Background, or “What is this WordPress thing?”

WordPress is an online publishing platform. It began as a tool for posting quick blurbs of info to a personal website, but has enough horsepower to manage large, complex websites. The software’s selling point is the simple way WordPress drives your site’s template and navigation, allowing you to focus on content – and customize the nuts & bolts as much or little as you’d like. WordPress comes in two flavors, both free:

• WordPress.com – Sign up for a free WordPress site. The developers handle all the nerdy details, so all you need to do is choose a web address and username. WordPress.com charges fees for several optional features (such as ad removal) on an annual basis.
• WordPress.org – Download and install WordPress yourself. Self-hosted WordPress is much more flexible, but requires a web hosting account and some maintenance. Many web hosts (including GoDaddy, home of awful advertising and great prices) will install WordPress for you with no hassle.

The first step to running a WordPress site (after deciding its purpose) is to set the thing up. Both WordPress.com and WordPress.org do a great job of walking you through that, so I won’t belabor the issue. Next step: adding content.

WordPress manages two distinct types of content:

1. Posts appear in reverse chronological order on your site’s home page; add a new Post, and the others are bumped down automatically. Old Posts that get pushed from the home page are easily accessible through monthly archives – also created automatically by WordPress.
2. Pages are listed permanently across your site’s home page, generally in a band of navigation links near the top of the screen. Add a new Page, and its title will be listed prominently for users to see and click.

Because of the way Posts and Pages are displayed on a WordPress site, news, reminders, and event recaps are ideal Post content: they will be listed front-and-center when published, but less prominent as time passes. Basic “About Us” content, contact information, major events & initiatives, or other long-term items make for good Page content, as these are all things you’ll want users to be able to find 5 days or 5 years from now.

Publishing Content with WordPress

Once you’ve created your WordPress site and have content to publish, log in to your site (using the instructions provided by WordPress.com or your hosting provider). When you log in to WordPress, the first screen you’ll see is the Dashboard. The WordPress Dashboard provides an overview of your content, lists recent comments, and basically throws a ton of shortcuts on the screen that may or may not be useful. In the top right corner are several important links:

Starting from the left, the New Post button will let you quickly add a new Post. Clicking the link on your WordPress username will bring up a profile screen where you can change how your name is displayed, update your password, or otherwise adjust your WordPress profile. The Log Out link will do exactly what a Log Out link should. Screen Options lets you hide Dashboard items you don’t use, and Help will give detailed instructions for the current screen.

Tip: The Help link is available at the top right on every WordPress administrator screen, and provides some great info for new users.

Click the New Post button, and you’ll see the Add New Post screen. Type a clear, concise title in the field labeled Enter title here:

When you publish your Post, this title will be displayed at the top. Under the title field is an editor box containing a number of buttons:

Next to the Upload/Insert heading at top left are small icons you can click to add photos, video, audio, or other files to your Post. Click any of these icons for a screen that will walk you through inserting multimedia items.

In the gray bar are a number of formatting buttons – these should be familiar to most users, but you can point at any button to see a brief description.

• To add text, simply click in the editor box and type or paste (Right-click > Paste) your content.
• To format text, select the text using your mouse and click the appropriate button.
• To add a web link, select text and click the Insert/edit link button – it’s the one with a picture of a chain link.

To preview and then publish your Post, look for the Publish box on the right side of the screen:

Click the Preview button to see what your Post will look like when published. When you’re ready to display your Post on your website, click Publish.

Once you’ve mastered Posts, you can dig into the other features of WordPress using the left navigation. Of key importance are the buttons in the section immediately below the Dashboard button:

You can edit existing Posts or add new Posts using the Posts button. The Media button will help you manage multimedia files on your site. The Links button allows you to add links that may be of interest to readers. The Pages button will let you create new pages and edit existing Pages, which use an editing screen nearly identical to the Add New Post screen. The Comments button displays a screen where you can approve reader comments and delete comment spam.

For more advanced WordPress information, refer to the WordPress.com or WordPress.org documentation!

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski now has the three votes needed for approval, despite firm opposition from the two Republicans on the five-member commission. Genachowski’s two fellow Democrats said Monday they will vote for the rules, even though they consider them too weak.

