I ran into this error: “Unable to locate WordPress Content directory (wp-content).” after upgrading the Linux distro on my server. Nearly every solution I found was to add a custom block of code to wp-config.php that would no longer require you to give the FTP credentials. I found this unappealing because I have multiple WordPress […]

MP3s are reasonably big files. If they’re popular, their bandwidth usage adds up. All web hosting companies have bandwidth caps, whether stated or unstated. Even if it says unlimited bandwidth, trying using a few terabytes and see how long it takes for them to take down your site. I’m surprised there are so many video […]

Embedit lets you embed all sorts of file types directly on your site. It lets visitors see the document conveniently instead of downloading and viewing it in another application. It supports the typical Microsoft Office file types, along with Open Office. It also supports images and text files. The images don’t seem all that useful […]

WordPress 2.7 is now available. The admin UI has been completely reworked to be easier to use and faster. I’ve been using it since RC1 on a test blog and was impressed with the changes. I’ve now upgraded all my sites to 2.7 and all plugins are functioning as far as I can tell. Get […]

Typealyzer claims to be able to determine someone’s personality type from what they’ve written on their blog. I tried it out with my blog along with several others from the blogs I follow. This blog, along with Cameron, JD (of Get Rich Slowly), Dave Barry, Gina (of Lifehacker) and Steve Pavlina were dubbed ISTP – […]

I recently added my Twitter feed to the sidebar with Twitter’s Javascript badge. I was surprised to see the URLs weren’t hyperlinks. URLs are converted to hyperlinks on twitter, why can’t the badge use the same code? They obviously know how to do it, but for whatever reason, they haven’t. Nine months ago a guy […]

I just got a beta invite to RedLasso, which allows you to pick and choose clips from all sorts of TV networks. It includes Comedy Central, NPR, Bloomberg, CNN and a host of others. Instead of just writing about a news event, it’s a lot nicer to be able to show your users a clip […]

Plurk is similar to twitter, but it displays updates in a timeline instead of a flat list. I like the idea of having a timeline. It can serve as a mini journal. I have a timeline, but I’m not making any guarantees I’ll keep it updated. I heard about Plurk from Amir, the lead developer […]

I’ve been happy with Akismet, the spam filtering plugin from Automattic. It has caught over 250,000 spam comments with minimal effort on my part. A handful of spam comments get through each week that I have to manually mark as spam, but that’s far better than the hundreds I used to deal with. I’ve often […]

You might have noticed two new additions on the front page sidebar. The first one shows pictures of recent visitors who are registered users of MyBlogLog and the second one shows the most popular outgoing links of the day. MyBlogLog has provided a way to track outgoing links and ever since I heard about it […]

Many sites are hard to navigate, don’t have sitemaps and have local searches that are mediocre at best. When I want to find information on a given site, I have to try to figure out what the designer was thinking and where they might have put various links and information. But I recently realized that […]

Bloglines was acting weird a few weeks ago. It showed new posts on the left pane, but when you clicked on the feed it showed no new entries on the right pane. After a few days of this I got fed up and began looking for a replacement. I wanted a free, online RSS reader […]

I’ve found a solution to send e-mail notifications of blog entries that resolves almost all of the issues I discussed previously. The first problem was that I didn’t want to post multiple times a day to avoid sending multiple e-mails a day. The solution sends out a notification once a day at 5am. It includes […]

Glen Stansberry over at LifeDev put into words the process I have adopted to use draft blog entries. It helps to come back to something I’ve written after a few days because I’m fresh and may notice ways to improve it that I wouldn’t have seen if I did it all at once. I currently […]

Here are three ways to measure your site, all using backlinks as a means of valuation. First, is it a big fish? Second, what is the dollar value? Third, what level of pimp is your site? Here are my results: (via presurfer)

Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, announced a little shindig in San Francisco to be held on August 5th. He’s dubbed it WordCamp and even set up a site at wordcamp.org. Since I’m within reasonable driving distance, I’m planning to go and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll get to meet lots of people I’ve […]

