The Future of Short Order Code

The future of Short Order code is very much up in the air right now. With a baby on the way in the near future and what seems like no time to work on things for the podcast already There’s a good chance that there won’t be another episode of Short Order code for at least another few months.

I have been considering using the SOC blog as more of a blog and posting all of my programming related posts there and leaving this one as more of a general blog. I have some posts coming soon for programming related things and I’m trying to figure out what makes more sense: posting them here where they’ll get a few more eyeballs, or posting them on SOC where the site is all about programming — albeit a programming podcast that hasn’t seen an episode since late 2009.

In short, the future is muddy. Hopefully I’ll be able to shed some more light on things as the next month or two roll on.

Multiple RSS Feeds with DualFeeds

I’m a huge fan of bloggers (and podcasters and well… everyone else for that matter) using full feeds for subscribers to their sites. I’ve got no time for people who demand that I hit their website to be able to read the content. If you want to monetize the feed that’s fine, but let me read it where I want.

That said, I was contemplating this evening whether it would be possible to offer both full and summary feeds from kdmurray.net. The reason? I wanted to start pushing partial posts to Facebook with a minimum of fuss.

The problem? WordPress only supports one post feed out of the box.

The solution? Stephen Cronin‘s DualFeeds plugin (which I found thanks to @bluefur on Twitter). The plugin allows you to create multiple feeds one for full-posts, and a second for post summaries. This is a very elegant solution to the problem. Though I wanted to add the stuff into Facebook, I didn’t want to push whole posts because I did want to try and use this to drive some traffic to the site.

Technically the plugin works very well. I was able to set it up in just a couple of minutes and after about 15 minutes of testing have found that it plays nice with FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin, as well as my other feed-related plugin FeedEntryHeader — the latter as it turns out was also written by Stephen Cronin.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to offer multiple feeds from your site, have a look at DualFeeds. Works like a charm.

WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1

After what has seemed a rather lengthy wait, WordPress 2.7 has graduated from the Beta phase to RC1. The new release of WordPress has a completely redesigned admin section bringing back some features that went away in 2.5, and adding to the party a brand new dashboard which makes the platform that much more useful.

I’ve just run the 2.7 update myself tonight (I swore I’d wait until the full release before putting it on the main blog… but I couldn’t wait anymore) and I’m really liking the changes so far. The fact that I can quickly look at the dashboard and see comment stats, recent everything and pen a draft all at the same time is great.

So far everything looks good, though I did have to deactivate a couple of plugins to make things work as expected. TinyMCE Advanced was causing some CSS issues (I could fix it I’m sure but… meh). In addition I had a plugin to replace the category box in the sidebar when posting which isn’t required anymore with 2.7.

Stay tuned here for more of the pros, cons and otherwise of the newest member of the WordPress family.

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 Released

Old News? Yea, kinda. I forgot to actually hit the publish button on this post a few days back…

For those of you who’ve been following the development of the next iteration of WordPress you already know that 2.7 Beta 1 was released last Friday night.

WP 2.7 features some really great refinements to the admin panel which not only make it more useful, they also serve as the building blocks for the next few generations of WordPress.

I’ve been messing around with 2.7 for the last month or so on my WP sandbox and it’s been very interesting to watch the evolution of the menuing system.

I’ll be drawing up a full review for the AGP blog which I’ll post once the full release happens.

PageRank Experiment Update

Well the one week deadline to try and get the site ranked in Google has come and gone, and not to anyone’s surprise the site still doesn’t carry a PageRank. But, not to fear, I’ll be continuing to write content for the site reviewing everything from software to hardware in hopes of landing the odd paid gig some time in the future.

If you’re interested in some background you can check out the original post I wrote explaining the experiment. The key lesson with all of this however is that Content is King (or at very least a Duke) and you need to respect that above pretty much all else if you ever expect to get ranked.

The One Week PageRank Experiment

I’ve decided to start a little experiment. Over the next 7 days, I’m going to try to get a new wordpress blog on a new domain from a PageRank of 0, to at least a PageRank of 1. If I can get this done, I’ll renew the domain. If not, I’ll probably let it lapse.

