Posted on 2 Comments

I lost my DOM plugin

In what has to be the dumbest thing I have seen all week, the DOM Inspector plugin is available on the Mozilla website only at its 2.0.0 version. The DOM Inspector 2.0.0 is only compatible with the unreleased Firefox 3. The current stable version of Firefox is 2.0.0.13. I was having trouble with Firebug not displaying styles and one troubleshooting step is to reinstall the DOM Inspector. Whoops. Not anymore! Guess I have to install the FF release candidate or just wait. I’m not a huge Firebug fan anyway. I can wait.

Update: To get the DOM Inspector working, follow these instructions:

I exited Firefox, edited the xpti.dat file and replaced the
line
223,inIDOMUtils,{ffffd059-13d1-4ef7-acb1-91188c6e31dd},2,-1,1
with
223,inIDOMUtils,{78fd16c2-bdfb-4b1d-8738-d536d0a8f430},0,-1,1

Started Firefox again [Source, Bugzilla, DOM Inspector "CSS Style Rules" panel suddenly does not display any selectors Comment #22]

Note: For me it was line 237 so make sure you are editing the actual line with inIDOMUtils.

Posted on Leave a comment

Performance Issues?

If there is one thing that Reality Me shouldn’t have is performance issues. I was told that today it saw 500 errors. Not as in the quantity five hundred but as in the server was having a problem. Reality Me is on a shared host which means that the one computer servers out web pages for many different people. In other words, the same box might have a very popular website unrelated to any of my websites and the server could have performance issues because of stuff they are doing. Of course, it could be me. I could be demanding too much of the machine with an inefficient WordPress plugin.

In short, I need to do troubleshooting which could take a lot of effort. If you notice problems with Reality Me or Domestic Psychology, please email me or Twitter me and let me know about the issue or error message. I am also going to try out the WP-Cache plugin so I would be interested in hearing about any odd behaviors (or improvements) it created. Thank you!

Posted on Leave a comment

Knoxville Tweet Up

Knoxville Twitters @Whodini and @Z11 are planning on meeting with other area Twitters at Lakeside Tavern in Concord park today at noon. I may or may not be there depending on how much work I get done in the next hour. I have to leave early to pickup a child from school. Let’s schedule the next one for 11:30!

In similar news, this Saturday is the next Blogfest! 6:00pm at Wild Wings Cafe. Rich has the details and be sure to leave him a comment if you are planning on going Saturday so that they can arrange enough seats.

Posted on 7 Comments

I am in Alltop also!

Reality Me has been honored by being listed in the Life category of Alltop.com! Cathy was made it into Alltop just two days ago and I slipped in on her coattails.

Featured in Alltop… I am tickled to announce that Cathy has been recognized by Guy Kawasaki and has joined the likes of Jack Lail in Alltop! Cathy is in the Alltop Life category along with some familiar blogs such as xkcd.com, indexed and Sarcomical. Congratulations to Cathy!… [Source, Reality Me]

Posted on 14 Comments

WordPress 2.5 post by email broken

Yesterday when Comcast was down for scheduled maintenance I tried to blog it by sending an email from my phone to Reality Me via a secret email that WordPress checks once an hour. I actually sent two posts via email and neither were ever seen on the blog. I just found both the posts with a "pending review" status. This seems to be a new behavior in WordPress 2.5 and not a feature that I like. There does not appear to be a setting that allows me to change this behavior. Perhaps it is my turn to write a plugin.

I think having the ability to post by email when I cannot otherwise reach the blog is a powerful feature. Having the post hidden from publication by slapping it into a pending review status makes posting by email a bit useless, at least for my purposes.

Posted on 10 Comments

New York Times Pwns Bloggers

Let’s knock out some buzz words: new media, blogger, msm, social media, old media. The future of the New York Times, and other traditional papers, is shaky at the moment.

…its financial performance is lagging. NYT Co.’s stock is trading at about 40, down 25% from its high of 53.80 in mid-2002…The Wall Street consensus is that the company will report net income of $290 million for 2004, down 4% from the preceding year and a good 35% below the $445 million it netted in the media industry boom year of 2001. Revenues have plateaued at $3 billion, give or take a few hundred million, for five years running. [Source, BusinessWeek, The Future Of The New York Times]

With newspaper circulations down, the newspaper companies are in a panic and looking for someone to blame. The finger most frequently gets pointed at bloggers, citizen journalists who write without the impedance of an editor nor the accountability of a professional journalist and who are able to get the news out (accurate or not) in seconds from the scene as eye witnesses. Blaming bloggers is simply a red herring.

The root problems go back to the late 1940s, when the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop. But for years the U.S. population was growing so much that circulation kept rising and then, after 1970, remained stable. That changed in 1990 when circulation began to decline in absolute numbers. [Source, The State of the News Media 2004]

1940 predates the modern Internet and 1990 predates the blogging boom. But since The New York Times is convinced that bloggers are partially responsible for subscription decline (and that may very well be accurate!), they devised a way to get some of that traffic back…they published an article about how detrimental blogging is to health! They even attributed a 41 year old’s heart attack to blogging. Now that should scare the competition away! Bloggers jumped on this story! Writers like my wife, Michael Silence, and Dr. Helen all chimed in and linked to the story. It spread like wildfire through the blogosphere with each blogger adding their opinion and interesting commentary. Now I respect each of these bloggers and enjoyed reading their take on the NYT‘s article, but I’m going to call it like I see it. In a stroke of marketing genius, you were link baited by The New York Times! Which I’d say is quite an honor!

Is blogging stressful? I suppose if you were relying on it for your income it would be. But if you are a hobbyist who posts between tasks rather than taking smoke breaks (which is how I blog), there should be no stress in this diversion. I do find blogging stressful when I have deadlines because I know my clients read my blog and each post could look like I am playing instead of working (which is not the case). So for me, the stress is in wanting to post but not give the wrong impression to those people to whom I have professional obligations.

Others who took the NYT’s bait:

Whew! The list goes on. I just can’t keep up.

Posted on 1 Comment

Cathy recognized by Alltop

Featured in AlltopI think Cathy’s writing is fantastic but I happen to be biased. I find Domestic Psychology a pleasure to read (again with the bias). I am tickled to announce that Cathy has been recognized by Guy Kawasaki and has joined the likes of Jack Lail in Alltop! Cathy is in the Alltop Life category along with some familiar blogs such as xkcd.com, indexed and Sarcomical. Congratulations to Cathy! (Does this mean I don’t have to program anymore?)