After a federal court ruled that his Federal Communications Commission could not regulate the internet, Julius Genachowski did what a good Obama appointee does: regulate it anyway.

Yet many supporters of network neutrality are disappointed. Clyburn and the other Democrat, Michael Copps, both said the rules are not as strong as they would like, even after Genachowski made some changes to address their concerns.

You don’t have to be a kook like Michael Copps to worry about providers throttling specific types of content, or charging for services in a way specifically designed to screw customers over. I’ll be the first to say that Time Warner sucks, and though I’m content with Verizon I hardly love ‘em. But let’s think about this whole “Net Neutrality” scam for more than fifteen seconds. Time Warner’s monopoly in Oxford was infuriating, so I’m now a happy Wide Open West customer. If I get sick of Verizon, I can dump them for AT&T, or T-Mobile, or Sprint. If the FCC regulates the tubes stupidly, guess what – we’re all stuck with those stupid regulations.

Companies sometimes do bad things. This is a fact that is well established. In some unfortunate circumstances, people have limited options for their home or mobile broadband service. If the FCC could predict trends, regulate wisely, and do more good than harm, that would be one thing. But where’s the evidence that the federal government is competent enough to regulate the industry? Genachowski wants all data to be delivered at the same rate, regardless of the content or how little the customer might be willing to pay for its delivery.

When I think of the government and I think of delivering stuff, I don’t get more optimistic.

• The United States Postal Service has a government monopoly on first-class mail
• The United States Postal Service lost $8.5 billion in fiscal 2010

Contrast packets of data with items delivered by mail: the USPS conducts business that’s not wildly different from when letters were carried by a dude on a horse. The internet is a global network of networks, supporting the creation of new technologies and businesses every day. The carriers selling access to this web of digital goods and services are continuously developing new ways to provide said access, from varying devices and at a wide range of price points.

Delivering letters is too complicated a process for the federal government. Think they’ll do a better job of regulating the internet? Maybe the USPS is an unfair example. After all, the last time Washington decided to take over a sixth of the economy, it went really well. When bureaucrats decide Americans have a “right” to a product, woe to the industry that produces it!

I’ve got all but the first Keys album – yes, I’m one of those late arrivals who didn’t hear of the Akron duo until Attack & Release – and couldn’t have been much happier with the set list. Although Dan Auerbach’s voice lost the battle against drums and guitar, the rocking-ness of his guitar and Patrick Carney’s drums completely made up for that.  I was hoping to hear 10 A.M Automatic, but when a band has 6 albums to cover it’s hard to be picky!

If you want to see a movie based on a web comic which is itself heavily influenced by video games, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is nearly perfect. It’s more stylized than I expected, which won’t sit well with some viewers, but I was impressed. The trailers had me looking forward to indier-than-thou dry humor in a geeky wrapper, with some goofy action for good measure. That could have been entertaining, if not exactly original… given that Michael Cera himself has been in, what, 19 films matching that description? Pilgrim is, in fact, something unique, and something very, very funny.

According to TV By The Numbers, tonight was actually intended to be the season 3 finale. Chuck is on the bubble again, it would seem? Allow me to refer you to last spring’s cutting insights on the topic of cancellation. Anyway, what would’ve made a great finale could also make for a good segue into what this season should have been all about: butt-kicking and laughs courtesy of a fun duo with a great cast of co-stars. Chuck as this guy. Sarah as this hot mama.

I didn’t think of this until my roommate said something a few months ago, but the relationship between those characters is the perfect template. Chuck’s got ridiculous talents, and is more of a clown than a tough guy (though admittedly about .04% as terrific as Wash from Firefly). Sarah is also extremely talented, but her sense of humor takes a back seat to all the skull-cracking she’s got to do. Like Zoe. They’re different but made for each other, blah blah etc etc.

So, yeah… if you’ve given up on Chuck as I nearly did during that string of lame episodes earlier this season, catch up! With any luck, the remaining filmed season 3 episodes feature a sturdy, non-high-school relationship between the show’s namesake and leading lady! Better late than never, and there’s still plenty the writers could conjure up besides everyone breaking everyone elses’ hearts and making sad faces 10 minutes per episode.

It doesn’t hurt that Adam Baldwin maintains a steady level of awesome.

