Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Of course I am writing this on my Blackberry. What kind of test would it be if I didn’t? At first glance I really don’t see anything different mainly because the UI didn’t change so I took a run over to their site and the major updates include:

• Easier sign in process
• Added support for HTTP authentication on password-protected self-hosted blogs
• Improved the app’s ability for bug reporting and feedback
• The file browser now remember the last opened folder

This doesn’t look like anything flashy but when you consider the extra steps some of us had to do when first setting up our copy then you realize that the HTTP authentication is really a nice touch. If you had trouble in the past using WP for Blackberry then I would give it another run. No longer are you required to verify your XML-RPC setup, now simply put in the web address, the user name and password.

There are also some bug fixes to note:

• issue when modifying the properties of a picture attached to a post
• start up issue on the splash screen that causing the app freezing
• issue on the Stats view when a post title contains more double quote characters

I didn’t know that WP was freezing my Blackberry but now that I think of it  I have seen it freeze on start up. Usually I assume that when loading WP it was just too much for the Blackberry to handle processor or memory wise so I didn’t give it a second thought. Nice to see that handled.

All in all, still solid. You can see their post about it here where they have a slide show featuring some of the changes.

Have fun with it. Nice to be able to write from a remote location.

Geek on!

There a few things that are really easy about running a website. I am involved with a few and have my own, most of them on WordPress which is arguably one of the easiest ways to blog out there.

One of the most common things I am looking for are color code when I am making visual changes to my website. I don’t like to keep things the same forever and so I change themes on occasion. Rarely do the themes look 100% the way I want out of the box and so small changes such as background color are the first things I look at.

Some themes you are lucky enough to have a choice of background color but with most you will have to make a change in the CSS (style sheets). This can be done from the Appearance/Editor option in your WordPress admin panel.

But this little web tool that I am about to share with you isn’t for people who blogging on WordPress, it’s for ANY web admin.

The tool? Just go to http://www.colorpicker.com/!

There you can use the slider and pin point tool to choose your color and shade. The wonderful result is an RGB (red, green, blue) value, a HSB (hue, saturation, brightness value and of course the web color code at the top #000000.

Happy web design :)

If you are a WordPress admin and you are subscribed to the newsletters then you got and email from Matt yesterday. WordPress 3.0 IS OUT!

You’ve probably already seen the notice in your dashboards, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet:

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

3.0 is faster, stabler, and more secure, so you can focus on what matters (your audience) and let the rest fade to the background.

Custom post types, MU merge, menu editor, Twenty Ten theme, over 1,200 bug fixes… there’s so much to enjoy in this new release, we’re really proud of it. It’s the best WordPress yet, and available for a limited time for only free ninety nine. ;)

Tell your friends, help them upgrade, write new themes that use the new features, spread the good word.

Love,
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://wordpress.org

Find and good. But every time that upgrade my WordPress installation I am a little weary that my site will take a hit and poof an error will cause it to be inaccessible. Tie that in with this being a major upgrade and I was quite cautious. First I was wondering why yesterday after receiving the email I didn’t see the update option in my dashboard. Some of you may have noticed the same issue and I believe that the option didn’t propagate as fast as his email did. I thought about that for a second and left it alone because that meant that a ton of other people would jump off that bridge ahead of me. Then I can look over and see if there are any dead souls at the bottom before I took the leap. Woke up this morning and didn’t hear any horror stories so I did a backup. DO THE BACKUP because you never know.

I have done many version upgrades using the auto-upgrade tool when it pops up in my dashboard and have been impressed with how fast and how easy it is. The upgrade has never given me an error but this is a major version upgrade. Once my backup was complete I was willing to give it a shot and like with the past 10 auto updates I have done it went off without a hitch. Even with all of my extensions enabled it didn’t even hiccup, but follow the experts advise and disable them before upgrading. This will make sure that you see the UI updates and allow you to choose that over your plug-in if you so desire.

So the blog is at 3.0 “yay!” and here is what we get:

I hope you enjoy your upgrade and it goes as well as mine did.

Geek on!

I have been running both Woopra and Google Analytics for a long time and both give me the same historical data but nothing matches Woopra’s live features. I am tired of getting email updates about things that happened in the past from Google and so in the end I am dropping them.

