Monthly Archives: October 2010

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

fun, Holiday, Life, ,

Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman.The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving:“The next morning the old horse was found without his saddle, and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at his master’s gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at breakfast—dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled at the schoolhouse, and strolled idly about the banks of the brook; but no school-master. Hans Van Ripper now began to feel some uneasiness about the fate of poor Ichabod, and his saddle. An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent investigation they came upon his traces. In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.”

Like I said, be careful tonight trick or treaters.

Fixing Shorten2Ping for WordPress

Life, ,

I’ve been using WordPress for my weblog for quite a while now and I find the ability to extend the basic functionality to be one of its greatest strengths. The developer community is amazing to say the least. I rely on a number of plugins to publish this weblog, but none more than Shorten2Ping by Samuel Aguilera.

Shorten2Ping allows me to use the excellent ping.fm, which allows me to post updates to all of my social networks, so when I publish a new weblog post Twitter, Facebook, and a couple of other spots are automagically updated for me. No fuss, no muss… until recently.

To get Shorten2Ping to work I have to provide an API key assigned by ping.fm. This is basically a handshake that allows Shorten2Ping to communicate with ping.fm on my behalf and publish my updates. (Yes, that’s an oversimplification, but you get what I mean.) About a week, or so, ago Shorten2Ping started receiving “Your API key has been suspended. Please contact us regarding this matter.” messages from ping.fm when I’d publish a post. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, turns out I wasn’t the only person with this problem. The author of Shorten2Ping got to the bottom of it. Ping.fm had a spam problem and disabled his developer key.

“The problem is that seesmic suspended it because they say that Shorten2Ping is used by spammers users.”

What to do?

All is not lost. Samuel patched up his plugin, and with any luck it’s going to work when I publish this page. If it doesn’t I’ll publish an update to this post, but hopefully it’ll work first time out.

There are a couple of things you’ll need to do after updating Shorten2Ping, it should show up in your WordPress Updates, so go install it.

First thing you’ll need to do is visit ping.fm and copy your posting e-mail address. Once you have that you’ll need to go to Plugins, locate Shorten2Ping and click on Settings link.

Next you’ll want to select Ping.fm email from the Send Notificaiton To combo-box.

Finally click on the Notification link and paste the e-mail address you copied from ping.fm and paste it into Posting email

Once you’ve done that you should be able to post using WordPress and once again update all your favorite social networks.

UPDATE: This fix requires more than the above steps to work. Apparently you’ll need support from your web host. The new Shorten2Ping “fix” requires the php mail() function. Apparently I don’t have that support enabled, and many folks probably don’t. I’d imagine it’s a security risk. Maybe we can convince Samuel to create Shorten2DlvrIt? Dlvr.it will also publish to your social networks just like ping.fm.

Extreme Pumpkin Carving

fun, Life, ,

Frankie.Villafane Studios: “If you have yet to try and carve a pumpkin in a 3-D manner you need to. Its fun and everybody enjoys a cool pumpkin. Unfortunately they begin to rot less than a week after carving so be sure to take plenty of pictures. You can experiment with ways of preserving them but I find nothing works better than a nice photo. Some chefs that I have carved for put lemon juice on the faces to help slow down the natural molding process that will occur.”

You gotta love “Extreme” Pumpkin carving. Wish I had the skill to do this sort of stuff. I’ll bet there are some folks at LEVEL that could do this.

Bucking the trend

Movies,

Why so serious?Hero Complex (LA Times): “Nolan was most eager to talk about the fact that Warner Bros. had agreed with his argument that the film should resist the current 3-D craze and instead use high-definition approaches and IMAX cameras to strike out on a different cinematic path than the stereoscopic technology that, for better or worse, has become the dominant conversation in the blockbuster sector.”

Thank goodness someone has sense enough to move away from this horrible 3-D trend. Just make great movies, you don’t need 3-D.

Movie line of the week

MLOTW

Watchin' it on the big screen!Good morning movie liners! Today’s line comes from one of those movies I can watch time and again. Are you ready? Here goes.

“If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up. This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up. My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I am the President. “

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.