Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Normally during an XMarks installation when I get the website info tab in Firefox I just close it without a look. One of the reasons I use it is because I re-install my OS so often that having a cloud bookmark repository just makes sense.

The last install I did I saw a glimpse of this cool new feature: Open Tabs Sync.

What a great idea! Sync a list of all the tabs I have open to their servers and if I want to grab ‘em from another computer I can. This doesn’t force the change to all computers I use however. What’s nice is when I was looking at something work and I forget to note it I can simply go grab the tab or the group from xmarks.

These guys really have it together. I suppose the only critism I can find is that they haven’t mastered all their features accross all the browsers. You can get a Safari version or an IE version of Xmarks but the only things that will sync are the bookmarks, not the passwords or the tabs. This says more about the API’s I think than XMarks so even though the feature is missing I bet you we can blame Apple and Microsoft!

This is an invaluble tool – I have said it before and I will say it again, this is the reason that I still use Firefox today and not Chrome or Safari. Take this tool away and the other browsers are much better in my books. It feels like I need to tell people everytime they ask me what browser I use – “I use Xmarks on Firefox”!

Geek on!

I had written an article about this when I started using iPhoto and it is still one of the most read articles on my page. It seems that the plug-in was hard to find for some people (it was for me at first too).

Well now I have upgraded to Aperture and I needed a new plug-in. Step up Ubermind. They have created an Aperture to Gallery plugin and I am happy to announce that it works really well. Very similar to what I expected given that I have been doing something similar for a while.

The process seems quite a lot slower that I am used to. But when I thought about it, I am using a much higher quality camera, shooting 12 mega pixels instead of 3.2 and am also shooting in RAW.

The interface could not be more simple. First you need to select which images you want to export while in the library browser in Aperture. Then click File, Export then Gallery. The following window appears and you’re off!

To add your Gallery into the plugin simply click on the large + icon and fill in the URL information. Then you can created a folder to place the images in from the Albums section, choose your personal export options and hit Export.

The first thing that happened was the window disappeared on me – I thought I did something wrong. But like Aperture does when you are editing pictures, it puts a small spinning wheel at the bottom that says Exporting. You can click that for a status box.

Have fun with your photos. I hope to either start posting some up here or possibly start a photo blog – I am not sure.

In any case – GEEK ON!

I ran into this problem head on yesterday and didn’t have time to fix it. The only thing that was good was that it didn’t affect the front end of the website so I could leave it without any impact – except to me. It’s was very disconcerting not to be able to access my admin page. Something was definitely wrong with a plugin after thinking about it for a couple of seconds. It started after updating a plugin and I was also able to access the admin page from my Blackberry. I have a plugin installed that gives me a simple admin page from mobile devices.

I wasn’t able to disable all my plugins from this mobile version of the admin page – which would have been great! I then had to look for a solution to my issue by making the change at the SQL level.

There are two ways of approaching this. One is to run a query and then backup the list of plugins so that you can re-enable the lot from the SQL database and the other is to delete them outright. I preferred the first option just in case it caused MORE issues when I actually deleted them. I like to be safe :) Keep in mind that this just marks the plugins inactive. It does not delete the files from your folder structure.

If you need to attempt this to save your blog please take the time to backup your SQL DB before messing around.

1. After the backup login to your SQL DB (most host providers offer myPHPadmin as an admin console).
2. Once you are in, select your WordPress database from the drop down menu on the left side.
3. Click on the SQL tab which will bring up a window for SQL queries
4. Copy the following line into the box and press GO (if you changed the default prefix for your DB from wp_ to something else, please edit that from the line below)
   SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;
5. Once active_plugins appears, press the edit button as shown below
   
6. You should see a value that looks something like this but much longer
   a:31:{i:0;s:13:”AddMySite.php”;i:1;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;i:2;s:23:”all_
7. Copy and paste that text into a notepad file and save it as a backup
8. Now delete all the text from the box and save the record
9. All of your plugins are now disabled

The alternate that I was talking about above does not afford you the option to copy that text out before deleting them.

1. After the backup login to your SQL DB (most host providers offer myPHPadmin as an admin console).
2. Once you are in, select your WordPress database from the drop down menu on the left side.
3. Click on the SQL tab which will bring up a window for SQL queries
4. Copy the following line into the box and press GO (if you changed the default prefix for your DB from wp_ to something else, please edit that from the line below)
   UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ” WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;

Now that you have used one of the two methods, you can go to your plugins page and enable them one by one to see which one was the culprit.

Happy blogging, it should be hard should it?

Geek on!

I was working on optimizing my site a little again and I had been told by a couple of people that inactive WordPress Plugins tend to slow the site loading time slightly. I had a chance last night to go to some website load time testing pages (such as http://www.websitegoodies.com/tools/speed-test.php) and on average it was taking ~14 seconds to completelty load the page. Now this is pretty aweful if you look at the number itself but the majority of the website is loaded much faster than that. There are certainly things still loading but most are plugins that are accessing external sources.

