

Do you know of any smilar approach to find and filtering knowledge? Please share with me in the comment.

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GMail changed favicon

Ken — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 05:41:58 +0000

Refreshed my browser and noticed that GMail is a new favicon. In fact a number of Google properties seem to have changed to this new favicon.

I rather prefer each site to have their own favicon, with many tabs open, it is easier to spot the tab visually.

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Moving Pegasus & ThunderBird archives to GMail

Ken — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:42:58 +0000

Storing everything, especially email in the cloud had been all the buzz lately.

Since moving to GMail I have not use a email client again. Going back to email client like ThunderBird seems like a step backward. No more worry about migrating email archive when changing computer, reinstalling system. No more backing up and copies of backup of different clients lying around. Whether working at home, office or cafes, it is just a single logon.

Well then the last step to complete the cloud migration is to move the outstanding archives backup dating almost a decade ago into the cloud. And I did it last weekend.

Here are some notes for those intenting to move existing Pegasus Mail or ThunderBird email archive into GMail.

ThunderBird

Since both ThunderBird and GMail both support IMAP, it is rather easy to install a copy of ThunderBird (I use the version from PortableApps which can be installed and then deleted after use.)

Follow this instruction to setup your GMail and ThunderBird for IMAP.
Next Add an POP3 account to hold your archive mails.
Go to (for Thunderbird Portable) ThunderBirdPortable/Data/profile/Mail, look for the account created.
Copy your backup mail archive into this folder. (You did backup the profile folder of your old Thunderbird right?)

Once setup you can run ThunderBird and just drag old emails into the GMail IMAP folders.

Some useful tips I had discovered,

GMail uses Labels (or tags) to represent the folders in IMAP. To create sub-folders, you can name the label in a directory-like format.
So using labels arc/work, arc/personal, in ThunderBird they will appear as arc folder with 2 sub-folders work and personal.
If you have thousands of emails, hue attachments and a slow connection, move them in a few parts.
Connect to the webmail and Thunderbird IMAP at the same time. Occassionally Thunderbird will report a Web login required (Failure) error which is fixed by signing on to GMail from the web.

Pegasus Mail

Pegasus Mail (PMail) is the very first email client I use and I still have some old archives in there.

PMail also support IMAP so on first assumption is that it would work like ThunderBird. Unfortunately, when the mails were copied over, the date of the emails were not preserved. So if you want to preserve the email date, there is extra steps involved.

The solution I used is to copy the email first to ThunderBird and then to GMail.

First download a copy of PMail.
Install and copy the email directory you had backup to the email directory created in the install. Just overwrite everything.
If the mail directory path is different before and now, edit this file in the folder: PMAIL.INI
Run Pegasus Mail and all the old mails and folders should appear.
Create a folder with Unix Mailbox Format. Create as many as needed.
Copy your emails into the created folder
Go to the email directory mentioned in step 2. The folder created in step 5 should appears as UNXnnnnn.MBX where nnnnn is some numbers. Sort the folder by date would really help if you have lots of files.
Setup ThunderBird following the section above. Copy the .MBX files to the ThinderBird account directory.
Run ThunderBird and the folder should appears.
Copy to GMail with ThunderBird IMAP.

I hope these steps help you to move all the old email archives that are sitting around, moving from backup harddisk to backup harddisk, into the cloud.

It is simply just amazing that the few thousand emails moved in did not even takes up a few percents of GMail 7281G.

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2009 - how I come around in a full circle

Ken — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:49:00 +0000

Exactly 3 years ago this blog was started to explore the possibility of earning an income online. A few blogs was started and the exercise went into motion for more than half a year. At the peak of the exercise, the income generated was close to $400. Not enough to feed a family and definitely peanut compared to these guys.

Then other business beckoned and attention was distracted. The business didn’t went well but it happens that a startup found me and I joined them. The sites never led me to financial indepencence as hoped. Nevertheless they were just left running together with the ads. It was not too bad for pocket money. The income fluctuates a lot, some months it was below $50 and others close to $200.

Occasionally as time permits, I did a bit of updating here and there, upgraded the Wordpress software that runs this site and my theme. The feeling was nice to have extra revenue stream coming in without doing much. It doesn’t cost much to maintain a site either. A $5 a month hosting, paid 2 years in advance, and domain registration of $7/year kept it going and going…

Now here I am, without a job since the startup crashed with the global financial crisis, looking at 2009 before me. Once again I’m back here in a full circle to get the online revenue stream flowing.

That was the update. Let’s get on with the year and business.

Broken blog layout, WordPress 2.7.1 upgrade

Sneak preview of AdAdvantage R8.0

Ken — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 02:12:39 +0000

This blog is running the latest update to AdAdvantage. It is probably the most exciting update so far with many ideas that I long wanted to do accomplished.

Among the new additions:

The span-block on the right has now a tab that can switches between blocks of information. Since WordPress now uses jquery, the necessary js files are already on the system. Many such ui features can be added.
The 3 columns footer finally made its appearance. The code had been hiding there for a long time. It was moved inside the #page container and renamed column (for the 33% width). This way you can even move it to the top if you want.
The sitebar block right at the top can now be really close by click on the x. For a long time it was just a dummy.
If you use Google custom search for Adsense, the search result can now be directed to a full-width no sidebar page. Before the result was squeezed into the content column which was too narrow, narrower than Google’s minimum width.
To do this just create a page and set the page template to Wide Page (No Sidebars).
Try the search below to see what I mean.
A few other css ugliness was also fixed. Notably the rollingarchive, the sidebars’ spacing and block spacing.

This is a big release (compared to before) and I’m really pleased with it. I had successfully added some jquery components and looking forward to add more js magic in the future.

I’m cleaning up the code and will upload the package soon.

Meanwhile, let me know any suggestions, improvements, critics, bugs you have.

59ideas

WordPress 2.8 to be released in May xxth

Related Post:

AdAdvantage R9.0 released

Random Posts

Offline Blogging Tool for MacOSX and Ubuntu?

Random Posts

Update to latest K2, fixed layout problem

Related Post:

Broken blog layout, WordPress 2.7.1 upgrade

Related Post:

Do you use Knol, Squidoo and Wikipedia?

Random Posts

GMail changed favicon

Random Posts

Moving Pegasus & ThunderBird archives to GMail

Random Posts

2009 - how I come around in a full circle

Related Post:

Sneak preview of AdAdvantage R8.0

Related Post: