Caddickisms

Nothing mind blowing today. This is pretty much going to be a stream of conciousness post. We’ll see if it’s even vaguely interesting by the time it’s over.

Just found Grooveshark. Loving it. On their About Us page, this was a quote one of their employees used:

“If it weren’t for physics and law enforcement, I would be unstoppable.” — Bukowski

For now, that’s my favorite quote.

The reason I found Grooveshark? Lee, over at Quit Your Day Job, has been doing a series of posts called “music to draw robots by” and has been posting the music from Grooveshark. The latest was “Carry on My Wayward Son” by Kansas, which I love. I also like the drawing. (Head over to QYDJ for more).

Grooveshark also has a WordPress plugin, so I thought I’d try it out here with a little more Kansas goodness.

“Kansas,” as some of you may know, is not just the name of a rock group. It’s also the name of a state in the United States. I know it’s hard to believe, but apparently there is no copyright problem there.

I don’t live in Kansas, nor have I ever been there. I do live in Pennsylvania, where I just saw local cable coverage of the PA Farm Show’s “Tractor Square Dancing” last night. As odd as this sounds, I was impressed with the drivers’ ability to actually do some interesting “dances.” Yes, I did actually watch it for almost 5 minutes. I’m still not sure why. I think I was hoping for an accident or something. In the end, it reminded me of simpler times when entertainment wasn’t in-your-face action/drama, but simple, fun, and personal.

Then I changed channels.

And I caught Backdraft, one of my favorite movies. If there’s a better “cheek actor” than Kurt Russell out there, I’ve yet to find him. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, GO WATCH THE MOVIE! Seriously, it’s really good. It also has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. Apparently a lot of other people like it too, because it shows up as the theme for unrelated trailers periodically as well as commercials. It’s also in a toy fire truck we got for my daughter one Christmas, made almost 2 decades after the movie.

um …

… uh

So I actually had more to say here, but I just got interrupted for about 4 hours, and completely lost my train of thought. I remember having a lot of ideas. Suffice it to say that there would have been something witty integrated about cows, to riff off the use of “utter” in the title. Okay “witty” may be overstating it. There was going to be something about TV and a few things that have happened recently, but hey… that’s what happens with stream of consciousness: you lose your thought and the stream becomes a trickle and dries up. So…. maybe it’ll come to me later. And then there will be another post.

Until then… as the song says, carry on.

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I’m looking to start a new blogging project online. Hopefully it’ll come together soon. I’m just in the planning stages now, but one of the things I’m considering is what the blog will look like. In tooling around the available themes for WordPress, I came across one that leapt out at me and started jumping up and down on my chest, slapping my face, shouting “Look at me! LOOK AT ME!!!”

The first thing that got my attention was the name: Atahualpa. A theme named after the last emperor of the Incan Empire. Great choice. It’s hard to ignore all those “a”s.

The next thing was the claim of customizability. It claimed to be either fixed- or flexible-width, 2 or 3 column, republican or democrat… and that you could control almost every aspect of the theme easily.

Well, I downloaded it and looked for myself. The claims are true… mostly.

You can control just about everything, to a much more granular level than I’ve seen in any other theme, right through the settings page, without opening the style.css file. It’s amazing the level of flexibility this thing affords. Check out the list of sub-pages on the Settings page…

The list of categories you can control in Atahualpa – many with multiple options each

There have got to be well over a hundred individual items you can style and control through this Settings page. It’s crazy.

The flexibility is great, but even though you don’t have to enter the style.css file, these settings aren’t for the faint of heart. Quite a few of the settings are just text boxes for you to enter CSS. There is a lot of guidance and great examples, but you gotta know CSS if you’re gonna mess with the default much. There’s no getting around it.

If you like the default, though, or there are just a couple small things you want to change, this may be a great style even for the CSS-ignorant. You just gotta ask for a little help from someone who knows what they’re looking at.

Here’s how this site would look with the default settings:

Caddickisms with the default Atahualpa look

For me, this theme is right on the edge. I like the basic default look, but there are a lot of little things I want to change. I love to tinker, too, but this may be a time when there are just too many options. I’m almost overwhelmed and that’s making it hard to focus on exactly what I want to alter.

Still, this is the best alternative theme for Caddickisms I’ve found yet. If I can determine what to change and then find those options, this might just be the next look for the site.

I think I’m going to go with something else for the new project, though.

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I thought I’d give the site a new look, so I went searching for a new theme. I’m not entirely sold on this one yet, but I’m giving it a shot. There are some tweaks I definitely want to make, but it seems like a pretty decent theme. I’ve made a couple changes already.

If anyone has any thoughts they want to share, I’m all ears.

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This time I followed the directions to delete (almost) all the WordPress files on the server before uploading the new versions. That seems to work much better than overwriting them.

So far I haven’t seen any errors (though the database upgrade page was filled with errors, it also said it was successful at the end). Here’s to nothing cropping up moving forward.

And it even looks like I might be able to keep my theme. Still haven’t messed with the sidebars yet. That’s next.

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Argh.

Well, I finally upgraded WordPress to 2.3.3. I’d been putting it off because I was afraid it would break things. It ended up being worse than I thought.

I’m still finding errors in the upgrade itself! I had to pull old versions of files just to get it complete the upgrade procedure. Who knows what I’m going to find when I finally get through all this.

Most of the plugins I use actually work fine. That’s nice. The one exception is the polls, which I just have to upgrade, but holy cow, that one’s a pain in the neck to upgrade. From the instructions, it looks harder than upgrading WP itself.

