B12 Solipsism

Not sure what happened exactly, but my Postalicious plugin went a bit nutso last night, creating several posts that were erroneous. The plugin is a simple way to keep track of interesting URLs that I don’t have the time to make a full blog post about, when it works correctly.

The way the plugin is supposed to work is that it polls my delicious links ever hour, finds if there are any additions, merges these snippets into a page, and publishes the page once three entries are found. There is supposed to be a time regulator as well so that a Links post is only published ever 26 hours (so there aren’t multiple Links posts a day), but that didn’t keep several posts from being published last night, posts with empty URLs at that.

500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

I’ve disabled the plugin until I can figure out what went wrong (or there’s a new version, whichever comes first). It could be a problem at Delicious.com, or it could be because of the new version of the Postalicious plugin I installed yesterday, or some other factor.

Sorry about that.

I should have said this earlier in the month, but got busy, and forgot to post the thought. Anyway, for the record, I am not giving gifts to anyone this year, besides my 5 year old nephew¹. For the rest of you, I love you, but instead am donating gift money to charities, food banks and Kiva.com.

However, I am planning to craft some photography calendars from photos I took last year. These will be hand-made creations, crafted as I have time to craft them. No two calenders will be alike, but if you want one, contact me²and I’ll let you know details like cost³. Last year I think I made five, but I’m hoping to make a lot more this year as we are not traveling anywhere, and our main client’s offices are closed until January 4, 2010. Plus it will be fun.

1. and even that might be a little late. We had picked out a cool gift, but then forgot to send it until yesterday. Doh! Maybe it will be a Festivus present instead? [↩]
2. if you don’t have my email handy, just leave a comment here [↩]
3. if any, since I haven’t actually finished making these yet, am not sure how elaborate and expensive they will be, so am not sure if I’m giving them away or asking for a donation [↩]

Blog rules have, apparently, changed.

- Blogger or flogger? The Federal Trade Commission is taking a tougher line on bloggers who accept cash or gifts to tout a company’s products or services.

Under revised rules announced Monday, the FTC will require bloggers and celebrities to clearly state when they receive cash or “payment in kind” for endorsing a company’s products or services.

The changes, adopted on a 4-0 vote, are the first revisions to federal guidelines on endorsements and testimonial advertising since 1980.

Connections between advertisers and endorsers must be disclosed under the revised guidelines. The FTC said the stricter disclosure will apply to comments on talk shows, blog posts and on social media as well as in traditional advertisements.

[Click to continue reading FTC Says Bloggers Must Disclose Payments - WSJ.com]

But this policy, as reported here and in a similar NYT article, is pretty vague as to terms and definitions. How will it be enforced? Who qualifies as a blogger? Does this policy include Yelp and their pay-to-play model?

Or does the policy include low trafficked sites like your humble host? Does Amazon.com’s mildly dirty lucre qualify as “receiving cash”? Amazon pays me approximately 3% of the pre-tax price of any product that you purchase through a B12 Partners affiliate link¹, which reaches peaks of nearly $30 some months, but more frequently is in the single digits. Google ads, over on the sidebar, or possibly inserted into your RSS feed or daily email, pay me a few cents for every click-through, which also adds a few dollars to my bank account every month. I pay more for my website than I make, but I’m not doing it for money, I’m doing it for other² reasons.

Other than that, B12 Solipsism has not received squat from any product I’ve mentioned, any person I’ve praised or ridiculed, or any event I’ve mentioned. Now and again, someone will suggest a topic to me, but most of the time, I just ignore the PR pitch. Perhaps if there was financial compensation attached to the pitch, or even free tickets, I might pay attention.

Besides B12, is the new ruling akin to what television product placement law is? Which is what again? Seem to see a lot of product placement in traditional media, how is a consumer to know which news magazines are running paid-for content, and which are not? How about Congressional leaders? Can the FTC or comparable governmental agency place disclaimers, perhaps in a forehead tattoo form, on health industry shills like Max Baucus for instance?

The FTC Guide, as currently written, seems woefully unenforced. Nearly all of the Sunday Talking Head shows seem to skirt the endorsement guidelines. Will that change too?

For purposes of this part, an endorsement means any advertising message (including verbal statements, demonstrations, or depictions of the name, signature, likeness or other identifying personal characteristics of an individual or the name or seal of an organization) which message consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser. The party whose opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience the message appears to reflect will be called the endorser and may be an individual, group or institution.

(c) For purposes of this part, the term product includes any product, service, company or industry.

(d) For purposes of this part, an expert is an individual, group or institution possessing, as a result of experience, study or training, knowledge of a particular subject, which knowledge is superior to that generally acquired by ordinary individuals.

[Click to continue reading FTC GUIDES CONCERNING USE OF ENDORSEMENTS AND TESTIMONIALS IN ADVERTISING ]

Anyway, we’ll probably read more about this in the future, but B12 Solipsism readers can sleep easy tonight knowing that we are not paid blogger shills³ ,⁴ ,⁵

1. such as the images of books-recently-purchased residing on the blog sidebar [↩]
2. heretofore unknown [↩]
3. though, Corporate America, our lines of communication are open, hint, hint [↩]
4. no, not really, we’ll probably just make fun of you. [↩]
5. but maybe not, if the price is right! [↩]

A while ago¹, before Flickr became my website of choice to host photos, I made some t-shirts and posters at the online print shop, Zazzle, from photos I took. I made a few for myself, but afterwords, left the account there, active, in case somebody stumbled upon one of my designs and decided to buy it. Not likely actually, and exactly zero people have done so in the six years or so I had the account.²

Today I got an email from Zazzle, reading:

Thank you for your interest in Zazzle.com, and thank you for publishing products on Zazzle.

Unfortunately, it appears that your product, Garfield Conservatory, contains content that is not suitable for printing at Zazzle.com.

We will be removing this product from the Zazzle Marketplace shortly.

The details of the product being removed are listed below:

• Product Title: Garfield Conservatory

• Product Type: Print

• Product ID: 228639274743114826

• Result: Not Approved

• Policy Violations:

o Design contains an image or text that is copyrighted.

If you are interested in purchasing Official Licensed Merchandise from Zazzle please visit: www.zazzle.com/brands

I’m pretty sure the image was this photo of a Chihuly exhibition at Garfield Conservatory.³

Notice that I had modded the image in Photoshop so that it resembled nothing so much as just a magic marker sketch⁴. So for all the Zazzle zealots knew, I drew the image by hand. Is copyright law really that much in favor of factory artists like Chihuly? He’s famous for churning out thousands of glass pieces in his sweatshop, touching none of them, having his interns do all the actual work, he just markets the pieces. So my manipulated photo violated this copyright, somehow. Seems like this would be protected under “fair use” doctrine, especially since it isn’t a straight photo.

Strange world we live in.

I have deleted the remaining four items that were still listed at Zazzle, and have requested my account be deleted as well.

Funny also, on the Chihuly wikipedia page:

In 2006, Chihuly filed a lawsuit against a pair of glassblowers, including Robert Kaindl, whom he accused of copying his work. Chihuly was unsuccessful: the glass blower federation argued that Chihuly’s designs feature basic shapes; therefore any novice would be able to create the spiral glass which is featured in many of Chihuly’s composition

Looking at the simple vase floating in a pond – how could you copyright something as mundane?

1. somewhere around 2003 [↩]
2. of course, I haven’t added any new items there in six years either – my initial experience was pretty shitty to tell the truth. The shirts were poor quality and the prints faded within a few wash cycles. I recall the entire “creation” process being incredibly awkward and cumbersome – the tools were poorly engineered and clunky. They might have improved since 2003, or maybe not [↩]
3. can’t tell for sure because the image had already been deleted and long ago that Google cache no longer had a copy [↩]
4. my Photoshop skills not that polished at this time. Ahem. [↩]

Interesting tool.

If you’re one of the couple dozen people who copied text off our blog yesterday, you may have noticed some more text accompany your clipboard when you pasted it — a link to our site and the license (Attribution) we’ve offered our content under. This is because we’ve installed Tynt’s Tracer tool on our blog which uses a bit of javascript wizardry to concatenate attribution and, as of now, particular CC license information to content copied from our site.

If you’re curious about how this works, try selecting some text from anywhere on our blog and pasting it somewhere. Rich text editors (such as most WYSIWYG HTML editors, or Gmail) will preserve the hyperlink but the text will also show up in standard plain text editors as well.

As a creator and contributor to the commons, you have the right to attribution (all six of our licenses require it), so why not make it easy for your audience to automatically provide it?

Setting up and installing Tracer on your own site is easy, just head over to the site, create an account for your domain, select the CC license you’ve released your work under, and add the javascript tags to the footer of your pages. You’ll then be able to see on your Tracer dashboard precisely which text and images are being copied and pasted from your site, and where they are going.

And don’t worry, the extra markup is just text. Nothing about Tynt’s tool forces reusers to do anything, its merely useful additional information providing proper attribution and license notification.

[Click to continue reading Who is Copying and Pasting Your CC Content? Discover More With Tynt’s Tracer Tool - Creative Commons]

I am not concerned with anyone plagiarizing my blog (there are much better sources out there than this humble web-zine), and my text is Creative Commons licensed and so are the majority of the photos I post. Still, might try using this tool as a lark.

Taking a cue from Kottke¹, I am reminding you that you should sign up for my daily email. Signing up should only take a minute or less if you are a fast typer, I absolutely promise to never send you unsolicited email². Feedburner/Google has enabled the email to include items that don’t necessarily make it to my weblog, but that I still think are interesting, or are otherwise topics of note. Like news stories that I Digg, YouTube video I “favorite“, Flickr photos I upload, etc.

Plus you should subscribe to my daily email³ so that you have something fun to read as you drink your morning beverage. A dose of B12’s Solipsism can only enhance your day!

Oh, and you should follow me on Twitter too, if you are so inclined. I have other social media accounts, but I don’t care if you friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Tumblr blog, for instance.

1. I hope Jason Kottke doesn’t mind being referred to by simply his last name, I’ve been reading his weblog for so long now, to me he is the blogosphere equivalent of single-named celebrities like Bono or Nenê [↩]
2. unless you want me to, of course. Ahem [↩]
3. usually gets released around 1 AM CST [↩]

Used WordPress for over 6 months now, and am still pleased with it. There are so many plugins available for WordPress that tweaking minor nuances is a fun hobby.

Currently I have these plugins installed and active, in no particular order:

1. WP-Footnotes – quite useful – adds a numbered footnote to a post. Good for my style of breezy, top of mind writing. Triggered by enclosing text in double parentheses.¹
2. WP Super Cache
   – supposedly speeds access to particular pages, and WordPress blogs in general. Haven’t tested it really, but who wouldn’t want a speedier rendered page?
3. WP Ajax Edit Comments
   – some Ajax goodness, eases editing of comments for me, and from you. Registered users can edit their comments, non-registered can edit in a certain time frame.
4. Smart Youtube
   – better YouTube embedding than the default from the YouTube site. Copy and paste a YouTube URL into a post and add the letter v to the URL right before the “://”. Simple, yet useful.
5. SimplePie Core
   Load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it.
6. Postalicious
   – creates the daily links page via delicious.com. Requires SimplePie Core these days, but other than that, seems more reliable than the links post option from delicious.com itself. I’ve started going back in and editing to add quirky images for some reason.
7. Quotes Collection
   – fuels the Random Quote sidebar widget on the upper right margin. More for me than you probably. Love me some quotes…
8. AJAXed Wordpress
   – don’t use all the options this plugin enables, but some are useful.
9. Akismet
   – spam comment filter. The last few days quite a number of spam comments have made it past the Akismet filter, but all in all, it does a great job. Occasionally, marks quasi-legitmate comments as spam, but no more than 5 times. According to its statistics, 4,872 spams caught, 18,972 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.849%. Umm, no, but we’ll keep you anyway.
10. All in One SEO Pack
    – not so sure about the usefulness of this plugin, but have kept it so far.
11. Around this date in the past… – Widget Edition
    – testing this (see the lower sidebar), a tip toe through this blog’s history. Of course, a year ago, I was using Movable Type, so only reposted items end up there currently.
12. Blog Copyright (by BTE)
    – sure, why not. Preemptive move against the splogs.
13. FD Feedburner Plugin
    – re-directs the default RSS feed over to FeedBurner which has a hell of a lot of more interesting features. FeedBurner also generates the “email of today’s posts” feature, which is pretty useful if you don’t use a newsreader or visit everyday, as it includes Flickr, Digg, and whatever else.
14. Flickr Photo Album
    – haven’t really used this, might go away.
15. Google Analyticator
    – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics.
16. Google XML Sitemaps
    -generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Contributes to good search engine ranking presumedly.
17. Lightbox 2
    – used to make uploaded images appear in their own “embiggened” window. Am using it less and just using Picasa’s bandwidth instead of my own, but will probably keep this too.
18. MobilePress
    – just installed this – presumedly creates a mobile friendly version of the blog, suitable for iPhones and the like. Haven’t tested it yet.
19. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
    – aids in painless upgrade to the WordPress software.
20. Wordpress Popular Posts
    – again, enables archive digging. Currently residing in the sidebar under “Hot Action”.
21. WordPress.com Stats
    – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks.
22. Twitter for Wordpress
    – sometimes fails, but works better than a straight RSS feed. Haven’t given up on Twitter yet, come follow me
23. Subscribe To Comments
    – useful addition to a comment feed, not that I get many comments, but in the rare instances.
24. ShareThis
    – for posting to Digg, delicious, FaceBook and various other social media sites. Don’t know if it ever gets used, but its here anyway.
25. Redirection
    – for those occasions where I make a typo in the URL of a post, and don’t notice until later, this plug-in smoothly re-directs to the proper page.
26. Random Redirect
    – try it!!

Geez, didn’t realize this would turn out to be such a long list.
Do you have any plugins essential to your blog’s functioning and aesthetic?

1. like this, duh [↩]

Received an amusing email, spam presumedly, from a Hong Kong company re my domain name. Here it is in its entirety:

We are Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “b12partners” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Dec 25, 2008.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark, so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.

In order to avoid the law problems invovled,we need to confirm with you first.If you consider these domain names are not important,please don’t reply this email,we will cooperate with the third company Kind Regards, Andy.liu

Tel: +852-31757930(ext.8023)

Fax: +852-31757932

Email: Andy.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. Website: www.hknsc.hk

Yes, indeed, I’ll get right on that.

Especially since they are so serious about their claims

A fairly simple upgrade, took less than a few minutes.

The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.

Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)

[From WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane”]

Ask me in a week if I noticed anything major. I’ve almost spit out 1,000 entries¹ in WordPress since installing it last May, certainly is much less frustrating an experience than using MoveableType ever was. Let me know if you see anything odd, will ya?

www.flickr.com swanksalot’s Your favorites photoset

1. this will be number 967, if you want precision [↩]

Sometimes just publicly complaining is enough to fix problems. I haven’t noticed errors recently. So culprit was probably LibraryThing, Amazon, LastFM, or a combination of the three, or something else unrelated. I know you were just dying to know…

I have a bad problem with cluttering up my sidebars – I want my blog to resemble my office, which is nearly always thick with piles of papers, notebooks, newspapers, magazine, books, CDs, DVDs, coffee cups, half-eaten food, and cat toys. Perhaps the error was warning to clean my act up! Or not, I’m sure in a week or two, I’ll have a bunch of crap everywhere.

Oh, and while I’m bloviating about non-important topics,¹ there is a new option: subscription by email, courtesy of FeedBurner. If you click the link in the upper right column (appropriately enough: subscribe to B12 Solipsism by Email), and follow the simple directions, you’ll receive a fairly nicely formatted HTML email theoretically every morning between 7 AM and 9 AM containing all the new content for the day. If it doesn’t work for whatever reason, I’ll be happy to help (if I can, of course).

1. unless you are me, then every topic is the most important topic, at that moment [↩]

First real problem with WordPress. Avert your eyes if technical talk hurts your brain.