I wrote a post in October 2009 about Woopra when I first heard of it and installed it on TheSleepyGeek but I kept Google Analytics around for good measure. After all my history was all there and I didn’t know if I could fully trust Woopra yet. Well here we are 6 or 7 months later and I am full on Woopra. It’s to the point now where I don’t even look at historical data anymore. You can see how a post or a Tweet about something affects your traffic right away. You don’t have to compare what you did yesterday to when you did something yesterday. TIME SAVER!

Since my post there have been some good improvements. Here is a list of things they had released in the Woopra 1.4 version of their desktop client:

• Inbound Web Chat: The ability to to have your visitors ping you and say “Let’s chat!” from the website. We’ve been testing the new Woopra Chat Widget and the feedback has been great. Expect this to evolve over time.
• Live Visitor Info Panel for Web Chat: We’ve expanded the Woopra Live Chat to feature a panel within the Desktop Client so you can watch visitors move through the site during the conversation.
• Updated Notifications: We’ve redone our event notifications to create a scrollable list for review, so you can track what’s going on even if you leave your desk.
• Monthly Usage Meter: You can now track your Woopra Plan’s monthly usage right on the Woopra Desktop Client.
• Woopra Member Access: We’ve expanded access from the Woopra Desktop Client to include direct links and access to the Woopra Members area to set settings and customization.
• Improved Firewall Connections: We’ve exanded Woopra to include the standards web port 80 in addition to 11228, to help you connect from behind most firewalls.
• Calendar Functionality Improved: We’ve done away with the vague stats like All-Time Visitors and brought you more of the stats you need like daily, weekly, and monthly summaries in the updated Calendar feature, along with an easy to see chart to let you know when your average high points are for hourly traffic.
• IP Range Filtering for Exclude Visitors: You can now exclude visitors from being tracked with wild cards, so you don’t track the whole office through your visitor stats.
• Single Simultaneous Login Enforcement: For your protection and privacy, and to keep Woopra running faster for everyone, we’ve implemented a common practice of restricting access from multiple locations. If you move from one computer or location, please log out in order to log in elsewhere. If you wish to share your Woopra stats with others, simply share your Woopra stats with any registered Woopra Member. Then two or more can log in at the same time.

The chat feature they speak of is pretty cool. I have jumped in and chatted with a few visitors, it an be really informative.

Have fun with it in the end. Like I mentioned above, you can see how every action has an effect on your site. Post a Tweet, wait and see if it comes in. Post a blog entry, make a change and let people know. See how Facebook entries affect traffic. It’s all there :)

Geek on!

I have been using BlogDesk for quite some time to do my blog editing because sometimes I prefer to write in a standalone program. The web editor in WordPress is awesome and I know that you can find a bunch of plug-ins to customize it but when information is important I like to keep it out of my browser which is less than stable at times.

Well this served me right. I was in the middle of editing a document for post and when doing one of the final image uploads BlogDesk crashed. I was pissed! I don’t write very long articles, I try to keep things around the 500 word mark but when the formatting is all done it still takes time. The benefit of using the broswer is obvious now – WordPress backs up your article as draft every few minutes, BlogDesk does not. #FAIL

For a long time I didn’t try any of the plug-ins for the built in editor because I was happy with BlogDesk but now I think I will give them a try. Feel free to give me any suggestions ;)

Geek on!

I just saw notice in my WordPress admin page that version 2.9.1 is ready for download. I am starting this article on Tuesday but am going to finish up some details on Wednesday before posting it so that I can make sure it doesn’t break anything!

You will see notice in your admin page like we have for the versions since 2.8 I believe. A nice upgrade util is included with WP and after backing up it is the easiest way to update your installation.

After a little looking around this seems to be the list of bug fixes that are included with this release through bugtrack. WordPress also stated in their blog post that the biggest fix was scheduled posts and pingbacks not working correctly.

WordPress 2.9.1

Posted January 4, 2010 by Ryan Boren. Filed under Releases.

After over a million downloads of WordPress 2.9 and lots of feedback from all of you, we’re releasing WordPress  2.9.1.  This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.  If any of these issues affect you, give 2.9.1 a try.  Download 2.9.1 or upgrade automatically from the Tools->Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

All seems well with the update – I have had it installed for a day now. All the plugins hat I use and the theme that I use seem fine. I would take the plunge with this one but like always, BACKUP FIRST!

Geek on :)

I am one of those procrastinators when it comes to integrating Facebook to my blog. Hopefully I have it installed and running here and I am going to share with you what I did.

