Affordable Web Design In the last bit of news I also recently switched to Disqus for my commenting needs. For those not in the know this means I have a few new features for my little spot on the web.

These words seemed to fit into the post I’d made (where I talk about switching over to Disqus) perfectly. It immediately dawned on me the reason it fit so perfectly is that it was a direct quote of my post. Once I realized this I checked on Disqus to see what else this asshat had posted. Comment after comment he’d quoted a short snippet from the blogs he’d commented on. Sort of creative but a really terrible and dangerous methodology to get SEO benefits. Here’s the link to his comment threads on Disqus. Once I’d removed and marked as spam the comment I decided to see what type of guy was behind this. So I popped over to his website and took a look. Let me digress for a moment by giving a few short rules to being a web developer and/or designer:

1. Know what Information Delivery means (Your site shouldn’t look pretty first and give information second unless your site is a photo or illustration portfolio and even that should balance well with the delivery of information).
2. Know what color consistency is (you don’t need to use all 65 million possible colors on your page, really trust me on this).
3. Know how to make your pages consistent (if I click 3 pages on your site at random and none of the color schemes, layouts match…you’re not doing it right).
4. Understand (I mean REALLY understand) how to properly choose and use fonts. A simple rule of thumb is: never use more than 3 fonts on a single website. Using more than that just looks chaotic and is stressful to the eye.
5. Never ever ever ever (really EVER) proclaim yourself as “premiere” or an “expert” on anything when you obviously aren’t. Especially not an SEO expert.

Ok now that we’ve covered those basics let’s get back to the asshat that prompted this post. Now some of you might think that I crafted the above list with Steve (the spamming douchebag) in mind. Not true, that list was given to me by a long time friend 10 years ago when I first got into doing web development. Oddly Steve (the spamming douchebag) managed to break (with great alacrity no less) all 5 rules with just the front page of his site.

1. Rule #1: His site is a (to quote Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead) psychedelic mess.
2. Rule #2: There are at least 4 colors to many (impressive since 3 of those colors are differing shades of blue).
3. Rule #3: How in the heck did he do this? The header, sidebars, content and footer all have widely varying styles (I know it’s sort of amazing really).
4. Rule #4: There are 7 different fonts used on the front page alone. I suppose one could play Devil’s Advocate and say he was trying to show that he could design a page to use different fonts but that Devil’s Advocate wouldn’t really be trying)
5. Rule #5: Steve (the spamming douchebag) calls himself an “SEO Expert” yet his craptastic website has a Google pagerank of 3. That’s like saying George Bush is an expert at being President.

This is perfectly in sync with what I’ve been saying on twitter the last few days. It seems every 4th person that follows me has a job title of “Social Media Consultant” or “SEO Expert”. I remember these days perfectly 8 years ago during the Dot Com bubble. Every asshat with Front Page was suddenly an expert Web Designer yet none of them knew a damned thing. So far I haven’t linked the site that Steve (the spamming douchebag) “designed” because I don’t want to give him the benefits of my Google Ranking, which is hilariously a 4 even though I haven’t done any SEO work on my site EVER (other than running WordPress and making sure to have a standard compliant site). Speaking of standards compliance Steve’s site gets the fail whale there too.

So here Steve (you spamming douchebag) I’ll link to your site, but first here’s a quick rundown of other folks on the web who blogged about you before me: RipOffReport.com outsourcing fraud listing

If you’re going to say you do something you damn sure need to know how to do it, Steve Shearer doesn’t.

A quick update by the way: It looks like the way Disqus let’s you see all of the comments by a user in a single page means finding spammers out becomes vastly easier (such is the case with Steve (the spamming douchebag)

Update! 09/09: While updating all of my site images I found this “great” image of Steve himself. Someone’s been editing pixels it looks like (badly). Photoshop & Steve don’t mix.

Related posts:

1. Moving back in time to go forward. Well it’s been a strange few weeks since I last...
2. Lotus Media Group project So I’m part of a media collective that can handle...
3. Fun with WordPress 2.5 So noticing that Matt Mullenweg blogged that there was a...

Cadence Management Podcast.

Excellent podcasts on project management skills and training. Definitely a must listen for anyone managing people, projects or anything in between from Portland’s own Cadence Management.

Tags: cadence, project management, podcast, business, pmi

Open Parenthesis » WordPress to Facebook and Back Again

Wow, a wordpress plugin that crossposts to facebook (and crossposts comments as well it appears!!!)

Tags: crosspost, wordpress, plugin, wordpress plugin, facebook, comments

ManyBooks.net – Free eBooks for your PDA, iPod, or eBook Reader

Thousands of free ebooks, pre-formatted for reading on your computer, PDA, Blackberry, iPod, iLiad, Sony Reader, Librie, Zaurus, Newton, eBookman, or Rocketbook – eReader, PDF, Plucker, iSilo, Doc, RTF, Mobipocket, Newton Paperback, and zTXT ebooks ready to go!

Tags: books, ebooks, free books, iphone, ipod, kindle

Monotone WordPress Theme

Brilliant wordpress theme that is quite similar in concept to the way Dave Shea of mezzoblue.com has his site setup. This theme is perfect for photoblogging since the site will always color complement the photo.

Tags: theme, wordpress, photoblog, photo, clean

Related posts:

1. CDC’s weekly links list Last weeks links that inspired, impressed or just seemed share...
2. CDC’s weekly links list Last weeks links that inspired, impressed or just seemed share...
3. CDC’s weekly links list Last weeks links that inspired, impressed or just seemed share...

1. How did you get the moniker Unreliable Narrator?

I gave it to myself, in an undoubtedly bootless effort to forestall ex-friends and ex-lovers and ex-employers staggering onto my blog and emailing me angrily about how wrong, Wrong, WRONG I got everything—reminding us all, “Hey, this is just one crazy chick’s temporary take on what happened.” It’s my optimistic prophylactic against self-bludgeoning as well.

2. You mentioned you were in school? What’s your major?

“In school”–that sounds so fun! I’m a graduate student and teaching associate at a ginormous ugly football university in Arizona, seeking my terminal degree–an MFA in creative writing (poetry).

3. What is your all time favorite word? why?

Thinking about this idly for the last couple of weeks has yielded only the realization that I like adverbs way, way too much–especially poly-jointed Latinate ones with lots of prefixes. Cf. “an undoubtedly bootless,” above.

4. If you could take only 4 items to a remote place for a month, what would they be and where would you go?

Dude can I just say first? that sounds SO FUCKING GOOD.

I probably wouldn’t want to go to Mexico or Italy, usual fantasy destinations—I’m feeling right now like someplace simple and scorpion-free. The Professoressa has a summer place on an island in Wisconsin—in my dream world, there. Deeply rural Western Massachusetts, maybe. Somewhere grassy and numb and totally silent.

Assuming the Brujo is not an item and therefore can’t come, I would take….a very long DSL cable! KIDDING.

a) relatively unscathed purple-batik journal, which I started last year before being devoured by State School
b) new blue fountain pen (needs to be aggressively procured from Santa Fe pen shop who repeatedly fail to deliver it)
c) Featherweight sewing machine with stack of fat quarters tucked in the case (breaking rules of 4 items) and
d) a picture of Pyewacket to remind me of HOW NICE IT IS NOT TO BE AROUND HER WHEN SHE’S MIAOWING.

5. What did you most aspire to when you were 10 years old?

Publicly, within my family, I said I wanted to be an entomologist. I was fascinated by insects and had a murderously thorough butterfly collection (which now horrifies me to remember). I hadn’t yet become obsessed with musical theater, the ballet, the opera, Shakespeare, concert piano—all those yearnings which would torment me through adolescence.

I specifically remember visiting, for some reason, the agriculture/science building of the junior college I would later attend at 17, and seeing the fetal pig embryos in jars and what have you. And imagining that someday I would be a PROFESSOR OF SCIENCE, sweeping through the doors to teach my class, wearing (for no reason I can explain) a gray Harris tweed skirt and pantyhose and silver strappy high heels. Hey, I was ten. Though I don’t think my fashion sensibilities have much improved.

