All Fixed

by | Aug 17, 2011 | Personal, Web

Fixed a couple compatibility issues and we’re all set again. Man, upgrading to WP 3.2 and dealing with all the TimThumb, jQuery issues is a huge pain. Luckily I had been working on exactly the same thing at work and knew right where to look to fix the problems. Anyway, should be go for now. Carry on.

Isn’t that lovely

by | Aug 16, 2011 | Aggravation, Web

Apparently, my theme isn’t compatible with the latest version of WP. Awesome. Ok… umm… here’s a new one. Pardon the dust. This may take a couple days…

GeekTool FlipClock

by | Jun 20, 2011 | Personal, Tech, Web

Being a big fan of desktop customization in general, and a self-proclaimed Photoshop wizard, it was really only a matter of time before I started making things for GeekTool, the roll your own Mac info widget thingy. I’ve been using GeekTool for probably a year or so now, mostly on my desktop at work. It’s a handy way to keep track of the weather, the time, the day of the week, etc. The “time” was always kinda basic and bland. It’s really just a text display and unless you have a ton of fonts, there’s really not much in the way of customizing you can do to it. And the “minimalistic text” thing gets kinda boring after a while. So, since it’s good to flex the creative juices every once in a while, and since I had just finished creating a set of Photoshop Styles for another project, I figured I may as well used them. So, I present to you, FlipClock for GeekTool.

It’s a fairly simple set up, but I thought maybe someone else might find it interesting. The clock is four pieces. The background layer, the background of the flip digits, a script to grab the time, then the “bar” graphic overlay on top. The font I’m using is regular old Helvetica since it’s spacing is consistent, but it should work equally well with other equidistant spaced fonts.

In GeekTool, just make a layer sandwhich. First, and an image layer with the background. Then a second image layer with the digit background. Then the included time script. Then the bar image on top.

Also available on the downloads page.

Enjoy. 🙂

PS: I do realize there are multiple widgets, scripts, programs, etc for displaying a “flip clock”, as well as at least one other for GeekTool. There’s nothing wrong with those others, I just like mine better.

The Cloud

by | Jun 6, 2011 | Music, Personal, Tech, Web

I would send a trackback to Chris’ post on the subject, but since I can’t (and will continue to raz him for it) a link will have to do. I can’t help being perplexed by the concept of “the cloud” as it pertains to music. I can see documents, I can almost see photos, and I can easily see email and online services. Music is a tougher sell, at least to me. Most of that may be due to my usage of the medium. The vast quantities of music, both legally obtained and, well, not, that I consume simply wouldn’t fit into a cloud. At least not a cloud with limited space. I’ve mentioned my vast music collection in the past and in fact it was Chris who actually witnessed the majority of it being purchased. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have purchased nearly as many Global Underground collections if it weren’t for him, for which I am eternally grateful.

Part of me agrees with the concept of having things available to me, any time I want it. Being able to pull up a song from some vast sky based storage labyrinth with a couple buttons has great appeal when I want to have someone listen to something I’ve found. The other part of me cringes that the concept of sharing or physically handing someone the same content would be lost forever. Being able to access my music is inviting, but not having the physical item (file, CD, etc) with me or at least accessible in the end, is a deal breaker. That cage has always been a part of iTunes and Apple’s attitude towards music, but we won’t get into that.

What do you do if you put everything on the cloud, then want it back, and it says no?

From a technical standpoint, I would have to invest countless hours to upload and sync the collection initially and as Chris pointed out, there’s still quite a bit missing. While a “Search & Sync” feature is nice in theory, what about things it can’t find? The sheer number of “Essential Mix” mp3s I have is staggering. I also don’t cherish the idea of Apple/Amazon/Google knowing exactly what I’m listening to. If you think for a second that any of those services wouldn’t turn over information about what they’re storing if faced with legal action, you have far too much faith in them. I hate to be the paranoid type, but if I uploaded the music I had, through iTunes, into the Apple cloud, the flags it would raise in the legal department would rivial a semaphore competition.