Friday night (I believe), I made some changes, installed a couple of plugins, and generally futzed around. Saturday I noticed pages never finished loading. Glancing at the error console in Safari, I see reams of errors that read something like:

SyntaxError: Parse error

http://www.b12partners.net/wp/2008/06/29/the-best-god-joke-ever/function%20(iterator,%20context)%20{%20%20var%20index%20=%200;%20%20iterator%20=%20iterator.bind(context);%20%20try%20%20%20{%20%20%20%20this._each(function%20(value)%20%20%20%20{%20%20%20%20%20%20iterator(value,%20index++);%20%20%20%20});%20%20}%20%20catch%20(e)%20%20{%20%20%20%20if%20(e%20!=%20$break)%20%20%20%20%20%20throw%20e;%20%20}%20%20return%20this;} (line 1)

and:

Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /wp/function (object) { if (Object.isFunction(this.indexOf)) if (this.indexOf(object) != -1) return true; var found = false; this.each(function (value) { if (value == object) { found = true; throw $break; } }); return found;} on this server.

Goes on forever, hundreds of these. This can’t be good, I thought, so have tried these fixes:

turn off all plugins (no change).

turn off all recently addeded plugins (no change)

remove widgets (the sidebar column elements). This is sort of a pain if a widget is hand-created (such as the Google ad widget), once you remove it, it isn’t available to be put back. Moveable Type is superior in this instance – every widget was saved individually, and you can mix and match at your leisure.

Switching to different themes

Replacing the templates from originals for the theme I had been using, in case some garbage code got introducedToggled:

WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically

because I did change this recently.

Crap. What next?

First oddity: a double post of the same entry. Oh well, hope it isn’t too confusing.

Mostly, though, no complaints about moving to wordpress. Much easier to configure everything.

[Golden Confidence]

[googmonify]1723016744[/googmonify]

WP notes from day 1.3 of use. 

• No javascript-based widgets, meaning some of my sidebar elements will have to die (like the one I wanted most, additions to my librarything catalog. Oh well, less clutter is probably good for everyone.
• Would like to be able to customize elements of individual pages/entries. The sidebar for the main page seems like it could contain more items than the individual pages, but as far as I can tell, they are required to be identical. Point for MT.
• There are seemingly a gazillion plugins for WP. I’ve added a few, and am on the lookout for more. Installation is a breeze -upload a folder to /wp-content/plugins/, activate, and you are set. 
• Speaking of, installed a Flickr gallery plugin that I wanted to try for a long time. If you want to see how it looks, go to http://www.b12partners.net/wp/photos/. For some reason, the ending slash in the URL is required (photos/). Just click it, and wait a second for the images to load. I haven’t yet figured out how to embed images directly in a post, probably because I’m running on fumes today (only 4 hours of sleep, don’t ask me why)
• I don’t like the faint grey text on some sidebar elements, I will fix this once I have time to find the right CSS code.
• I want to add a random image generator in the header (up at the top), but this will happen over some rainy weekend.

I installed WordPress 2.5 last night, and have been playing around with it for a few hours. Seems so much more responsive than Movable Type, at least at the moment. I don’t know if that is because I have over 4,000 entries in MT, or because WP uses PHP, or if WP just is faster. MT gives one more control over the layout (templates for every page, archive, index), but this control also makes MT much more complicated to configure. I never did get the category archive to work properly, and gave up after struggling with the formatting for hours. Also, about every 3rd post made in MT doesn’t complete the first time, I have to repost up to five times to get a proper response (though, this could be webhost-related, but then doesn’t happen in WP).

Not sure what will happen in the near future, but for now, new content will be found here more likely than here. The only change is “/mt” to “/wp” at the end (http://www.b12partners.net/mt/ to http://www.b12partners.net/wp/ )
Please adjust your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly. (I’d suggest keeping both active at least for a moment: a bit wishy-washy of me, but I have a lot of time invested in Movable Type.)

case in point – even publishing this entry took 4 attempts in MT, and 4 seconds in WP.

Also – if you notice anything weird, please let me know (comments not being accepted, page loading oddly, Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! anything)

Testing Wordpress. Seems easier to configure than moveable type, but that’s probably only because I’m drunk.

Hotel Cedar

“All rooms come with shower or tub” Whoo hoo!

a quickr pickr post