I don’t say excellent lightly here – I really enjoyed the end of season one and really liked how the Epitaph 1 episode on the season 1 DVDs wrapped things up while leaving ambiguity. I think it’s great how Joss (can I call him Joss? man I’m a dweeb) planned ahead with an episode that essentially said, “this is one of the possible horrendous outcomes of what’s going on in Dollhouse,” without closing any doors on season two.

I loved both episodes tonight, and the first thing I said to my roommate afterward was, “I’m so glad this show was canceled!” Surely, Whedon’s experience with Firefly – Fox airing episodes out of order like total jerkbags before canceling during the first season – prepared him for Dollhouse’s abrupt cancellation. It’s good to see a focused team of writers and producers providing great characters with a worthy plot-line. Nothing sharpens the mind like cancellation! Let me choose between seven top-notch episodes and 21 that are a mix of “cool!” “meh” and “boo,” and I’ll take seven every time.

Enver Gjokaj was born for Dollhouse – I don’t think I’ve seen anyone better at adopting a different voice, attitude, and mannerisms. Ray Wise‘s cameo tonight was good. Summer Glau was better than I expected in that her role wasn’t the same one I’ve always seen her in, and she played it very convincingly. If I have one complaint, it’s that Eliza Dushku is too sexy. It seems somehow… unsafe.

I’m looking forward to the final seven episodes, hopeful that tonight was an indicator of the fun twists and madness we can expect!

Having now seen the first two seasons via Netflix, it is so good. Really, the best way to describe my enthusiasm for the first half of Battlestar Galactica is “Schrute-like.” After watching the pilot – basically a feature film unto itself – I expected the entertainment value to drop. It did not. Through the first season and nearly all of the second, the characters (even the sleazy ones) are convincing and their relationships are interesting. The action is great, the bits of over-the-top science fiction goofiness are few and far between, and the drama is… dramatic.

Then you get to the last 20 minutes of the season two finale. I’ve read mixed things about seasons three and four, and the way season two ended inspires no confidence. Let’s say you have a believable love triangle – involving several major characters – that’s picking up steam, sparks of romance between two other characters, and a huge shift in the roles of warring political leaders. Would you fade to black and begin the next scene with “One year later?” Me neither. It almost felt like the writers had gotten tired of the whole wandering through space routine, and wanted to move on to something lamer.

So, like a Schrute (or a lady), season two of Battlestar Galactica left me feeling as though I’d missed a whole lot of important events in the lives of the characters, left me much less excited for the Season 3 disc that arrived today, and made me glad I resisted buying the crazy-go-nuts series box set when DeepDiscount.com had it on sale.

[Update: Typo. First paragraph. Corrected.]

There are a couple things missing (any kind of worthwhile content in the green social media box at the right, for one), but I’m happy with how this turned out. I used Colorschemedesigner.com to help pick bright, non-clashing colors for the extra content boxes. To save space and reduce the amount of repetitive text in the sidebar, I janked together some code to display a random post with a matching tag for each tagged post. That way if you’re reading a post on a certain topic, you can jump straight to another one instead of picking through the archives. As ever, the WordPress Codex made this less painful.

I’ll be adding links and stuff, but the whole point of the blue and red boxes to the right is that they’ll pull content based on what I share in Google Reader, favorite on YouTube, and listen to with Zune. What’s missing? Any suggestions for social media features?? Leave a comment – which you can now do with your Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID account! For the low price of all 10 of the old comments being eaten…

Yeah, maybe I’ll fix that next weekend!

At first it seemed like Fox was going to pull another Firefly on Joss. The first several episodes had some promising characters, but nothing all that intriguing going on. Then came the rumors that Alan Tudyk would be making an appearance. And about halfway through the season, the awesomeness ensued.

I’m not sure Joss Whedon and Alan Tudyk can work on something together without it being spectacular. Alan Tudyk is so good at what he does. Do you need someone hilarious? Done. Someone crazy? Sure. Someone hilarious AND crazy? Look no further:

We’re not bluffing! –I’m bluffing –But the rest of us mean business!

I hope Dollhouse gets the second season that Fox screwed Firefly out of. The crew at TV by the Numbers do not seem optimistic. If you’d like to lose some faith in humanity, and watching the evening news doesn’t cut it, take a look at this graph on James Hibbard’s site. Note how Dollhouse’s ratings drop in inverse proportion to the show’s level of face-rocking goodness.

