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Global Voices does Valentines: Teach someone to blog!
Back when there weren’t a lot of easy ways to start blogging elegantly I’d give blogs to any of my friends who showed interest, setting up Movable Type/WordPress/Blogger for them and working out simple templates I thought they’d like. Some of them are still up and going ( Mira, Woo! Room206, Speaks the Gimp, Tom Makes Pictures, A Collection of Works, The Creative Act, St-Francis Jigger, ) while others were abandoned a long time ago in favor of social networking or other hobbies (Brian, Princess Camp and Poison Frogs, Girl Riot, No, You’re a Blogger Geek, Lyss). Just making that list took me so long, I don’t think I ever added it all up like that before.
Anyway, these days I usually just point people at WordPress.com, since they have great themes, the best software around and an easy way to take it to the next level.
So what’s left to do? The other half of giving someone a blog: Showing them how to use it!
Global Voices’ core mission, aside from reporting on what’s happening in blogs all over the world, is to get more blogs and bloggers going whenever possible. Writing is good for you, it helps you clarify your thoughts and hone your writing, and it also helps people find you and keep up with you online.
GV is having a drive to get people to teach someone else how much fun blogging can be, or alternately blogging’s little cousin, microblogging (which means services like Twitter or identi.ca similar to “status” on facebook but with more power and more fun. btw I’m almost always @jeremyclarke).
I signed the pledge to write about it and teach someone, but as the above list implies, my life is already pretty saturated with people I’ve taught to blog, so if you live in Montreal and want to learn how to blog (or want some advice about it too I guess) drop me a line and I can help you out sometime.
If you have someone in your life with problems getting their message out (or a business to promote, or any other problem that could be solved if they had a TV channel) then consider taking some time to show them how blogging could improve their life <3
Greyhound.ca is a piece of shit website that is probably convincing people to buy cars.
UPDATE: Some commenters are reporting that the Greyhound.ca site works with Chrome despite still not working with Firefox, so maybe Chrome is the solution you are looking for. Read below for my take on how the site didn’t work in 2009, obnoxiously still relevant today.
From: Jeremy Clarke <jer @si….ing.com>
To: <webmaster @greyhound.ca>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 19:49:45 -0500
Subject: Greyhound.ca is completely broken if you haven’t noticedHi, I am a person who likes to use the bus as well as the internet.
Your site has been broken for years now and makes it harder to take busses. Lately it has become completely broken. You can’t search for any bus schedule without incurring an error.
Please try using your site and notice how broken it is, then fire whoever is in charge, hire someone who knows how to program a website, then make sure they fix the website. If you cannot handle this task please fire yourself, you do not deserve to be answering the ‘webmaster’ address at this domain.
Anyone who rides the intercity busses in Canada has probably noticed that there is no way to get the Greyhound site to give you a proper quote on a bus fare, its been like that for years: they actually told me once at the terminal that I shouldn’t trust times and prices on the site because it is innacurate.
What’s new is that it now shows an error any time you even try to find the times that the busses leave. This means that the Greyhound.ca website is now 100% LESS USEFUL than the flyers they print out and offer a bus stations with departure times.
It’s pathetic and frustrating. They end up making you call them and waste human phone time instead of fixing their site. While getting angry I noticed a link on the site saying “have a problem? Email webmaster@greybound.ca”, so I sent them the message above.
Their response?
From: <postmaster @firstgroup.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 7:49 PM
Subject: Undeliverable: Greyhound.ca is completely broken if you haven’t noticed
To: jer@si….ing.comDelivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:
webmaster@greyhound.ca
The recipient’s e-mail address was not found in the recipient’s e-mail system. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please check the e-mail address and try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
________________________________
Sent by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Thanks for the confirmation, assholes.
Lingua flexes its muscles.
On the site I work on, Global Voices we call our translation project Lingua. It is mostly composed of volunteers who love our mission so much they want to make sure people can read it in languages other than English (the default for Global Voices at this point, hopefully to change going forward).