First I took down all up links to other services in my WordPress setup. I had a link going to Ping.fm and that published my blog posts to a myriad of locations including Facebook. The problem with this was the poor visual on the Facebook page with a lack of information for the readers.

I took the opportunity while planning this to open a Facebook fan page. This is a good idea and will allow you to post things to a page where you don’t necessarily have all your personal stuff with your buddies. Mine is located at

and I have also made a http://facebook.thesleepygeek.com sub-domain that I can publish.

To integrate my blog posts with my new fan page and my main Facebook account I installed a Facebook app called NetworkedBlogs. This will take your blog posts and put them up on your Facebook page or Facebook fan page (both if you like).  So now Facebook through NetworkedBlogs is pulling the information from my site and they do a very good job of formatting the post.

Having the publication of the posts working was a great step but I also wanted some way for people to share my posts with their friends directly from the page. I installed the FaceBook Share (New) plugin. This puts the link on the each post allowing you as readers to share my post with your friends. This is a new plugin that works with the Facebook Share feature that Facebook built into their own system. Using the plugin simplifies the installation process… and I mean really simple.

I use a theme in WordPress called WicketPixie made by Chris Pirillo. The them has a lot of added features in it one of which is notifier that can link to ping.fm or twitter.com. I decided to stick with ping.fm still as they will update to a log of social media sites including Twitter. Easier to manage one account here than many. I made sure to remove my Facebook account from the ping.fm setup to avoid duplicate posts.

Now for a real test! I didn’t want to post garbage in here to see what would show up on Facebook, I would hate to see that in my RSS reader. After posting this I am going to see how everything looks. I have tested as much as I can without an actual post so this is the real deal.

Geek on!

I have been trying to find my way with Twitter for some time and I really have my own thoughts about how to use it but there was always this piece of me that thought I was missing out on something. I don’t think that anymore, but it’s nice to hear some industry leaders saying the same things openly. The idea that we can ‘connect’ on twitter is a bit of a misnomer to me. When someone says that it means that there is an ability to trade ideas back an forth in my opinion. I can really make good use of publicizing my activities and you can read them but if you do so 17 hours after I wrote something, then it’s hard to follow where and answer might relate to.

I have been following Chris Pirillo for some time and when I referenced the “industry leader” above, I was referring to him. He recorded a video and pretty much hit the nail on the head.

What are your thoughts on the matter? There are tools that are much better designed to converse with than Twitter is.

Geek on!

That’s right, I want you to submit some articles to me that I can use as a guest post! I really want to share some of your ideas with others and I think that this is a great way to inspire you :)

The winner will receive a Google Wave invite and have their article posted at http://www.thesleepygeek.com.

Article submissions should be sent in to my email address at marcus@hamaker.net and before the end of Wednesday November 4th, 2009.

So take the weekend to think about something good! Make sure to include a link to your site/blog so that I can link to it.

Geek on!

I have been using Google Analytics for a long time and it gives me great information and history, but there is something really awesome about live stats. Without it if you really want to know how a post or a tweet affects your traffic, you have to keep really good track of what you are doing and when. Then take the time to analyze that data. Live stats let you track your impact right away.

Move out Google Analytics, move in Woopra.

Woopra is another analytics service but they offer a slightly more detailed look at your stats. Live view is one of the most impressive things that I have seen for web stats and with a little work and tweaking I managed to up my page views by 1000% yesterday.

This service is not free across the board however. It is based on page views and if you are over 30,000 then you have to pay for the service. Most people are under that and that means that it’s a viable solution for the little guy. I truly believe that you can gather enough money from Adsence to pay for this if you have that many hits.

They also have a client program that you can download which is even better then their web interface. You can remain logged in which allows you to view your current status or any history when you like. AWESOME!

One thing that I have noticed that screwed me up a little was my time zone setting. By default it is set to UTC so if you are somewhere else you really want to change that. The problem I had was that it didn’t take affect when I set up my URL the first time. Then my reports reset at 7pm which was annoying, especially yesterday!

I still like to have my Google Analytics setup and the code remains in my html for now. Google is pretty much a standard when it comes to this information so I like it to be there. I am not sure if Woopra will be around forever so I like to have my information in more than one place. It’s almost like a backup copy of my stats, like they say “Data doesn’t exist until it exists in 2 places”.

Have fun with it, if you have 100 hits a day then it starts to get a little addictive ;)

Geek on!