And the biggest disappointment…. my theme, Tiga, died. It was already having problems with the previous upgrade but I was able to get past that issue. This time, it’s too much for me to figure out. Seems to be a sidebar widget problem, mostly, but that’s beyond me. It’s a shame, ’cause I really like this theme. Guess I gotta go out on a search. If anyone has suggestions for a nice 3 column theme, I’m all ears. (If I get the polls working, maybe I’ll put up a poll on it… ).

Anyway… lots of transition around here for the foreseeable future. Don’t be surprised if things break, get fixed, go away, come back, and just look plain different.

[Update: HA! At least three hours invested in this so far, and I finally got to the point where I had to restore my previous version. Too much was broken. I couldn't even edit posts. Cut my losses and run. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow night.]

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[UPDATE: as you can see below, I'm having some problems with CoolPlayer - like it doesn't work anymore. I've switched to the Anarchy player.]

As you can see from the previous post, I’m trying out a new plugin to embed video in WordPress (the software running this blog). There are some good players out there, but I’ve found that CoolPlayer does the job nicely for me, with a total minimum of effort – and that’s what I’m really after.

I’ve had trouble using the YouTube provided “embed” code previously, because WordPress mangles the OBJECT code it uses. This simple plugin lets me avoid that issue. It also handles more than just video – it plays audio, too – and it allows me to use both on-site and off-site files. Multiple file formats are supported. It’s really a nice little app.

Here are some examples of using it:

Off-site video (YouTube):

[coolplayer width="480" height="380" autoplay="0" loop="0" charset="utf-8" download="1" mediatype=""]
Google Docs in Plain English
[/coolplayer]

On-site audio (mp3) – the little blue arrows aren’t part of the player, they’re from another player technology I have installed here:

[coolplayer width="100" height="100" autoplay="0" loop="0" charset="utf-8" download="1" mediatype=""]
Pop-pop not talking
[/coolplayer]

Honestly, I don’t think I like it as much for audio, but it works.

[tags]WordPress plugins, video, audio, coolplayer[/tags]

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Nothing new going on here. I created the map for a project at work, and I wanted to test out the embedding plugin bubbl.us has for WordPress.

So, for what it’s worth, here is a draft of my talking points for presenting some Learning Technology ideas to my team (click on the map and drag to move it, or zoom in using the wheel on your mouse or the controls in the upper-left of the map):

Hmm… I’m not sure I like that I have to pick a static size for the view. It’s not terrible, though. For those of you with smaller screens… sorry about this. Lemme know if it’s really out of hand.

As for the content, the goal of this particular effort is to show how a bunch of different learning technologies can support different modes of training/learning. It’s by no means complete… just a discussion starter. But if you have any insights on technology categories I should use or selling points for each of them, please share. I’ve still got over a week before I have to present this, and I could use the help.

[tags]bubbl.us, mind mapping, learning technology, learning 2.0, web 2.0, collaboration software[/tags]

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Argh. I mentioned before that my site theme settings suddenly changed. Today I tried to fix it by upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the problem, but figured it might help if there was hacking involved. It didn’t. In fact, you may notice that my Blogroll is now broken. On the admin side, I’m also seeing weird things with my “Categories” (Blogroll categories and Posting categories are mixing up).

On the plus side, there seem to be a few cool features in this new version that I’ll have to check out later.

For now, I’m too tired to keep investigating either the good or the bad. All I can do now is repeat myself….. Argh.

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I find a lot of stuff that I want to share, but that doesn’t make it into a blog post of its own, for whatever reason (usually a lack of time and/or energy).

If I’m subscribed to the feeds, those interesting posts generally make it into my Google Reader Shared Posts page (currently in the right sidebar here, though I’m going to move it to it’s own page once I figure out how to get the Javascript to work in WordPress). For the other posts I run across, I’m going to start periodically creating a “link list” post like this one. At the moment, I’m thinking I’ll try to categorize the links, but I’m still figuring out what will work best so that may change.

So, that’s enough with the extended preamble. On to the links!

Which Operating System would your favorite Sci-Fi characters choose?
» Spock loves Linux, Vader is a Mac Daddy | Geekend | TechRepublic.com

The History of Sci-Fi, written by the fans
BBC – My Science Fiction Life
Thoughts and memories about all the sci-fi we grew up with, from the 1930’s to today, across all “platforms” – books, movies, TV, radio, comics, etc. – chosen and examined by users.

Justice League Of America – The Movie?
Slice of Scifi – Science Fiction TV & Movie News, Interviews & more » JLA Finally Coming to Theaters? Keep Your Fingers Crossed!
In theory this is really cool. In practice, I don’t think they’ll pull it off. In addition to the casting issues the post mentions, there’s the problem of trying to fit all those characters into a 2 hour movie. It’s hard enough to get a single fully fleshed out superhero character in a film, let alone seven. The closest movie to pull that off was X-Men, and they really only focused on Logan (Wolverine) and Rogue in that one.

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Video, Music, Podcasts, Audio, and Multimedia WordPress Plugins « Lorelle on WordPress

This is a great annotated list of plug-ins for WordPress users trying to add video or audio of any sort to their blog. I wish she would have put this list out months ago – it would have saved me quite a bit of time and effort.

Now I have to go through all those options and see how I can best use them.

Thanks, Lorelle, for the compilation (and the link to my previous post on the subject)!

[tags]WordPress Plugins, multimedia, audio plugins, video plugins, blogs[/tags]

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