To use several more words: Yvonne Strahovski. Yikes. Adam Baldwin sets a high bar of badassery, and then hurls himself right over it. The past several episodes the story has been interesting, the writing has leaned towards action while bringing well-timed laughs, and the stars continue to be great at what they do. If you’ve missed it – Hulu has not.

Then you get to the preview for the next episode (and season finale). Are we headed for a cliffhanger? It looks cliffhanger-ish, but let’s face it… most of the commercials feature some combination of Chuck with a gun to his head and Sarah in her underoos. Again I thought, “Have they renewed Chuck? Because it’s been great and they better not ruin it.”

I turned to The Internets. And wouldn’t you know it, the New York Times Arts Beat posted an interview with Josh Schwartz, one of Chuck‘s creators, this morning. The gist of the interview is that renewal or cancellation have still not been announced, which understandably sucks for everyone involved in making the show. They asked Schwartz about the season two finale, and his response was as far from what I was hoping for as a response could be:

If, in two weeks, that is the last episode of the show to ever air, it will be one of the least satisfying finales of all time.

Times like these I’m glad I have no power or influence! Should Chuck end in a miserable cliffhanger? Or should the show get another 20-some episodes, more than half of which are likely to be tired rehashes of old episodes mixed with on-again-off-again nonsense?

I was wrong. iTunes sucks. Want to add some music to your library? Give iTunes a few months to move everything… and convert it to a proprietary format. Want to get art for the 90% of your CDs whose album art was not recognized? You’ll have to sign in to the iTunes store. Then you’ll have to go to the website to confirm your identity. Then you’ll have to log in on the website again. Then when you’ve updated your account info (which requires you to provide a credit card), you’ll have to log back in through iTunes.

Congratulations! For all your trouble, you’ve earned the right to sync your music to your iPod. If you want to copy said music onto a different machine… good luck. If you connect a different iPod it will be logged in to your iTunes account, and you may have to smash it with a rock to sign it out. Each time you connect an unregistered iPod, it will try to register itself to your account until you’ve told it not to four times. If you need to charge someone else’s iPod, you’ll have to sync it with your library — or all the iPod’s contents will be deleted. Really, Apple? It takes some seriously aggravating “features” to make me wish I were using a Microsoft program.

To subsidize the converter boxes, most of which cost between $40 and $80, the government has been letting consumers request up to two $40 coupons per home. But any day now, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the arm of the Commerce Department in charge of administering the coupon program, expects to hit a $1.34 billion funding ceiling set by Congress.

I sort of understand the FCC mandating the broadcast switch to all-digital. I can also see the argument for providing converter vouchers, since the government is essentially removing analog as an option for broadcast viewers with dated TVs. But two per household?

I’ve pissed and moaned about the stupidity of this from the first day I heard of it. Must be my poor grasp of the founding fathers’ intentions: Life, Liberty, and Federal Subsidies for Multiple-Television Families. This is such a small but pathetic example of bureaucracy run rampant. Someone in a meeting somewhere said, “why not offer two $40 vouchers per household?” and suddenly, twice as much taxpayer money is gone. Sorry, but if you can afford two televisions, you can afford a $50 analog-to-digital converter for one of them.

Just think of the disasters that await on February 17th! Converter vouchers lost in the mail… half the population of New Orleans joins a class action lawsuit for mental distress due to daytime dramas missed… op-ed columnists the world over go into apoplectic shock from this final, spiteful injustice committed by the Bush administration. America falls into darkness without the guiding lights of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Agence France-Presse.

I have never once entered a Starbucks without being made to feel like an idiot. I asked about wi-fi, which apparently takes a registered Starbucks card. I didn’t even ask if that cost anything. I’m carrying around a MacBook these days and certainly don’t need my name in a Starbucks database, too. After I paid the guy who took my order and he wandered off, I realized I was supposed to wait near the little round thing at the end of the counter. I was disappointed but not surprised to see that $2.50 at Starbucks gets you a hot chocolate that’s roughly the size of a children’s Frosty. Then again, if you know what size a children’s Frosty is you’re probably not Starbucks’s target demographic.

