thesleepygeek

I wasn’t at home all weekend so I couldn’t immerse myself in Gnomedex and the Olympics. A cottage weekend with the family trumped geeking out, and it was awesome. I did have some time to reflect however on what I want to do with my blog, what goals I want to accomplish by blogging and sharing with the community.

I started to really concentrate on the blog on a daily rate back in May of this year, sometimes writing posts everyday and sometimes working on site design and layout. At the beginning the goal was to see if I could stick with it through the summer which would be the hardest months to do so. Aside from family trips up north on the weekends and some vacation, I have been keeping this up to date quite well. Now that the season is coming to an end, I only believe that my attention to the site will grow.

That brings me to a new goal that I have, “I would like to attend Gnomedex 2009.” I have been following what was going to happen at Gnomedex recently and I was interested in the conference from my first having heard of it. I like the idea that there are not ten thousand people attending, but more of a core group of like minded people who are going to experience the same itinerary as one group.

I have been involved with big conferences in the past. I was part of a group of people that went to E3 in 1999 and 2000 for Guillemot who was the parent company for Hercules and Thrustmaster. I had a great time at these conferences and learned a lot from attending them, but to host a Web 2.0 or social networking conference in that or a similar format wouldn’t be ideal in my eyes.

To have community members and leaders present to the whole group and then let the group meet socially sounds extremely more promising and I think that is what the goal is with Gnomedex.

If I am to attend the conference, it needs to be on the merit of my work however. I am not sure if I am telling you this or if it is more of a notice to myself. I didn’t set out to make The Sleepy Geek my primary source of income when I started this venture, in fact like I said before the goal was to keep going through the summer months. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t love to be doing this full-time, but that’s not on the front burner right now. So the goal is to continue to build readership and relationships through the site. I may expand my avenues of communication, possibly a podcast, more likely a video stream, but the goal is to raise enough funds to join the group at Gnomedex next year.

Chris if you read this, please don’t hold it in Hawaii… who knows if I would be able to make enough to cover that airfare

Cheers!

I was looking to add some RSS feeds to my sidebars for popular news sites that I view daily, or close to daily. I looked at using the RSS widget that is included in Wordpress but it is very limited and I wanted something more customizable, which I found on KB Advanced RSS Widget.

Adam R. Brown is the author of this widget and I am pleased with what he has done. He has added features to allow you to list certain portions of the RSS feed coming in. Some of the other features include:

• Decide which RSS fields to display (as opposed to the default RSS widget, which limits you to link and title), and
• Decide how to format the fields (it doesn’t have to be a list if you don’t want it to be).

You are also able to add titles to each feed so that it is clear to your readers what they are looking at. With some work you can limit the title to a certain number of character or parse the first X amount of characters off the beginning. This is handy if your feed has a static lead in that you want to remove.

He also mentions that this is called an advanced product for a reason:

Be aware that it’s called “advanced” for a reason. You need to know some basic HTML, and possibly a little PHP, to use this fully.

I am sure most people who know how to install an widget on their own hosted Wordpress will be able to get this in there and working.

As you can see for now I have added feeds from Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo because they are a couple of my favorites. I think that I will eventually move towards putting a news service, or a more current events type blog on there. That seems to make more sense to me for my blog.

If you are looking to add RSS feeds to your site go take a look!

Of course when you log into the dashboard for your Wordpress installation it will scream at you to update if you are not already at the newest version. After looking at that message for a few weeks, I thought it was time.

The easiest way to upgrade your installation is to follow their installation/upgrade instructions. They are very simple and easy to follow. I however went one step further and read through their comprehensive upgrade instructions. I recommend these for anyone who has installed a plugin or theme that wasn’t part of the original installation. I am pretty sure that means most of us running Wordpress to host our own blog.

One of the most important steps that they talk about is to backup. This is truly a must! I recommend before starting your upgrade that you install a plugin called Backup Wordpress. Most of the Wordpress backup plugins that exist are designed to do database backups and not file backups. The upgrade of Wordpress will touch the database but only at the end of the procedure. This backup plugin will backup both the files and the database so you are safe.

Once you are sure you have a complete backup, then proceed with the upgrade. There is a lot of manual file manipulation so I recommend that you use an FTP client to connect to your server unless you have a very good web host interface.

Watch their steps carefully. The only one that I would recommend against is their suggestion to use a plugin called Maintenance Mode. This is a good plugin for when you are performing some tasks on the site, but in this case you are deleting so many supporting files the site will go down anyhow.

After the upgrade you will find some new features. Although they don’t seem huge, they are nice touches and typical of a sub-version release.

• Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
• Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
• Add paging of Themes in Design panel
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet
• Add sorting to gallery
• Export/import post excerpts
• Theme Previewer
• Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
• Show when a term is both a tag and a category
• Wider Profile fields
• TinyMCE 3.1
• Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Have fun blogging!