Each translator chooses which posts they want to translate (we have too many in English for the other languages to translate everything) so usually we get 2 or 3 of the dozen or so active languages that translate any given post, and we show links at the top of the post to the translations (a mix of showing off and making it easy for people who’s first language isn’t English to find more convenient versions).
This is something wonderful for me to see: One post that the whole Lingua community got together and translated, resulting in a ridiculously long list that shows the truly amazing variety of letterforms, if nothing else, that Global Voices is printed in.
We use the ISO codes for languages (like wikipedia, i.e. fr.wikipedia.org) but in case you’re curious, the post is available in: French, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Macedonian, German, Malagasy, Bangla, Swahili, Albanian, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Serbian, Portuguese, Arabic, Polish, Indonesian, Japanese and Farsi.
That’s a mouthfull. I love my job.
Six years ago today on Ungrateful Biped
Adding Dashboard Widgets to WordPress 2.7 Using Plugins
As you can guess by the title this is another incredibly technical and specific article that’s really only of interest to WordPress developers like myself. Friends and family: please amuse yourself with this instead :)
So onto Dashboard Widgets (also referred to as “Dashboard Modules” in at least one place, though the WP code calls them Widgets so I’ll stick with that).
I wanted to add a little box to the dashboard with the currently logged-in user’s avatar and a few links to things they might want quickly. Since WP 2.7 made the dashboard super configurable (you can show/hide different sections and drag them around to reorder them) I figured that there would be some documentation on how to add new ones using plugins. Unfortunately it turned out that not only was there no page on the WordPress Codex to explain the process, but the dashboard code itself (found in /wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php ) was completely uncommented and confusing as hell. Since I spent the day figuring the whole API out I decided to write up a nice Codex page so the next person would have it easier: Voila.
At that link you’ll find an explanation of the function and hook you’ll need to use to add dashboard widgets using plugin (or functions.php in your theme) code. The process is pretty similar to adding sub-pages to the admin section if you’re familiar with that.
Some lessons I picked up along the way:
- The dashboard API needs some serious work. I might take a whack at it at some point when I’m bored but hopefully it will get cleared up eventually, especially the missing PHPDoc comments
- Right now it’s pretty much impossible to easily or effectively push your sorting preferences onto the default Dashboard Widgets. In the codex article I give an example of how to get your widget to the top of the list for people who have never sorted their widgets, but there’s no easy way to add your widget and say “make all users see this at the top of their screen unless they drag it to a different spot”. This fact is pretty annoying as blogs with many users are likely to have a lot of people who never even see the new widget because there are too many default widgets above it pushing it below the fold.
- I did figure out a way to force your widget to the top of the page but it had the unfortunate side effect of making it trapped there forever regardless of users dragging it around. I don’t recommend this method for publicly distributed plugins (as it will confuse and frustrate users that the dragging is broken) but you can see the code here (wp.pastebin.com link, apologies if it stops working at some point).
- This one is a bit obvious, but writing a Codex article (or any documentation really) is very very useful for acquainting yourself with something. I know more about this process than I would have if I’d just followed the instructions someone else wrote (I also know more about what needs fixing!). Lesson: When the docs are missing don’t just hack around till you have a half-baked solution, look through the source and figure out the best solution and share it with the world by adding to the docs yourself.
Brain Controller for Video Games: WTF Awesome.
This is so badass, the OCZ NIA (Neural Impulse Activator). You wear a headband and are able to control video games using the muscles in your head as well as your mood brainwaves.
Seems like it could really compete with the keyboard as a means of information entry, though controlling a game with your face isn’t that much closer to the real thing than than your hand, it just more freaky.
doing something with those old videos
First time embedding a FB video somewhere outside FB. Problems seeing it?
Okay I lied: We are whores for cuteness
When the Global Voices community saw the baby joke (pictured in the last post) they loved it so much they demanded a lolcat-based campaign and the above was born.
Just to keep it classy we also have a more subdued badge:
New Global Voices Funding Drive Campaign?
I think it will really rake in the dough, don’t you?
Note: This is obviously a joke. Global Voices would never resort to ridiculous, cute graphics as a branding tactic.