When the Brujo was about five and was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied serenely, “A Chinaman.” And I similarly (but less openly) *really* wanted to be? An Indian. A princess. A time-traveller.

And a starship captain’s girlfriend, so I could hang around in sleazy outfits and eat blue snack food.

6. Would you have considered your present self someone to look up to when you were 10?

Bwahahahaha! Well, maybe.

7. I notice you listen to Ani Difranco. Do you remember how you discovered her music?

Weirdly enough I just told this story to the Brujo. I had acquired, somehow, a paper catalog to a music store called Ladyslipper Records. This was in, like, 1989, loooong before teh Interwebs. It had this hippie-looking purple watercolor painting on the front and was filled with “women’s music”—the real deal, like Cris Williamson and Holly Near and Ferron and artists to whom mostly no one listens anymore, mostly because they were mostly terrible. I could never afford to order anything, though; those were the Lost Years and I made $5 an hour at the bookstore. Actually maybe that’s where I got the catalog—the guys in the record half of the store were always giving me freebies and posters and stuff.

Anyway I would pore over the fairly elaborate descriptions of the recordings for HOURS. And they had I think two tapes by this shaven-headed big-eyed girl—Ani really was a girl then, maybe 16 or 17 herself. But what really drew me to them wasn’t her pictures but the reviews of the music as being completely ferocious and unprecedented. I was really into the Indigo Girls at that time *shudder* and was teaching myself to play every single Suzanne Vega song on guitar, but I also loved Sinead O’Connor and was CRAZY about Melissa Etheridge. I basically could only fingerpick but I was frustrated with how sweet and tiny that sounded, and I desperately wanted to know how to make a big loud sound, but without strumming.

So when I was at the Women’s College in 1993 and Ani finally played Amherst, my girlfriend kimba and I went immediately to hear her—I seem to remember paying with a roll of laundry quarters, which of course you couldn’t do now. And I remember that she opened with “Fourth of July,” I was standing about ten feet away, we were *surrounded* with entranced guitar guys, and I was like, “Uh-huh. Yes please. That.”

So in a period of a few years I went to a dozen of her shows, talked to her at summer folk festival camps, learned scores of songs, etc. In the late nineties I quit going to live shows because I couldn’t handle her audiences any more—either their size or their attitudes—around the same time that Ani herself started writing songs about her frustration with audience, oddly. Conversely, I have never heard Tori Amos live, ever, though I dream about meeting with her and talking to her and playing for her all the time—almost on a weekly basis; her persona has long been an inner mentor to me, completely unknown to her.

Hanging out the laundry yesterday I was thinking about why Ani and why Tori. I used to be fond of mangling Eliot’s bromide about Shakespeare and Dante, and saying that Tori and Ani divide the world between them—there is no third. (I didn’t discover Joni Mitchell until very late, for some reason.) They cover different territory within me and within many listeners—just think of their nicknames: The Little Folksinger and the Queen of the Fairies. Tori spaces herself all over that numinous inner landscape which is at times nonsensical and at other times insane; her lyrics aren’t representational, and very literal hearers find them bewildering. It probably sounds moronic, but listening to Tori taught me how to read Dickinson. She is often a language poet, if you’ll let me get away with that, while Ani is very much a formalist. Ani favors those 3- and 4-line stanzas, very square song structures, repetition with significant variations, and has that trademark politicized realism, with a kind of fearless, bawdy Chaucerian humor.

But I think the real reason why their music has spoken to me so richly and accompanied me through so much is for the very simple fact that they’re both a few years older than I am. And through the reality of how long it takes to write songs, record them, distribute them….I wind up hearing lyrics and music that directly address what I’m going through, in a sometimes uncanny way. So they had abortions/miscarriages/girlfriends/bad breakups/divorces/parental separations/reevaluations of work/artistic crises etc. in roughly the same timeframes as I did.