I was looking around on Viewzi after Chris Pirillo mentioned it on twitter today and usually when I do a search for the first time on a new service I search for “Sleepy Geek”. This one came out kind of interesting because I ended up finding a digg article mentioning Sleepy Geek. Totally unrelated to my site but quite interesting none the less. I think it applies to me

Take a look at the result here. If you click through the multiple levels of references you end up with an article from a UK site about tired people spending too much time on techy type stuff.

Interesting read, take a look. Then go to sleep. ‘Cause for crying out loud, this is one of the reason’s you are tired!

Wow! I was poking around the net tonight. I like to watch a few shows over at Revision3 and has just finished this week’s Tekzilla when I got a “Error establishing a database connection” error. I did some refreshing and eventually ended up with this notice, but it looks an awful lot like a replacement for a generic 404 message.

What is amazing to me is the fact that I was the first person to tweet it. It’s becoming a knee jerk reaction of mine to hit my twitter tab in Firefox as soon as I notice something strange. According to twitscoop I was the first to notice.

Granted this could be, and most likely is nothing at all. I am hoping that is the case after what Revision3 went through a couple of weeks ago with a DDOS attack that rendered their servers down for the majority of a long weekend.

Just thought the twitter aspect was interesting!

EDIT: Please note that as of 10:16pm their servers seem to be responding.

I have wanted to set up an IRC channel for the website. I plan to have a video stream eventually (very distant future) and I wanted to have the chat channel up and running when I am ready for that. I have looked at a number of options and in the end I feel Wyldryde is a great choice.

Wyldryde is a free IRC server. Anyone can join their service and create their own IRC channel if they wish. They don’t rely on advertising revenue right now, they rely on donations. This means that if you want to embed their IRC window on your website, there is no advertising in the way of your chatting.

I have created a dedicated chat page. I find that when you put a chat window in the middle of a page with a lot of other content it tends to confuse matters. I like to keep it clean and a dedicated page I think is the best way to achieve that. One day, a long long time from now…. I might put video and chat together because that just makes sense.

To set up a channel with Wyldryde is very easy. They have laid out instructions on their website in a clean step by step list. Simply follow the commands listed and type them into your IRC chat client. When the channel is created you can make a lot of adjustments including the ability to add free bots provided by their servers.

Kudos to Wyldryde!

I was able to add the option to digg my articles to the blog. Each post on the main page has the button as well as each post if accessed individually.

This post is more a test for me. I am curious what happens to the code when it is pushed through RSS. If it comes through that would be amazing.

Feel free to digg away!

I have been waiting for Chris to release his new social media theme called WicketPixie for a couple of weeks and it looks like he might have to put that off for a bit while he helps out his folks. So try and get something working that looks a little nicer than the plain one I had installed, I went searching

I came across a theme called CorporateID and the basic colours made me look twice. So I have taken that and made a few minor changes to make it something more me. I have put back the TheSleepyGeek picture at the top, a shot from the balcony at the cottage. Then I removed some images that are the background of the sidebar titles. They were too flashy for me.

So there you have it. Until Chris has the time to work on the final versions of his theme, I think we are sticking with this.

Comments?

—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.1
GIT d- s:+ a C++++ UL+ P L++ W++ N+ K-
w+ M+ V– Y+ PGP t++@ X- tv+ b– DI+++
D+ G++ h++ r+++ z++++
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——

I came across this page (http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html) while reading through my regular sites and thought it was worth a mention. I am all for this kind of thing. I have a printed out Initech TPS Report cover sheet hanging on my cubicle wall along with another sheet reading “There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don’t”.

It’s nice to know there are other people in the world with the same interests and can talk the same language. After all we are a ’special’ bunch. I try to keep my posts clean of too much geekness but let’s be honest… There are times when my wife, with the best intentions will ask a detailed question about why my day was good or bad and then I get to watch her eyes glaze over while I tell her. Kudos to her!

To get your geek code you need to read through the page and manually write it out. Only a true geek would take the 5 minutes

I have had my own blog for quite some time now and I am doing my best to post often and post good content. In an effort to generate traffic I think I took an over zealous approach today. Since the beginning of March, possibly end of February I have been writing at a pretty good pace and then also uploading my articles to what seems like a dead site. That would be undo.tv. The site has a really good setup allowing people to post their articles in a central location.

Today I started to upload my blog posts that I create for my own site to the Lockergnome site. Chris has done a really good job of turning the site into a community blogging mecca. I really like the way that the main page displays some of the most recent posts from its contributors. So I decided that I would add my link to the posts. After all I am “TheSleepyGeek” (I have intentionally left out the link… read on) and I want people to see my articles wherever they are posted. I am trying to build a name for myself, so why wouldn’t I add my link for people to come see me?

I think I missed the point of Chris’ website. Lockergnome is a place for people to come and post their blog, not for them to repost their blog. I will still post to my own blog and update to my Lockergnome profile but I will do so transparently.

Chris sent me a note on one of my posts letting me know nicely that there is no need for me to link to my site every time I post. To tell you the truth given the purpose of the site, I agree. My apologies

So be careful not to step on anyone else’s toes. I only write this article so that we can all learn from my mistake. Be careful how you try to generate traffic. If you build it, it will come. Be patient.