Expert Texture
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
June 24, 2008 at 12:45 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Last weekend, my parked Audi was hit by a speeding vehicle. The damage was pretty major: body, mechanical damage, and a bent frame.
Thankfully nobody was hurt.
Yesterday, my insurance carrier has declared the car a total loss.
It was in good condition with only 48000 miles on it. I planned on keeping the car for a few more years.
These things happen. On to plan B.
But I am irked about the timing. I planned to make my next car a hybrid. Gas prices have spiked. Hybrids have gone up in price and I understand that some models have wait-lists. For example, if I want a Prius, I might have to wait months.
Now what do I do?
Tags: blog, Personal
November 9, 2007 at 8:56 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1 with its new tagging support — very cool that they included an importer from Ultimate Tag Warrior.
Added my twitter feed to the sidebar. You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/rwandering
Added new phone-only templates: both iPhone and Windows Mobile users should see a simplified version of my blog.
Tags: blog, Wordpress
February 12, 2007 at 9:29 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I published a few changes to my blog template today.
- Upgraded to WordPress 2.1.
- Added some plugins:
- Feedburner Feed Replacement
- Feed Locations
- Sidebar Widgets
- Ultimate Tag Warrior Widget
- Whole new template with dual floating sidebars (from the image on the left to the one on the right).
This post is mostly for me so I can remember when I have made a change, but comments are welcome.
Update: I can see that the sidebar padding is wrong in Firefox, but looks perfect in IE. Why, why, why do we still have to deal with these incompatibilities? Argh.
Tags: blog, blogging, Wordpress
December 21, 2006 at 12:38 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
It looks like Dan Ciruli has decided to challenge a whole slew of bloggers. The challenge? 66,795 pushups and crunches next year.
Savas and Pirillo: I know you both lost a lot of weight in 2006–maybe you’re looking to firm up those newly svelted bodies? Shahar - how about getting the Excel Services team on board? Jim Benson, your cousin Robert sure did a lot of pushups this year; think you can top him next year? Brad Feld, you certainly know a thing or two about athletic goals (50 marathons in 50 states before he’s 50), I’m sure you could do this without sweating. Carl Franklin, you think .NET rocks, but did you know that pushups rock? Dan Fay, Joe Duffy, Mark Schmidt, David Gainer: they won’t be calling you Microsofties in 2007. Jason Follas, think you can manage 19 pushups the second day of CodeMash? Nick Carr, IT may be dead, but calisthenics are alive and kicking! And of course: Scoble made some big changes in 2006–how about making some more in 2007?
What’s next? An arm-wrestling match?
Tags: blog, crunches, pushups, resolution
September 5, 2006 at 5:46 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
That is, now it is 1. I started blogging on September 3rd, 2005 just before going to PDC05. Back then the blog has a different name (Mind From R. Wandering) and was hosted elsewhere, but it is essentially the same. According to WP Admin, this is my 193rd post.
If my readership continues to increase at even a fraction of the same rate, everyone in the universe will be reading my blog within the year.
Long live the divide-by-zero joke. 
Tags: blog
August 20, 2006 at 7:39 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am out of facility for the next week. Off the grid. Disconnected. Laptopless and without an Internet cafe. I expect lousy cell connectivity.
In Antarctica?
Nope, just on vacation with the family.
Tags: blog
February 28, 2006 at 10:21 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am trying out Shannon Whitley’s FeedLinx email subscription service for publishers.
First, the Verification link.
Then, the new subscription icon:
I’m also adding this to my email subscriptions page.
Tags: blog, FeedLinx
February 5, 2006 at 7:40 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
It looks like my feed reader just duplicated all of my posts — I don’t know if that is because I updated to WordPress 2.0.1 or if it is because I changed the # of items in feed.
Other than that, the blog remains the same.
Tags: blog
January 24, 2006 at 8:41 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous blog changes:
- Updated my picture. I heard that I looked too clean-cut in the old one.
- Added the askimet plugin. My spam comment problem has gotten out of control. In the last few days I’ve gotten over 2000 spam comments. Cheers to Matt et. al. at Automattic for making this so easy.
- Added explicit About and Disclaimer links — these were there all along, just buried.
- A new, better, Digipede graphic.
If you wonder why I blog about these things: it is mostly so I can track changes in case a problem is introduced.
Tags: blog
January 19, 2006 at 10:06 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I have made a change in my RSS feed. Several months back I thought I would experiment with FeedBurner Item Stats. To get this feature to work, you turn on the Feed item link clicks (”clickthrough” tracking) feature.
This allows publishers to track clickthroughs from their RSS feed. This is accomplished by redirect-links added by FeedBurner. My permalink was replaced with a redirect that increments a counter and then redirects the user back to my site.
Cool.
However, I recently noticed that some links to my posts were linking through the FeedBurner link and not directly to my own permalink. This greatly skews the per-item stats, because I cannot tell the difference between actual RSS click-throughs and other links. While this makes the stats less useful, a bigger problem is it seems to disable automatic trackbacking.
So, I turned it off. My feed is full-text anyway, so I don’t really care about clickthroughs.
If your news-reader caches posts (and therefore the item link), those redirected links will now link to my nicely-formatted FeedBurner RSS page. Not so perfect, but good enough.
Tags: blog, feedburner
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