In Europe are all the tables extremely tiny? Is Europe where Starbucks picked that up from? I am sitting at a table with three chairs around it, and it’s like a TV tray. It’s as if all the furniture in this place was designed by Lilliputians. +10 points to Mac for their dictionary’s simple and shiny confirmation of the spelling of Lilliputian. -100 points from EA for blocking me from playing Spore Creature Creator without an internet connection.

[Update: Typos, begone. Who misspells "Frosty" - seriously!]

It boggles the mind why Blu-ray players are so expensive, when they are unable to connect to the internet at all.  That feature is on the horizon for the players, but all versions of the players so far will never be able to access online content for movies or receive firmware updates, which could possibly mean the inability to watch future Blu-ray movies.  One would assume Sony would distribute firmware updates through the mail on a Blu-ray disc to remedy this issue.  Even with this being the case, Blu-ray prices continue to rise.

It is also popular belief that the upconversion on the Blu-ray player does not match that of the HD DVD format.  This has also been tested by professionals and determined to be true.  This being the case, you can easily grab an HD DVD player for under $100 and enjoy a great upconverting DVD player for the same price (or even less in a lot of cases) as a good upconverting standard DVD player.  Hopefully Blu-ray improves this in the next generation of players, as I have an extensive standard DVD collection and would enjoy a good upconversion for all of them.

Considering all of this, now is the absolute worst time to purchase a Blu-ray standalone player.  The costs are soaring, and they will be obsolete by the time the next generation Blu-ray player is released.  If you really need a Blu-ray player, buy a PS3.  This way you spend about the same amount, plus one would imagine that you will be unaffected by the looming upgrades since the PS3 has online capabilities.  I make it a point, however, to never assume anything with regards to Sony.  I am continually let down by their utter lack of interest in what is best for the consumer.

Consider it a preview of cartoons to (maybe) come! You can even buy the full-size poster, if you trust CafePress…

By any estimation, there are way too many people – somewhere around 9 million active accounts, last I heard – paying monthly subscriptions to play Warcraft for the game to be just a trend. In my case, several friends started playing while we were still in school, and I was glad to join in as soon as I had a job and a broadband connection. The prospect of running around a huge virtual world with the guys, beating the virtual tar out of virtual enemies controlled by lesser nerds the world over, made several months of catch-up seem worthwhile.

And, for a good long time, it was. There’s a lot to Nerdcraft, and we had hours of fun completing quests and picking fights. We’d stumble upon a group of morons tormenting new players, and kick them around until they ran away. We developed quite the skillset for finding the lamest, dirtiest players around, then smashing their faces until they cried and logged off.

The problem came from our lack of virtual dedication: the better your pretend armor and weapons, the tougher your character gets, and when the annoying losers playing the game (it’s a game that attracts more than a few) spend 4-6 hours every day grinding for better gear… most fights are determined by mathematics alone. Um, sure, I’d love to sit at my desk for 30 hours a week clicking 2 buttons a hundred billion times so I could be that awesome. Thing is, I already have a job, so I’ll pass.

I never wanted to play World of Fight This Monster Four Times A Week Until Your Armor All Matches, but unfortunately that’s what the Warcraft developers had in mind for anybody who hangs around more than a few months. I should add that for every complaint my friends and I have about Warcraft it sounds like Warhammer (“Nerdhammer,” to keep the theme consistent?) poses a solution. Until then, if you see one of the Warcraft commercials on TV and think “Wow, that must be the dorkiest thing ever,” ..you’re right!

Get you/’re bachelor/’s! Your busines dreams can be realize but only with a degree!!!11!

And then there’s a phone number to call, with gramatically inept directions on precisely how to leave my name and contact information because this offer is too good to miss! I feel bad, really, that I deleted the whole heap before thinking to copy a phone number so I could share the inside line to a fast-track degree. I guess C1al1s S0ftab5 are sooo last quarter. Speaking of quartering, that’s what we should do with spammers! Seriously, if I’m not going to respond to one pathetic email why would I respond to any of the next 30 with the same, exact words from the same, exact place? If you knocked at my door that many times our relationship would progress rapidly to door-slamming and then punching of face.