A mere month after I move out of Utah, a blogging conference is held within walking distance of where I used to live. Coincidence, or conspiracy? It sounds like they had great participation (over 150 people attended) assisted by the free food and t-shirts I’m sure. Of course people have blogged about the event including […]

As you may have noticed, I didn’t end up posting much last semester, and while I missed it, I wasn’t sure I would have much time to do much (if any) blogging this semester either. Then I attended the first day of my Ethics and Computers In Society class, and things changed. You see, one […]

I recently posted a comment on a blog where the author said, “I blog mainly because I love getting comments, emails and feedback from other people in the world who make me smarter. It’s also rewarding to help others by sharing knowledge and ideas, but I know I love the feedback because I click on […]

I was just viewing my daily comics today and noticed that while Calvin was impersonating a monster during show-and-tell, he unwittingly used the word ‘blog’ (see the fourth box). Methinks the Wikipedia entry for Blog could use an update.

The referrer spam in my web stats page has all but ruined my ability to see who is linking to my site, so as I see it, I have two options. 1) Find a solution to referrer spam or 2) Find another way to track backlinks. Find a solution to referrer spam A benefit of […]

Most bloggers have a way to track their stats. It’s fun to see where people are coming from, the search phrases used to find your site and the most popular pages. That’s all well and good, but do you know what outgoing links are most popular? Me neither, until now. MyBlogLog.com requires a single line […]

When you write a blog entry and link to a page on your site, it’s tempting to use a relative URL because it’s convenient. There’s a problem though – if you have an RSS feed, the subscribers may be reading your blog entry on another site which isn’t on your server, so the relative link […]

Writing a book is one of the most popular goals people have at 43 Things and if you’re a blogger and want to write a book, you may be a lot closer to doing it than you think. blogbinders.com will publish your blog in book form. A 125-page book would cost about $15, so it’s […]

A few days ago I mentioned to Jason that at long last, comment spam is a thing of the past (hey, that rhymes). The same is true on his blog thanks to WP Hashcash. It’s such a relief to be notified of new comments without the dread of having to clean up hundreds of spam […]

I don’t know who started it first, but both major blog engines that I’ve used (Movable Type and WordPress) allow either anonymous comments or require both the name and e-mail address. I’ve never understood why they don’t just require the name, without an e-mail address. I’m hesitant to give my e-mail address because I don’t […]

Anyone that has a blog with comments enabled has probably dealt with the unpleasant experience of checking their e-mail and finding hundreds of comment notifications after being hit by a comment spammer. A lot of time and effort has been made to resolve this problem and yet the spam continues. I’ve been trying to come […]

Back in 2002 I was trying to do something that had never been done before (at least on my blog). I felt like an athlete trying to break a world record, soaring for the stars. Okay, that may be pushing it a little. Basically, I wanted to post once a day for an entire month, […]

I had some links to my site in comments using the old permalinks format and I decided to update them to the new format. When I tried however, I got a MySQL error. I looked on WordPress Support and found the issue but no one had provided a fix. Here’s one that worked for me. […]

I had over 1,000 posts in Movable Type that were archived individually, by month and by category. When I switched to WordPress I changed the format of the permanent links to include the date and title instead of the non-portable post ID (which, by the way, MT does not include when you export your blog […]

A few sites discussed the attribution of your sources when blogging and I wanted to share my two cents on the subject. The short answer: I concur. It’s like the bibliography teachers require on essays, where you reveal the source of your information. Matt refers to it as a hat tip or link thanks, but […]

Here’s a short quiz to see what kind of blogger you are. I scored 60/100, which states: You are a dedicated weblogger. You post frequently because you enjoy weblogging a lot, yet you still manage to have a social life. You’re the best kind of weblogger. Way to go! Oh, and extra kudos to TJ […]

I know of several sites that can be used to track who is linking to your web site. Here’s a list of the ones I typically use. Bloglines Daypop Blogrolling Truth laid bear ecosystem Blogdex Bloogz Technorati Missing from this list is a site who used backlinks to determine a site’s popularity and became extremely […]

