luminary blur

I’m really more interested in trying this out than anything. When Apple finally announced official 3rd party app support, my initial idea of a “killer app” was mobile blogging software. Now that Wordpress for the iPhone is out, my wish has been realized (I know TypePad was first but I’m a Wordpress guy) and here I am blogging from work. Will this newfound ability increase my output? Doubtful. I’ve vowed to be more prolific too many times to count yet this blog still chugs along at one post a month.

Still, the idea of slowly crafting a post via iPhone throughout the day when a spare moment presents itself is an attractive proposition. Heck, it sure beats wasting time on Twinkle which seems to be slowly morphing into some sort of Web 2.0 dating service (see attached screen grab - “female playmate” - enough said).

And so concludes my first truly mobile post. I hope there will be many more.

Note: After posting originally with Wordpress on my iPhone, I went back in with ecto to center the image (for some reason I hate left-aligned images) and also to add a few links to the body of the post. Despite some minor post-production, I think posting from my iPhone is powerful indeed and will—hopefully—drive me to be more active.

written by Ben \\ tags: iPhone, Twinkle, Wordpress

I think Tom Merritt, Molly Wood, and Leo Laporte’s Twitter novel is a nifty idea. However I really don’t like reading it from the bottom up. The RSS feed wasn’t much more help - you still have to click on each “post” to read it. What was I do to? Well, with little PHP trickery and Wordpress wonderfulness, I was able to parse the RSS feed in such a way as to strip out the “140novel:” at the beginning of each tweet as well as the sometimes-present “#t” (or “#m” or “l”) at the end of each tweet. Eliminating these two conventions makes for a nice linear reading experience. You can view the “book” version of 140novel on my appropriately-titled 140novel page.

Now the question I’m faced with is this: where are paragraph breaks in a Twitter novel? Right now it’s just one stream of sentences. There are no hints from the authors as to where to make these breaks so I guess it will just have to be a big jumble of text.

UPDATE: So it seems that only a certain number of the most recent tweets are fed into the RSS feed. Therefore the story doesn’t—and never did—start from the beginning as it appeared on my 140novel page and it would continue to cut off more and more from the beginning as more posts are added. Not sure how to fix this. I’m a little upset because the code works. The story is formatted perfectly. It’s just the RSS feed that is the issue.

written by Ben \\ tags: Novel, PHP, Twitter, Wordpress

Just one minor blog update, actually. I’ve added a new page for Ben’s Videos appropriately titled the Ben’s Videos page. You’ll find my last eight Vimeo uploads there.

Also, I’m extremely disappointed with the Jawbone I purchased on Thursday night. The darn thing couldn’t be more staticky. Holding my iPhone at arm’s length causes the headset severe distress whereas I was accustomed to roaming around my entire apartment with my $20 Jabra. I’m concerned about the Apple Store’s policies regarding non-Apple branded merchandise. Hopefully they will exchange it for me without an issue as I’m assuming I simply got a defective unit. All those glowing reviews can’t be wrong. Right?

written by Ben \\ tags: Jawbone, Tech, Updates, Wordpress

Ok, it’s really just the same old Wordpress, only upgraded to version 2.3.1 (I had been on 2.2.x). Also, I found out I was a full two versions behind on my favorite Wordpress theme in the whole word, i3Theme. Now I’m on 1.4 which fully supports all of the new-fangled features in Wordpress 2.3 like tags. (In fact, this is my first post featuring tags. Cool!)

Not much else to update on other than 7:15am meeting coming very very quickly. Oh, and MoodBlast 3 rocks. Everyone should use MoodBlast. Everyone.

written by Ben \\ tags: i3Theme, Updates, Wordpress

I love this theme - it’s reasonably clean, easily customizable, and has that Mac look that I love. One problem: the individual post previous/next links don’t seem to function properly. After going to the creator’s site and reading through some comments it seems like this happened with an upgrade to Wordpress (likely 2.2). In fact, the links work on the creator’s site probably because he is using a previous Wordpress version. Deeming these not entirely necessary, I have set the “post-nav” class to “display: none” so the wrong link doesn’t show up on every post page. Might cut down on the navigability a bit but having the wrong links is worse methinks.

Posted while listening to Satan’s Bed from the album “Vitalogy” by Pearl Jam.

written by Ben

I still haven’t figured out how to import Blogger posts into Wordpress. My iPhone had an attempted delivery at 7:13pm last night. And I have a lot of pictures to go through from the White Sox game on Sunday. Caution: 629 words ahead.
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written by Ben