I also lack the number of devices it would really take to make a service like that useful. I don’t have an iPod that I can plug into a stereo system. I don’t have a HTPC to stream music to. I don’t have an iPhone to listen to music on the go. In fact, I actually don’t have any music loaded into my Android smart phone at all except the few tunes I use as ringtones. The vast majority of my music listening is done in the comfort of my own home, where all the music current resides. If I’m 10ft from the music in the first place, I don’t really suppose it needs to be “in the cloud” to begin with. I do a lot more listening at home/work than I do on the go.

That actually brings me to an idea. Since the concept of the cloud is completely valid, and having things accessible on the go is nice, my only real objection to it is the services/companies running it in the first place. What if you could combine the old and the new? What I’m talking about is a personal cloud. A home server, or a home device, that synced and fed content on demand. Your own personal cloud, probably with a web interface. We’d most certainly need a few prerequisites: cheaper home high speed connections, IPv6, cheap physical storage media in large sizes. Just imagine the possibilities of having music.yourname.whatever and simply having the gateway to it on your portable devices. That would be magical.

Apple does a great job of taking ideas, refining them, making them great and then putting them in an iron cage with a fence around it. Your information is YOUR information. You should manage it. Having your stuff, on the go, without the need to pay someone else to manage it for you should be the end goal. Apple wants to hold your hand and help you make your things easily accessible, and that’s an admirable goal, especially for the less technical of us, but their failing has been in never recognizing that some of us simply want the mechanism, and not the hand holding that comes with it. Give me the concept, give me the tools to create it, then stay out of my way. Everyone should have a cloud. Everyone. It should be a concept that’s embraced, not bottled and sold by a single company.

Also, and maybe this shows my age, there’s something to be said about the “collection” in the first place. I want my daughter to SEE the music that her Dad has. I want to have her listen to everything from Miles Davis to the Beastie Boys to John Digweed and not have to buy the music a 5th and 6th time to do it. I have it all on CDs and tapes and vinyl, and whether or not the medium still exists is besides the point. It’s real. It’s in a box. It can be shared. The vast amounts of it speak to the diversity of it. If I had a bigger house I would literally have a room that housed nothing but music and movies. Something about digitizing it all into a 3×4″ device with a headphone jack seems to cheapen the experience, and removing even that device from the equation all together completely destroys it. I’m not suggesting that we all sit around our living rooms listening to phonographs, but there’s certainly something that was gained by doing so that we seem to have lost over the years.

In the end, perhaps it’s just my media lifestyle choices that define the way I listen to music. I have sympathy for the old ways. While I embraced digital photography, I still have a love for paper and chemicals and the darkroom. In the same way, I embraced the MP3, the software and eventually I’ll embrace the cloud, but I still have a love for record players, the fuzz and the pops, and listening to jazz on rainy Sunday mornings. I can’t wait to share that with my daughter.

WordPress Intranet

by | May 23, 2011 | Web, Work

Since I made the suggestion a couple years ago for my company to use WordPress internally for it’s major websites, they’ve loved every minute of it. In fact, I actually saved the company over $40,000 in license fees to a 3rd party CMS that they had been paying annually for “support”, which was non-existent. I’ve been able to recreate and/or update all of our software products websites, our main website and a couple smaller subsidiary company websites, in WordPress with only a small team and with zero additional cost. That may sound like a giant commercial for WordPress in general, but it’s really more of a statement of fact. WordPress is dead simple for even the most computer-challenged office worker to use. I have office admins, in offices around the country, telling me how much easier it is for them to update things than it was with the old CMS. I’m honestly not getting paid to say this. I just have a deep appreciation for what WordPress can do and how much it’s changed what I can do on the web.

That said, it does have it’s limitations. It’s not a great CMS. It’s the single greatest BLOG platform ever created, but out of the box, it’s lacking some CMS functionality that sets it apart from enterprise packages. That’s ok. It wasn’t created to handle 1000’s of pages, it was created to handle 1000’s of posts and comments. There’s a distinction between the two. Static content isn’t WordPress’ bread and butter. Once you understand that, and can find ways around it, the platform really opens itself up into being just about anything you need it to be.

