Archive
Upgraded blog to WordPress 2.7
Very impressive UI for the Dashboard, Love the QuickPress widget on the top right hand corner. Maybe this will get me get back to blogging rather than twittering
Some comments on older posts got deleted
Not sure how this occurred, will see if I can get some of them back via backups. Will have to automate blog backups and keep weekly snapshots
Twitter's use for SMS sending and receiving
Hong Kong is unique in the sense that whilst we have insane mobile penetration of 154.4 %, there is a huge price difference between voice plans and SMS plans.
Depending on a third party long distance provider, it is actually cheaper to call up somebody and speak for a few minutes (HK-US charges are 7 cents/min and an SMS costs at minimum HK$ 2) and convey more than send a SMS to that person
Thus, I find Twitter’s SMS integration very useful. I tell my family members to sign up to Twitter and then also enable their mobile devices. In India, Twitter has a shortcode 5566511.
In HongKong, wifi access is very ubiquitous via the GovWiFi program as well as efforts by FON as well as PCCW, HongKong’s dominant telco provider so hopefully with the upcoming launch of the iPhone in Hong Kong it can help me by allowing me to have access to Twitter
A brief interlude with Yahoo Pipes
Friend and fellow jamaat member Ali Ebrahim recently setup an instance of the Venus RSS aggregator to create Planet Bohra. He had pulled the twitter feed for mumineen.org but my grief was that when I clicked the link from inside Planet Bohra, I would be sent to the twitter page and not to the final destination.
I thought I would have to hack Planet to get around this. Thinking for a few minutes, I realised that maybe I should munge the twitter feed via Yahoo Pipes and started playing around with it (I had never used Yahoo Pipes before).
A short while later, I had something which did the trick and Ali was able to incorporate into Planet Bohra.
I should try and get together with Ali and see if we can do something more interesting via Yahoo Pipes.
NetNewsWire 3.1 is now free
I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire and love its synchronization ability with NewsGator Online. Imagine my suprise when I open up NNW today and come across NewsGator’s CTO Greg Reinacker’s post that all of NewsGator desktop clients are now free and will include synchronization
Thanks to the team at NewsGator for making this decision.
Off to check out FeedDemon on a Windows box
Upgraded to WordPress 2.2
I had been looking forward to WordPress 2.2 being released though I miss having tagging as part of core. I shall probably investigate Ultimate Tag Warrior one of these days
The upgrade was relatively straightforward and the new release incorporates Widgets as part of the core. I googled a bit and came across this neat Category Cloud Widget which just dropped in neatly.
I’ll wait for a few days and then see if there are any other widget friendly themes so I can try a new look.
Looking forward to 2.3
Simpler way to upgrade WordPress
I love WordPress and the ecosystem (plugins and themes) behind it. However, upgrading WordPress is generally a tiring event and not something I really look forward to. So when Mark Jaquith provided a diff to upgrade from 2.1.2 to 2.1.3, I quickly jumped on it.
A quick test with
patch -p0 --dry-run < diff-file
seemed to indicate no issues and then applied the patch for real