Month: October 2007

Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1

I’m doing lots of silly stuff.  Who else could post a few articles in the morning, and then start with major WordPress upgrade?  Surely, there was a disruption of service while many of your came to read the posts.  Sorry, guys.

The good news is that I finally did it.  The blog was lagging behind the recent security updates and new features, running on WordPress 2.2.2 .  Today I updated it first to 2.2.3, which went without any problems.  Then I went for 2.3.1, which broke a few things.  I had to remove a few files and re-upload them and then fix a few places in the database and adjust the theme a bit.

All my posts were under a single category, and were tagged with Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which WordPress 2.3 provided an import for.  That thing didn’t work properly.  Probably, because I have a few thousands of posts, and a few thousands of tags, and importing them all takes more time than a browser is willing to wait without timing out.

But I don’t care for that right now.  It was a mess anyway.  Some posts got tags imported, others didn’t.  I’m not going back to fix them all. What’s done is done and it’s time to move on.  All posts will still remain under the single category (General), but that won’t be displayed.  Instead, you’ll see the tags to each post.  I’ll try to keep them orderly, and maybe even organize them a bit later.  For now, if you want to find something, use the search box of this site, Google, or drop me a line and I’ll try to locate the bit for you.

If you notice any misbehavior of the site, please let me know.  Thank you.

Workspace observation

This Web Worker Daily post reminded of an observation that I made about my workspace. There is one thing that shows if I care about the workplace, work, and the environment, or not. It’s a cup coaster.

I often have a cup of coffee or tea close the computer I am working on. I always, and I mean always use a cup coaster at home. That’s the only place I always care about. When I move to a new office or change a job, I always use cup coaster too. I’m usually excited and truly interested about new places. I care.

If I lose interest, my cup coaster tends to disappear. Either it falls on the floor and hides under the table. Or it brakes. Or the cleaning lady takes it away. Or something else happens to it. Never do I do it intentionally though. It took me some time to notice this…

Question for the English speaking crowd

What is the English word for the piece of carton, wood or plastic which is placed on the table under the cup? Usually, it is used in place of a saucer for large tea or coffee mugs. I’ve spent the last few minutes searching for it, but none of the online dictionaries helped. I also went through quite a lot of tableware, glassware, dishware, and other-ware, but hit a dead end in every direction.

If you know what I am talking about, please leave a comment. Thank you.

Update: the word is “coaster“, or “cup coaster“. Thanks, ma.

The 3 Rules of Self-Marketing

If you are interested in self-marketing, Web Worker Daily has an excellent post with links to more.  Here are some quotes to give you the feeling:

Knowing how to market yourself will do more for your earnings and reputation than becoming better at what to do. Don’t believe it? Think about the people in your industry who make more money and are more famous than you. Do you think they really know more than you? Did they just happen to get lucky? Or were they savvy about how to promote themselves?

Start now. Why? Because this stuff takes time. Building blog circulation, getting people to notice you, cultivating your social network, working your way on to the speaker list at conferences good marketing can take years to pay off.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say these were 3 easy rules. Simple, yes, but not easy.

Web worker’s Halloween

Web Worker Daily is as good as ever.  Here are a couple of quotes from their mandatory Halloween post:

 There seems to be a pretty good correlation between those of us who work on the web and those of us who accumulate things that beep, buzz, light up, transmit, and receive.

and

Take a walk through your house at dusk and look at all the digital time and temperature and channel displays, all the pretty LED lights, all the remote controls listening for your commands, all the wall chargers humming away, all the instant-on appliances: those are all standby power users. Depending on who you believe, they’re responsible for somewhere between 3% and 20% of your electricity bill (and a corresponding percentage of your contribution to global warming, strip-mining, and other energy consumption-related ills).

They are always on the subject, always nicely written, and often with seasonal feeling to it.  There are few online resources that I read more often…