Monthly Archive for September, 2007

WordGrief

Published by Cody on September 26, 2007 in Blog and Rant. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

So I upgraded my blog to the latest version of the ultimate blogging goodness that is WordPress. One of the cool things this version (2.3) has that everyone’s been talking about is tags. This is Web. 2.0: you have to have tags. Categories just don’t cut it anymore.

Anyways, tags are cool. I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 for all my tagging needs but when I upgraded to WP 2.3, I decided to give the built-in tagging features a whirl. Of course, this entailed extensive modification of the theme to switch everyone over from UTW but things were made easier by a neat little tag importer that took all my tags from UTW and put them in the WordPress tagging table.

A few minutes of use almost sold me. It looked just as nice as UTW, and since I don’t use tag clouds, the features were good. However, I stopped short when I couldn’t find any kind of management for the tags. There is no (easy) way to add, delete, or modify tags other than going into the database or editing every post individually.

But this was just the tip of the iceberg. As I was writing this post, I began to get strange errors telling me that I was missing a table in my WordPress database. I couldn’t even save my post. Investigation led me to this support article. Apparently, the developers saw fit to completely rename three tables in the WordPress database, which means that many plugins and themes are using outdated code which will cause errors just like the ones I was getting. Now I’m forced to use the featureless WordPress tags because UTW is one of the incompatible plugins crashing my blog, as is the nifty AJAX archives plugin I had managing my archives page (which is now the boring old version until I can figure out what to do with it).

Alas, this isn’t a new thing with WordPress. It seems that every major upgrade brings with it major problems for existing installations. I’ll have my blog just perfect with everything all figured out. Then I upgrade and I can’t use half of it. That’s the price of staying on top of things, I suppose. I guess my biggest frustration is being forced to use the inadequate WordPress tagging feature, but plugin authors will probably catch up soon enough. I hope.

UW hearts RIAA

Published by Cody on September 24, 2007 in Rant. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

This isn’t really recent news, but after reading an opinion article in the University of Washington’s newspaper, the Daily, I felt I needed to say something. Anyways, over the summer, the university agreed to pass along “pre-settlement” letters from the Recording Industry Association of America notifying students who have committed copyright infringement that they have the option to pay $3000 to $5000 (or more) to the RIAA. If the person doesn’t pay (or doesn’t get the letter), the RIAA will file a lawsuit for even more money.

As you can very well imagine, this produced varied reactions from students when they found out. With the UW being the liberal bastion any major public university is, the reactions were mainly negative. That’s because most students are too stupid to look any farther into the story. All they see is UW forwarding RIAA letters and they scream “Oh noes! Our college is cooperating with the evil RIAA to steal all our money!” Here’s the real story: the university agreed to forward the letters to students when there is reasonable evidence that a student has illegally downloaded copyrighted material. They’re actually doing students a favor. If UW refused to forward the letters (much like the University of Wisconsin did), students wouldn’t be aware of the chance to settle with the RIAA. They’d only find out when the RIAA presents them with a lawsuit for a lot of money with no chance to settle for less. Which is better: paying $3000 or paying $10,000 plus court fees?

Continue reading ‘UW hearts RIAA’

Paradigm shift

Published by Cody on September 23, 2007 in Blog and Random. 2 Comments Tags: , .

I was looking through my archives (I’m nostalgic, what can I say?) and realized that this blog has really changed in content from when I first started it way back in 2004. I know the archives don’t go back that far, so don’t worry. I blogged on Xanga before moving here and was unable to keep all my old posts. That’s actually a good thing, since they were the usual thing you’d find on Xanga: vague ramblings about how my day was and how much I hated my German/math/gym teacher, or how lame my car was (there was a funny post in there about the family Crapavan…good times), but nothing you’d really want to read.

However, as time’s gone by, I’ve written less and less about myself. I kind of switched to writing about how I feel about more important stuff, which is what blogging is really more about. Writing all about yourself is either egotistic or whiny, depending on how you phrase things. The rants started probably around late 2005 or early 2006, but they were few and far between, and I wrote more and more about technical stuff: my experiences with Linux, games I liked, movies I’d watched, or, when I moved to my own hosting, about WordPress and other blogging platforms. (Yay for lame history lessons…moving on.)

Now, however, my posts are almost exclusively news and rants. Or both. By now you’re probably wondering what the point of this post is, considering I’ve gone on and on about what I write about. Anyways, I’m asking you, my readers, what you would prefer to see out of Mad Rants. In short: what do you expect from this blog?

This has become less and less a personal blog–and that’s not a bad thing–but I want to make sure that’s okay with my readers. One of the best things a blog can do for itself is write towards its audience. If Maddox started writing about fluffy kittens and DDR (in a non-sarcastic fashion), his readers would be pretty taken aback. Heck, they reacted bad enough when he pulled an April Fools’ prank.

The question I asked is optional. I half meant it, but I also half wanted to just write something to make it look like I’m doing something. I also half wanted to see how many people replied. And now I think I need to go work on my fractions. Kolleg iz lerning me gud, arn’t it?

RAWR

Published by Cody on September 22, 2007 in Asides. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ignore the freakin’ AdSense ads. I don’t support PETA. Nor do I wish you to click on links that will lead you to PETA sites. I don’t want to make money off of stupidity.

When Republicans sounded like Democrats

Published by Cody on September 16, 2007 in Asides. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Oh the irony. Back during the Clinton administration, Republicans were saying the same things Democrats are saying now. Click the link to see some verbatim quotes.

 

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