So off I went and started to review what plugins I might want to keep and which were just a test to see if I liked it. After looking at my list with the intention of deleting the dead weight I was amazed that all of the plugins that I wasn’t actually running live were garbage. So a select-all and delete it was! A quick check back with the speed testing sites and now I am averaging a load time in the neighbourhood of 11 seconds. Still not optimal but a definate part of the problem.

Happy blogging lads!

I wasn’t looking for a plugin to tweet my blog posts but while I was browsing around today I found a new icon. It is from a service called Tweetmeme.com that lists popular tweet links on their web page. The listing of links on the website is secondary to me then is the ability for someone to easily tweet my article.

Some of the Tweet this type icons are very simple and do not offer a number of tweets. I like the Digg style icons that tell you how many times this article has been Dugg. This is what Tweetmeme has incorporated into their link and now you too can retweet on TheSleepyGeek.com.

I was able to install it quite easily by installing the WordPress plugin. It automatically placed it at the top left of every post like I wanted it to do (go ahead… take a look and hit the button up there!), but it does offer other locations in your post. If you are not running a WordPress blog then you can also take raw code from their site and place it into one of your templates.

I like the way this one works and it’s a handy item to have on your site.

Happy posting and happy tweeting!

I have been looking for a good plugin for people who access the blog from a mobile device for quite some time. It is almost mandatory today to make sure that people’s experience on their mobile device is just as good as if they were sitting at their computer.

Today I downloaded PDA Plugin For WordPress from http://imthi.com/wp-pda. The author has done a good job of updating the experience based on what mobile device you have. After the installation I immediately tested this on multiple phone types. I am lucky enough to have enough friends around me with different phone types to make this possible.

Based on my tests I like what I see so far. On a Blackberry it was nice and clean; having most of the heavy graphics removed and the site reformatted to fit the screen size. Having a Blackberry Bold myself this was good to see and it’s something that I would definitely use to view a site such as mine. Next I took a loot at the site on a Windows Mobile phone and was surprised at how well it did at making it look like the Blackberry. I have seen the Windows Mobile browser screw up so many websites that were not designed for mobile browsers, but with this plugin the site was nicely displayed. The last test for me was on an iPhone and I must say that they did a great job. Typical to a lot of sites who are making their pages specifically for the iPhone the PDA Plugin For WordPress automatically formatted it the same way. I love how the menus no longer even look like HTML, they are iPhone-esque which is what iPhone users want.

I am very happy with this plugin and hope that it brings more people over to the site. You can now take a look at a clean site from a bus, train, car (passenger of course) or where ever you might be while waiting for something.

Happy surfing!

Turns out that it was time to make some changes on the site. The old background and colours are gone and I am back to something a little more blue. It was time to update some of the plugins I use, 6 of them had newer versions and who knows what those updates would fix.

I have been working on testing a recording scenario for podcasts and that has taken most of my free time lately. The techy side is a lot of fun but my real dilemma is still the theme. I have been talking with a friend who I think will join me as a co-host about this and we are both really interested in tech/geek crap in general. I think that we are going to shoot for a general tech show related to current events and then throw some interesting features into the show.

Only outstanding thing right now on the blog is the email. Right now I am getting 2 copies every time I post. EMAIL ME IF YOU ARE TOO!!!!

Ciao for now.

I have been searching for a plugin for WordPress to automatically send an email to my subscribers each time I post a new article. I haven’t been very lucky, until now! I have found a tool called Subscribe2. The name isn’t very telling however it will let you set up how new blog subscribers are registered for emails by default.

Before installing this plugin at www.thesleepygeek.com, subscribers did not receive an email notifying them of a blog post. Since installing the plugin, I can set that any future blog subscriber will automatically be put on the email list (unless they choose not to) so when posting they will be notified.

This is an exciting addition to The Sleepy Geek. I have wanted a medium to notify users of new material if they are not involved with the Web 2.0 scene. It has been easy to setup plugins that update twitter, facebook, pownce, etc. but there are people in the world who don’t subscribe to those services.

I have had RSS setup for sometime with the default WordPress settings. It worked great except that there are little options. People have been subscribed but I have no way of telling how many. Either I wasn’t looking in the right places or the feature built in just doesn’t carry the information. So many people read blogs by subscribing to their feeds, never to return to the original site. Heck, I do it too.

So I have turned to Feedburner. Another RSS feeder that allows the publisher to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and also has a great interface for the subscriber.

If you subscribed before now to my RSS feed, I would ask that you cancel and re-subscribe with Feedburner if it’s not too much trouble. If the only option is cancel the old and not re-subscribe I would prefer you keep reading, however I would love to track who’s out there.

Simply click over on one of these icons on the right!

If your service isn’t listed there, click on either the orange RSS icon or the feed counter.

To enable the features on the right site I installed a Feedburner widget that I like the look of. There are a couple out there but some of them have integration problems with my theme so I chose this one.

Then I added the counter which you can get from the Feedburner website. They have a code generator that I took and added into a “text” widget in WordPress. And voila, I think a nice addition!