Yesterday I installed version 2.5 of WordPress (which is great!) but the menu in the admin interface uses up a lot of screen estate. That’s why I just patched wp-admin.css to save some of this precious space in the admin interface. Just follow the above link and replace your version found in wp-admin/ if you think the menu is too big. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Sonja I found out, that bloglines launched the new beta for their feed reader under beta.bloglines.com.

It looks very similar to the old app with a lot of added AJAX. But they fixed at least one major annoyance: if you open a feed with a lot of unread messages only the ones you have actually seen are marked as read. Nice, very nice… And bonus points for calling it “βloglines”

Update 6.9.2007:
As far as I could tell βloglines has all the original features but one: the “keep new” checkbox. I use this very feature quite often to mark important posts and was thinking about switching back to the old version but my prayers were answered today:

What happened to “Keep As New”?
We have renamed “Keep As New” to “Pinned”. It can be toggled by clicking on the pin icon in the lower left of an article (or using the “n” hotkey). Your previous “Keep As New” articles should all be transparently available in the Beta as “Pinned” articles.

I looked through my logs and was happy to see that some of my older posts are still quite popular. When I reread them I found some minor mistakes and added a little content. Anyway, I updated these three older posts:

• Rails, ActiveRecord and Distributed Ruby (DRb) in a nutshell (added DRb over unix sockets)
• Rubybashing: Why use implicit return? (this reminds me, I wanted to write an article about what I had learned, something like “Why and when to use implicit return in Ruby?”)
• Using Google Talk with kopete

The previous post about blog quality made me think about the things I want to write on this blog. Here’s the result, enjoy:

• Thou shall not post daily links – if I’m interested in your links, I will subscribe to your $socialbookmarkingtool feed
• Thou shall not post daily pics – BOCTAOE like [daily dose of imagery]
• Thou shall not write ‘sorry for the lack of posts’ posts – twice in a row is evil, thrice is a mortal sin
• Thou shall publish full feeds – I want to read my stuff from bloglines
• Thou shall finish at least one of your unfinished blog entries before starting a new one – right now I have 8 unfinished posts
• Thou shall add some new content to a quote – “The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. ~Somerset Maugham“
• Thou shall not join the chorus – I really like rails, but how many people posted this in the last 24h
• Thou shall link to this list and/or add comments with additional commandments – sorry, but I’m out of ideas

I don’t have my own blog, I’m just occasionally posting here on Frank’s blog. This is because I don’t think I have lots of important or relevant ideas to justify the existence of my own blog, nor would I like to invest a lot of time. Now I found a kind of official confirmation for my point of view: Read the rest of this entry »

With this article it’s really simple.

There are a lot of good articles available about how to customize the layout of you blog but sometimes want to add some kind of outside information to your blog. For complex or large amounts of information, you should consider a database solution but in a lot of cases a simple file based solution works, too. This tutorial shows you how to add information from a file to your blog. Read the rest of this entry »

The theme does not include the ‘just read’ from the sidebar, but everything else is just like you see it here on my blog. You can download it as .zip or .tar.gz.

Update 10.2.2006:

• ‘Subscribe me’ in sidebar
• links to delicious, diggit and reddit on single article page

Update 11.2.2006:

• different background for odd/even comments
• nice numbering for comments, used the idea found here

This theme works with WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0!

I moved my blog this morning. It looks as if everything is up and running again, but if you note anything strange, please drop me a note.

I edited an older article and noticed that I could not cut-and-paste the XML into a file an use it becaus wordpress does some funny things to my document. I changes the quote from " to ” and the double hyphen from -- to –. Therefore I wrote this short sed script to escape my XML for use in blog posts. Any sed gurus out there who can tell me an easier/shorter/more elegant way of doing this?

sed -e 's/\&38;/\&38;38;/g; s/\\/\&38;#92;/g; s/>/\&38;gt;/g; s/</\&38;lt;/g; s/"/\&38;quot;/g; s/-/\&38;#45;/g' $1 | sed -e "s/'/\&38;apos;/g;"