The one email (again, out of over a thousand) that I saw from a real live person was a request to be removed from my mailing list. Which means, sickeningly, that my contact form has been used recently to spam people other than me, and at least one poor guy thinks I’m the one who did it. “Pissed” would be a good way to describe the way that makes me feel, and “deleted” would be a good way to describe my contact form and anything attached to it. So if any of my site’s four visitors ever want to contact me again… tough, because I won’t sift through trash knowing others are getting it on account of me, too. But hey, that’s the way it goes, Electronic Mass Marketing is a dog-eat-dog industry. I just wish all the filthy rat-dogs would eat each other already and leave my stuff alone.

If I live to be a hundred and remain lame enough to write about it in 2083, I’ll still be railing on about Internet Explorer. My distaste for it is such that no matter how many Africans the Gates Foundation provides with food, clothing, and Short Term Single User Software Licenses, Bill Gates will be on the short list of people I irrationally hate. Other members include the guy who decided Mark Wahlberg should choose the monkey over the blonde in Planet of the Apes, and whomever happens to be dating Natalie Portman currently.

You see, the problem I have with Internet Explorer is that it sucks. If you are working on a website, there are basically three phases. Phase 1: Design. Phase 2: Implementation. Phase 3: Fix all of the things that work in every browser but Internet Explorer. In a typical web development lifecycle, Phase 3 lasts as long as Phase 1 and 2 combined, and is far less rewarding.

So it is that this week I’m working on a surprise continuation of Phase 3 in a project that should have been done months ago. Sadly, its original iteration was written in InfoPath, a fine product by – who’d have guessed! – Microsoft. What I inherited was completely wrong for the business process, so I learned InfoPath while rebuilding from nothing. Only when I started trying to test it did I find that InfoPath cannot do math. Addition, multiplication, you name it, InfoPath’s XML processing ruins the living hell out of it. Format it to death and back again and one cent plus two cents will (sometimes, not always) add up to .030000072001 dollars.

Now, here I am, having wrenched the Access backend (can I mention Access without writing a separate paragraph of my hatred for it? -maybe!) into shape and the fronted into semi-functional ASP. Turns out my initial testers are incompetent beyond compare and didn’t mention to me that half of the friggin’ totals are calculated completely wrong. They also mentioned, only in passing, that any data entry mistake causes the main form to be completely reset in Internet Explorer.

The first issue, I could fix… if someone would, you know, tell me how the totals are supposed to be determined. The second, to my delight, goes to the very core of how Explorer processes ASP code, and is probably going to require a very ridiculous and painful amount of data retrieval. And only now do we get to this post’s title -

Sweet, sweet relief! In the middle of my crappy day yesterday, I noticed a poster in the hall about the office next door selling ice cream this afternoon. In the middle of my crappy day today… I had to leave the building just in time to miss out on ice cream. And then it was 5:30 by the time I got back downtown. And boy, was that the perfect way to end the week.

First Amendment, First Amendment, First Amendment. For all the carrying on you hear about it from the attorneys of terrorists and Martha Stewart, here is a situation where a Federal bureaucratic agency is seriously targeting First Amendment protections. We’re not talking about millionaire nutjobs pouring dirty money into dirty politics here (ok, we’re not as long as you exclude moveon.org), we’re talking about insightful working men and women who take the time and energy to lend their own unabashed perspective to daily events. I, for one, enjoy that right, mostly because I like reading what they have to say. A lot. Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters has posted a letter to Congress, and La Shawn Barber has a good rundown of the subject from top to bottom.

As far as open letters go, here’s my own much easier, dumb version:

McCain-Feingold must not be applied to the Internet. Would it be just – or within the intentions of the original legislation – to treat private citizens the same as NBC or The Washington Post? This is a dangerous swipe at our freedom of speech, and one that I’m counting on you and other Republican members of Congress to block. Thank you and God bless.

The Internet is, in addition to giving nerds such as myself someplace to write as though people were reading, a great resource for reaching our elected officials. If you’ve got a minute, send a quick message to your state’s senators. If you’re blessed to be an Ohioan, visit the contact forms at Voinovich.senate.gov and DeWine.senate.gov and drop a few sentences through. Otherwise, visit senate.gov and pick your state from the dropdown list.

Oh, by the way, those links to George Voinovich and Mike DeWine’s websites? In the months prior to an election, they’d probably be considered illegal in-kind assistance if McCain-Feingold were stretched to cover Internet communications. Yikes…