It’s a pretty simple proposition really, I’ll put together what I know about SEO with regular posts to the site. Hopefully between now and next Friday night I’ll be able to get the site on Google‘s radar.

What are my chances? No idea, but you can check out the post explaining the Google – WordPress experiment on the new site at kickjoey.com.

BarCamp Vancouver 2008 Party

I just got back from the BarCamp Vancouver 2008 networking party. This is the meet & greet prior to the actual unconference which takes place tomorrow down at Granville Island.

It was great to see a few familiar faces like Rebecca and Raul.

I also got to meet some of the folks who I’d only known online. Duane, John, John & Andy. Looking forward to meeting lots of other great people tomorrow.

I did forget one thing tonight: Business Cards. However, I did manage to find a few spare sheets of my Avery business card blanks tonight. I also discovered (somewhat to my surprise) that Google Docs supports Avery business card templates.

sample business card from google docs

The implementation isn’t quite as slick as MS-Word, but it will more than do in a pinch. I managed to whip up this snazzy little number in a matter of minutes. Now I feel more prepared for tomorrow. Hopefully Dave doesn’t mind that I borrowed the show logo, I promise I’ll promote the show!

Cloudless Computing :: Things To Do When You’re Without Your Interwebs

So here I am without access to the Internet. So what have I done? I’ve found a way to do my computing without the cloud! Here are some projects that you can do the next time you find yourself without access to the cloud.

Organize your Photos
This is a relatively time consuming task that I rarely take the time to do. A “net-outage” is a great time to pour through the photos in your computer and group or rename the files. If you use a photo organizing program like iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac, or Google’s very popular Picasa on Windows you can use these programs to do much of the tedious file management for you.

Blog Something
I find that one of my biggest impediments to getting a bunch of blogging done is my rather short attention span. When I’m online researching a story for an article I tend to get lost surfing the Internet looking for new and exciting things. Being offline for a few hours, or even a couple of days, can provide you extra time to focus on getting that article written, or in some cases provide inspiration for a whole new article (or two). I managed to a get a couple of good articles out of my unexpected “grey mode” period.

Write a Letter
We’ve all said it at one time or another, often when frustrated or annoyed, “I’m going to write a letter!” Well, here’s your chance. Bring up your favourite word processor, or text editor and bang out some phrases that are sure to convince your audience that you’re right (and that you should get a free case of coke the next time you shop there). Letters to politicians or other elected officials are also great candidates.

Play a Game
Assuming you have games on your computer which aren’t of the MMO variety playing them can be a great way to kill some time. A couple of games that I’ve purchased over the last couple of years are Escape Velocity: Nova (EV:Nova) and WingNuts 2. Both of these games are sci-fi shooters, with EV:Nova extending the genre with trading and other somewhat less violent activities. EV:Nova also supports a wide ranging plugin architecture that will allow you to download (prior to the network outage, of course) plugins from other players to extend the game or cheat the system.

So there you have it. A few ways to get your geek on without access to the cloud. So the next time you find yourself in a coffee shop and don’t feel like paying exorbitant fees to check your email. Try out a cloud-free activity. Hey you might even find yourself more productive!

The Gmail Effect

The Gmail Effect Well it’s not quite as staggering as the Digg Effect that can take down web servers in a single afternoon, but I experienced my own little spike in traffic this week. When Gmail went through their little bout of difficulty last week I let you know about the post-mortem entry on the Official Gmail blog.

I saw a rather significant spike in traffic as millions of Gmail users checked out the blog, and a few hundred of them clicked through on the trackback which showed up as a result of the post. Go figure.

We’re Back! Aussie Geek Podcast Episode 001 Is Out!

We are back!!

It’s been a long month but after a couple of early glitches and a fight between WordPress 2.6 and PodPress the first official episode of the AGP is out.

We all missed doing regular shows during the forced hiatus and it showed in the show. There’s a lengthy out-take at the end of the show. If you haven’t subscribed to the new feed yet, do it now! Either by RSS or through iTunes.

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