Some might say that there are better choices for managing static content, and they’d be right. However, I’m willing to trade some functionality that I have to eventually add back in, for some easy of use and flexibility up front. Especially design wise. Nothing really makes the designer in me happier than a simple CSS based design that I can change at will. In the past, with our old CMS, everything was ASP based with C# and this weird mishmash of bits of  random CSS thrown in. It was pretty counter-intuitive to designing. So much so that when it came time to redesign our intranet, I dumped that old system all together and tried to figure out how I could make an intranet, heavy with documents and databases, using WordPress.

To that end, I started searching for ways to extend WordPress’ core functions and there was a distinct lack of information on the subject as far as intranets are concerned. Maybe it shouldn’t be done, maybe there are better alternatives, who knows. All I know is that somehow the top blogging platform isn’t being used to drive company intranets and that suggestions for doing so are few and far between. So, with that in mind, I thought I’d share what  I’ve found to be handy tools and plugins that helped me get the job done:
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  • Connections – Connections is essentially a large contacts/address book manager. It can be customized via templates to display the contacts within your post/pages however you like. Also, with an addon ($15) it can bulk import CSV files into the system. That’s what I’m using to replace our aging “office directory”. I requested a large CSV export from our HR department and had everyone imported in just a couple minutes.
  • Easy Category Management Widget – Within our intranet, I had to separate out news by department. I also (using the theme I chose) created custom sidebar’s for each department. This widget helped me display just that departments news within it’s own sidebar.
  • LJ Subpages Widget – Most “page” widgets are pretty useless. I’ve tried various ones in the past to display child-pages only, or pages from a certain level, etc. None of them worked. This one does. You can define was pages are listed as sub-navigation either based on what page you’re on or a selected master page. Very handy for making department specific navigation. It’s technically possible within theme code, but this is a simpler solution.
  • Post Page Associator – Fantastic plugin that lets you associate specific posts with specific pages. You can pick individual posts, posts with certain tags, or whole categories. Each department in my company likes to post their own “news”, so I used this in conjunction with post categories, to create separate “news” pages in each department. Someone makes a post in the “HR Department” category and it shows up on the HR department homepage. Very slick.
  • Private Only – A fairly old plugin that just does one thing and does it well. You can’t see the site without being logged in. That’s it. You get the login screen before you get content. Great for “putting up a wall” to do testing on a private beta site.
  • Search Unleashed – Strait forward improvement in internal search results. I kept getting odd results from the built in WP search engine, and this seems to be helping users find relevant content better.
  • Job Manager – We use a service to post job positions externally to the public, but I wanted something easy for HR to use to post internal jobs only. This fit the bill. Easy to use and strait forward.
  • WP DB Backup – Not really much to say about that one. Does what it says.
  • WordPress Download Monitor – This is a big one. I’m using this to manager hundreds of documents internally. Really easy to use, version controls, bulk imports. With tons and tons of documents, there was just no way to do this by hand, this one really saved my bacon. With nice touches like being able categorize and display documents/downloads per category, it’s easy to put things just where they need to be.
  • Vanilla Forums – Not technically a WordPress plugin, but a stand-alone forum software. I really tried to like bbpress, but it’s lacking so many features it just wasn’t going to work for a company intranet that wanted to be “social”. Vanilla is awesome and feature rich out of the box and with this plugin, can easily be deeply integrated into a WordPress site.
  • Contact Form 7 – Kind of a “duh” plugin for WP at this point. Easiest and most widely used contact form plugin. Using it to power the “help desk” forms on my site.
  • Easy iFrame Loader – I needed something to embed some content from a benefits company that our HR department is using. This was the easiest solution I came up with. I’m not a huge fan of iframes in general, but this is at least super-easy to use. Shortcodes make me happy.
  • FV WordPress Flowplayer – Every once in a while you need a simple movie player. This fits the bill, is unbranded and uses shortcodes to embed the video. Also features player customization (colors, sizes, etc).
  • Log User Access – As the webmaster, I’m responsible for all site operations. This helps me keep track of who’s logging in and changing content. I can keep an eye on all the “content authors” who are making changes. That way I know who to email if something gets messed up.
  • Capability Manager – Since we have a large intranet, I’m not the only content author. Other people need to be able to publish content. They also do NOT need to be mucking around with WP settings. The few default roles within WordPress are very “all or nothing”. There needed to be something in between “admin” and “author”, with specific abilities defined. That’s where this plugin comes in. I created a custom role that had the permissions I needed and defined other authors appropriately. Lots of content privileges, zero settings access.
  • Exclude Pages from Navigation – A really handy function that I’m surprised isn’t in the WP core. I needed a couple hidden pages to do some random things and this makes it really easy. It’s a simple checkbox on the editor screen. Check the box and no one can find that specific page unless you want them to.
  • Shortcode Exec-PHP – We have a couple custom written scripts that pull from various databases. Things like recent contracts we’ve won, etc. Instead of finding a plugin to do this internally, I just let the programming guys create their own. This lets me run php code wherever I need it.
  • Simple LDAP – Having a company single sign on for everything already, I needed a way to have it play nice without creating WP accounts for all 800 of our employees. This let me access and use the system already in place.
  • Backup Buddy – The only plugin on this list that’s a “premium” plugin. At $50 it doesn’t really break the bank, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Since I’m creating the site on an separate machine and I need to move it when I’m done, this was the best “migration tool” I could find. It packages everything up nicely, including widgets, themes, settings, etc, which are all things that WP doesn’t include in it’s built in export function. Given that I have dozens of sidebars and custom widgets that are all normally non-exportable, I needed something that could handle the job. This one will be a life saver.