In an effort to curb the onslaught of comment spam, I renamed mt-comments.cgi, the file that is used for all comments. It’s not too hard to figure out the new name, but anything that makes it harder for someone to spam my blog that is easy for me to do is worth a try. Elise […]

All URLs in the comments are visible again, without the silly redirect which sucked out all the Google juice for commenters. I upgraded to MT 2.661 way back when because I liked the comment throttling feature to avoid comment spam, and even though I didn’t like using redirects for comment URLs, the good outweighed the […]

I have noticed a subtle issue with blogrolls that people may not realize, but it makes it harder to know who is linking to you. The issue is that any site using Bloglines or Blogrolling, or any other service that uses Javascript to display a list of links, will not have those links registered on […]

I didn’t know this until yesterday, but you can see who is linking to your blog using Bloglines. Use the following URL (replacing example.com with your blog’s URL): http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=www.example.com (via outer court)

I agree with most of Phil Windley’s ideas on how to start a blog. With this blog I don’t follow #4 very well, but that kind of conflicts with #6. There are so many things I’m interested in it’s hard to just pick one subject area and stick to it.

Bloglines has improved upon what was already an impressive and powerful RSS aggregator. In addition to the layout changes and the ability to automatically sort feeds, there are some cool new features, as well as some other features that I didn’t know about before. Here are what I consider to be the highlights. Blogroll management […]

Waypath is a new site that allows you to search for keywords in blog entries, find related blog entries and find sites linking to a blog entry. There are also several blogging tools (like the Buzz-o-meter) that look pretty spiffy. Another cool site is Bloogz. You can use it to search blogs, see the most […]

I tried using the new service that offered one ping to rule them all at Ping-O-Matic but for some reason it consistently returned errors. I posted a comment asking about it and got no response, so I have returned the list of sites. However, I wanted to make sure I was pinging all available sites. […]

Three months ago I read about RSS feeds in this article. I had heard all about them but finally decided to investigate, so when they mentioned Feedster, which I had heard about here and there, I decided to try it. It wasn’t too easy to use but I found out that my default MT template […]

I currently have 84 drafts of posts in Movable Type right now. There’s also another entry that is a draft that has over 100 ideas for entries that weren’t developed enough to create a draft from them. Does anyone else do this or am I alone in my draft-happy state? My basic method is this; […]

MT-Blacklist 1.6.3 (tar/gzip, zip) was just released. Since I was changing things anyway, I got the latest blacklist too, so now everything is up-to-date. This looks like it will be the last release based on Jay’s comments. His reasoning is that Movable Type 3.0 will have sufficient methods to manage comment spam so the utility […]

I’m in a Chicago hotel room right now and just paid $9.95 to get internet access so I could check e-mail. I wasn’t going to make a blog entry because it’s late and I want to get up early tomorrow in order to do all the fun stuff in Chicago (like going to a Bulls […]

This article on how to increase your blog’s readership doesn’t say anything I haven’t heard before, but repetition can be helpful. It would also help if I were to to try some of those things instead of just reading about them. He has also written several other articles about improving your blog which may provide […]

While working on an AMD Opteron server running SuSE one of the running processes jumped out at me. It’s name was blogd. For those not familiar with UNIX, a ‘d’ at the end of a process name typically indicates that the process is a daemon or a service. For example, the DHCP server is dhcpd, […]

Have you ever been away and wished you could have a blog entry posted automatically for you? I’ll admit a break can be nice too, but for the times you aren’t around a computer and want to keep on blogging, here’s Movable Type Trickle (as the name suggests, it’s a Movable Type plugin).

On the way to work yesterday I was listening to NPR’s Fresh Air and the guy they were interviewing said something I had never heard before on the radio: Blog. Okay, so it’s not a big deal, and blog isn’t a household word, but the momentum is starting and one day the spell checker might […]

USA Today has an article about how bloggers are rewriting the rules of journalism. It’s a good article, but I take issue with the claim that political blogs have had the most impact. I agree they’ve had a significant impact, but there are many non-political blogs that have made just a big of an impact. […]