Posted on 3 Comments

John McCain to shutdown blogosphere

The trees thus spoke to the mother wolf, "mother wolf, you must teach your cubs not to be prey." Mother wolf replied to the trees, "But it is your forest, I shall implore the king lion to rule that the trees shall be punished if they do not watch over their own land." The king lion came to the trees, "I have heard mother wolf’s request. I have seen one man do a bad thing therefore I must assume that around every corner lurks a bad man. Mother wolf is too busy napping to watch over her cubs. Since you permit so many bad men to walk your forest, I must make you responsible for her cubs. Every time you let a bad man into your forest, I shall cut down a tree until you are a forest no more."

And John McCain thus spoke for in the name of fear and the safety of the children, any law shall be passed and any law shall be broken. McCain grew tall and his voice boomed, "I need only invoke the words child pornography or terrorism and I become a god!"

  • Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000."
  • Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face "even stiffer penalties" than ISPs.
  • Social networking sites will be forced to take "effective measures" — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is "associated" with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

[Source]

A crafty man so decided to pursue the American dream and thus spent his life savings on a building downtown from where he could deal his trade. Government propaganda encouraged him by describing "The American Way" only to take his profits with fees, penalties, and unusual taxes; and to overwhelm him with paperwork and legalities. Over time he came in earlier and left later. His family supported him but suffered and his trade turned from pleasure to torment. Vandals started painting graffiti on his building. The government explained that these vandals must be registered, and the business owner must file a report whenever a sex offender paints his building. One day the proprietor overslept. That night the vandals had painted his building with obscenities. On the way to work, the government employee saw the vandalism and took everything the proprietor owned then locked him in prison. The judge explained that the proprietor should have taken down the wall. If we give people the opportunity, certainly they will make the crime. We cannot possibly expect people to be responsible for their own actions under such circumstances!

When he introduced his legislation to the Senate, McCain offered no evidence that children are being victimized by people who post comments on blogs. [Source]

I am greatly bothered by how we are evolving into such a prude society.

Update: Apparently I am about 8 hours behind on this story. See comments here.

Posted on 13 Comments

Plug me in – Enhancing WordPress

For anyone interested, these are the plugins I currently use. I’m experimenting with one not listed but it has to prove itself before it gets any credits.

  • Spam Karma 2 (absolutely incredible, occasionally some trackback spam gets through but this just makes it all manageable)
  • Audio Player (slick way to include audio on the site)
  • Live (for the stat addicted, it shows the ip of someone on your blog while they are there, whether or not they are on the site or rss, if they are leaveing a comment etc) (Note: stat addiction can be cured. Don’t judge the success of your blog on "stats")
  • Flickr Photo Gallery (adds a tab on the upload box that allows you to easily paste several size pictures from your Flickr account)
  • Subscribe to comments (gives your readers the ability to request an email when someone replies to a particular comment thread)
  • Time Zone (automates daylight savings time adjustments so that the times on your posts are always correct) (wonder if it will break in 2007)
Posted on Leave a comment

How to post del.icio.us daily links automatically to WordPress

If you want the del.icio.us daily blog post to work in WordPress, your settings should look like the settings below. To get to these, log into del.icio.us, click "settings" and find the "dialy blog post" link. Finally click "Add new thingy."


job_name: DailyDelicious {doesn't really matter}
out_name: {wordpress user here must have at least author privileges or it won't work}
out_pass: {wordpress user password - will be displayed in plain text}
out_url: http://domainname.com/xmlrpc.php
out_time: 23 {military time}
out_blog_id: {leave this blank}
out_cat_id: 17 {number of the category id for the post - get the number under Manage->Categories}

I have decided to turn this off. Instead I have a link in my sidebar that reveals my del.icio.us tag cloud and below the cloud my most recent links.