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I hope someone finds that list useful. I thought it might be worth compiling a list of things to help with an intranet build since the resources out there are a little scattered and there’s not really any good solid guides put together. There are some other plugins I’m using here and there, but they don’t really have anything to do with intranet/CMS functionality. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Matt out.

The Good Old Days

by | May 19, 2011 | Aggravation, Music, Tech, Web

You know what I want? I want music software to be the way it was in the 1990’s. I want this:

Instead, I have this bloated, full of shit, piece of festering software monstrosity that looks something like this:

I have YEARS worth of music. I can’t physically load that much music into iTunes. Why? Because it would have a fucking aneurysm. I personally take the time and organize my music, on my hard drive, into folders, with correct labels and tags and album artwork. I do NOT need a program to do that for me. If you do, then I can only assume you welcome the day that our computer overlords will pick out socks for you to wear from your personal vast collection of socks, because we’re talking about something as equally simple.

You know why the iPod Shuffle is such a success? Because it’s so small the only thing it actually does WELL is play fucking MUSIC. I don’t want music on my phone, I don’t want music on a iPod Touch, I don’t want music on my TV, my toaster, or anything else that’s a pain in the ass to carry around. Nor do I want one universal media brick/phone/blender/air-conditioner that does everything for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love my phone, but I use it to make PHONE CALLS… and play the occasional game of Angry Birds. I don’t watch YouTube videos, I don’t surf the web and I don’t play music on it.

My non-need for a multimedia device is just a reflection of the over all point I’m trying to make. Let me be exceptionally clear.

I WANT TO LISTEN TO MUSIC.

That’s it. Just listen to it. I know, it’s mind blowing. I want to click play and for my ears to enjoy the sonic vibrations of artists playing instruments.

I don’t want to organize it. I don’t want to categorize it. I don’t want to tweet about it on my facebook. I don’t want to track it on Last.FM. No. I want to play it. The song I chose. The one I clicked “play” to hear. That’s it.

Please, someone, anyone, PLEASE make me a music player that doesn’t suck. That’s it. I’m not asking for much. Something little. Something tiny. Something that simply plays the music I give it.

This comes close. It’s a Bowtie theme, but you have to run iTunes in the background. I don’t want that. I just want the player. Please, someone help! Save this generation from thinking that EVERYTHING needs to be inter-connected with everything else. Let them know that it’s completely ok to sit on the floor and listen to Miles Davis and NOT be building a “Genius” playlist around your listening habits. Someone save us!