Category: site specific

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What started off as a test installation of Movable Type has turned into a ten-year-old site. To mark the tenth anniversary of jpreardon.com, here are the 10 most popular posts:

  1. Wacky Weather Widget
  2. Skype on Mac with Jawbone Headset
  3. Google Analytics Mobile Tracking With Rails
  4. AJAX drag and drop on Rails
  5. NYC to Montreal and Back (in Four Parts)
  6. Automatically Refill Your Metrocard
  7. Motorcycle Parking at NYC Muni-Meters
  8. ActiveRecord Tutorial
  9. EasyPay Metrocard Update
  10. IA/UX Stencils, Templates and Patterns

I’m not sure why a random post about a weather widget is so damn popular. It continues to be one of the most visited pages on this site. Although, in the last six months or so, it is has been been knocked out of the top spot by more informative posts such as Temperature Logging with Twine and ThingSpeak and Pomodoro Timer.

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If you’ve hosted a WordPress blog for any amount of time, you are probably familiar with the traditional upgrade procedure. It is fairly painless, but it involves downloading and copying files. If you have some custom files somewhere, you run the risk of forgetting one or two (like .htaccess) which might lead to undesirable results. Even when everything goes well, it still takes time to copy things around on your server.

There is a much easier way. By using Subversion, you avoid all of the downloading and copying. There are some excellent instructions for installing/updating WordPress with Subversion on the WordPress site. Once your blog installation is set up with Subversion, upgrading to a new version only requires one command–two if you make a backup, which is highly recommended.

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Update 2007-08-02: The server at www.longtimelost.com is no longer responding. I’ll assume they are no longer around. The link has been removed from this page. Sorry

Long Time Lost helps reconnect people through the internet. Basically, you enter some information about the people you are looking for at Long Time Lost which is then put on a web page that will be indexed by search engines. Then, when one of the people you are looking for does a vanity search, they should find the Long Time Lost page, and you!

Perhaps the Long Time Lost pages will get better PageRanks than such lists on individual sites. Even so, I’ve opted to use my own site for these purposes rather than someone else’s. There is now a short list of names tacked to the end of the about page. We’ll see if anyone finds it.

via lifehacker

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Dave points out that there should be a better way to cite multiple sources in a blog post. I agree, but I don’t want to add a sentence describing the trail of blogs that ultimately led to mine in each applicable post.

Instead, I’ll start including the chain at the bottom of the post. Items I lift directly from somewhere else without directly citing the source in the post get a “via” link anyway. Now I’ll click back to find the source–which is probably a good idea anyway. I can’t promise extensive research, but the sorts of things I am writing about here are probably no more than two or three posts away from the originator.

Here is an example of what the “via” link would look like on a recent post where I originally cited only lifehacker:

via A Whole Lotta Nothing :: lifehacker

In this case, it only lists one additional site, but you get the idea. The first link listed is first reference I found and the last link is the place that I first read about it. In some cases, there could be a few sites in between. This effort won’t take much more time on my part and it will give some credit where credit is due.