Technology

WordPress Plugin : WP Instagram Digest

For a while now I enjoyed automated Instagram Digest posts in Yana’s blog. I’ve decided I want the same for my blog too. A quick Google search suggests that these are done with WP Instagram Digest plugin. So I’ve downloaded and installed it.

The configuration is not too complicated. You’ll need to login into your Instagram account and then go to the developer’s center to register the application and receive the API key and secret token. Hopefully, eventually this will be a part of automatic configuration, but not yet. Once you do that, you get can configure the plugin to run at certain times and post to specific category and/or with specific tags. The cool thing is that you can control the minimum number of new images needed to create a gallery posting. This feature will prevent empty posts or posts with a single image.

I had to consider if these kinds of posts would be too annoying. Firstly, I already have an Instagram widget. That looks nice, but it doesn’t really send out any notifications. Secondly, when I publish to Instagram I often cross-post the image to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and sometimes Foursquare. I don’t really want to annoy the people with both the individual photos and the digests. Thirdly, my blog posts are broadcast to Twitter and Facebook, and sometimes Google+. So, would it be too annoying? I guess not. Because since I’ve switched the Social 2.5 plugin, my blog posts aren’t broadcast to Twitter and Facebook automatically – I push them through with a click of a mouse. So, I guess, I just won’t be pushing the digest posts through and all should be fine.

The first Instagram digest will be out today at 21:00 (server time). Let’s see how it shows up. Hopefully it will also work well with the Lightbox plugin for the image popups. Curious…

P.S.: I’ve also introduced a separate category (Photography->Instagram) for these digests and a new tag – “automated” – that I will try to use for any kind of automated postings.

WordPress + P2 = Company Intranet in 5 minutes

I’ve mentioned a few times already that I became a big fan of P2 theme for WordPress. I currently maintain multiple installations of it, just because it is so easy to setup and start using. I have it as company Intranet or as a project collaboration tool. It’s like a blog, a wiki, and a chat room combined together. And since I’ve installed it so many times, I thought I should publish what exactly I am doing, in case someone else will want to try it.

Continue reading WordPress + P2 = Company Intranet in 5 minutes

Proper email client

I had a brief discussion with a colleague at work today about email clients. Once again I had to say that I do miss Mutt. Gmail is pretty good, but it still lacking a lot of Mutt’s functionality. And that thing that Outlook and Web Outlook thing that they force us to use at work, is horrible, no matter what you compare it to.

As I was going through the things that I love in Mutt, I mentioned the threaded discussions and quoting. It was a bit difficult to describe the details, so I quickly searched for a screenshot. Here’s one.

Unlike grouped replies in MS Outlook and Gmail conversations, here you can clearly see which email is a reply to which email. Once you get into group discussions, with multiple participants dragging the conversation into different directions, this kind of discussion view becomes extremely useful.

And one other thing is about quoting. Gmail at least tries to be useful. MS Outlook is completely horrible in this department. It quotes full messages UNDER the replies. So if someone forwarded you an email with quotes from a long discussion, you’ll spend a day reading it. You’ll need to scroll to the bottom of the message, then scroll up a bit to read the first message in the discussion. Then scroll up to the second message, and scroll down while reading it. Then scroll up again to the third message, and scroll down while reading it, and so forth. I get dizzy just by thinking of that.

Mutt users are from a different culture though. (Truth be told, not only Mutt users – this culture comes from many years ago, from the times when bandwidth was expensive, rules were strict, and people respected each other’s time.) In the image above you can clearly see the part of the original email to which the reply was done, and all the other bits of the conversation necessary to understand the current state of discussion. In fact, the message above includes relevant details from four messages (!!!). And one look at it is enough to tell who wrote what and when.

Just that screenshot alone makes me want to go back. And, in fact, given how things have changes since my last thoughts on that, maybe I will. I won’t get rid of Gmail, since it is mighty convenient to have access from everywhere and good integration with even my mobile phone. I also can’t imagine the life without Gmail’s SPAM filter. But, maybe I can find some middle ground and configure Mutt on my hosting server to access Gmail via IMAP. I’ve done it before, I think it might be time to do it again.

Atmospheric electricity

Last night, I stepped out on the balcony to enjoy the thunderstorm. It wasn’t too windy or too rainy, but the lightnings and thunders were rather violent. In the middle of the night, long strikes across the whole sky were lighting the city as bright as midday. That was something!

And that also got me thinking. There is so much energy up in the sky, is there any way to extract it and use it? I’ve heard that there was some work done on the issue. And, given that I wasn’t the best student at school, but I still remember the fact that most of the lightning energy is spent on the actual light and on warming up the air. But, I thought, one day we’ll find a way to catch lightnings before they happen, and collect all that energy. That would be very useful, even though it would probably destroy the magnificence of the thunderstorm.

This morning I went online to see if I can find anything interesting on the subject. There are plenty of resources out there, but nothing special has caught my attention yet. Here’s the obligatory Wikipedia page:

There is always free electricity in the air and in the clouds, which acts by induction on the earth and electromagnetic devices. Experiments have shown that there is always free electricity in the atmosphere and that it is the quickest electricity connection, which is sometimes negative and sometimes positive, but most generally positive, and the intensity of this free electricity is greater in the middle of the day than at morning or night and is greater in winter than in summer. In fine weather, the potential increases with altitude at about 30 volts per foot (100 V/m).

The atmospheric medium, by which we are surrounded, contains not only combined electricity, like every other form of matter, but also a considerable quantity in a free and uncombined state; sometimes of one kind, sometimes of the other; but as a general rule it is always of an opposite kind to that of the Earth. Different layers, or strata, of the atmosphere, located at only small distances from each other, are frequently found to be in different electric states. The phenomena of atmospheric electricity are of three kinds. There are the electrical phenomena of thunderstorms and there are the phenomena of continual electrification in the air. The phenomena of the polar auroras constitute a third branch of the subject.

Microsoft takes password security to the next level

I’ve spotted this link somewhere online, and I think this is funny.

Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords

The solution is, as always, obtain the latest service pack.