Having, basically, immensely talented big sisters has been invaluable in the sense of predecessors, or permission-givers. (“I can SAY that?! I can MAKE that kind of move?!”) And obviously sometimes it’s depressing/paralyzing, too, the way it can be when you have really cool older siblings—when you’re saddled with any anxiety of influence.

8. Is the change in voice from 1st person to 3rd person and vice versa something intentional or a personality quirk?

By “personality quirk” we hope you’re not thinking that we actually walk around all the time addressing others and ourselves like this? Because that would be SERIOUSLY ANNOYING. Technically, though, that’s the change from singular to plural so she thinks you do mean the change to third person. And she’s not quite sure, honestly, why or how she stumbled on it—probably via poetry—but she did notice pretty quickly that it enabled her to write about all kinds of things she couldn’t have touched with a bargepole in the first person. Yet another unreliable subterfuge tactic.

9. Favorite album of all time.

That would have to be Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which I think contains Whitmanian multitudes. I spent one unemployed summer learning every single song on both guitar and piano, though now sadly I can’t play any of them.

10. What one thing do you regret most?

Only one?!?

Honestly, tonight…and many times since then: I regret not waiting until I got to the top of Atalaya to swallow more pills with more brandy, because then I wouldn’t have been able to get back down again no matter how fucked up and turned around I wound up getting.

I know, that’s horrible. I would never have met the Brujo, never have started corresponding with oleoptene, and there’d be three fewer years of verbiage hurled at the aether. And, you know. I’m supposed to teach in four hours and tonight it’s true. I was curled up under my desk earlier; I have my period; I haven’t even started grading papers; it’s a bad night.

11. What do you wish you had invented?

The bicycle-light generator! Actually I *did* invent it, my first year at Cambridge, and I described it excitedly to all my new British friends who listened politely and then told me it had been invented sometime before the first world war.

12. What is your favorite sound.

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”

13. Coffee or tea?

Tea, always—until the State School slammed into me sometime around last December. Then, at the advanced age of 38, I was like, “What is this marvelous drug which turns me, on three hours sleep, into a PAPER-GRADING MACHINE?!?” And I’m such a cheap date—all I need is half-a-teaspoon of the Brujo’s thick indigo brew, with about a gallon of milk, and I’m wired all day.

Lately I’m addicted to this horrible coffee that comes from a machine in my office building on campus—for 75¢, it dispenses what it calls an “International Coffee” which is mostly corn syrup solids. Maybe February was so hard this year because that machine broke down, and of course Walt Whitman and I are the only people who ever use it, so they didn’t fix it for weeks and weeks. I just wish I could put my mug under the spigot but it insists on dropping down a wasteful little paper cup every time.

14. Describe using just 6 words your favorite food.

Maguro, tekka maki, sake, toro, ebi.

15.Do you have any irrational fears (zombies, werewolves, pirahanas in the toilet, etc).

Ghosts—is that irrational? I don’t know. I saw one when I was about three or four years old—I was up past my bedtime reading in bed and I was completely terrified (although it seemed harmless, mainly curious, just an amorphous glowing purple blob with eyes, but it moved *fast* and I knew it was not at all something I was supposed to be seeing). Ever since then I have, perhaps deliberately, NOT seen ghosts—but any film about that stuff scares the beejeebus out of me: The Sixth Sense, for example, or in fact A Christmas Carol, when I was about 8 or 9 years old. For MONTHS after I see one of those movies I’m all jittery and haunted and refuse to look in mirrors when I’m alone in the loo at night. And then there was the weird certainty I had one summer at Chez Zen that a dead priest was trailing me all over campus, which was unnerving, to say the least.

16. Earliest memory?

I remember being in my crib one evening or morning—Texas, rainy, gray, dim outside, an overhead bulb—and watching my mom put the diaper cream down on my changing table. It was a white tube with dark blue square letters outlined in red, and I realized that the letters on the tube meant the name of it—DESITIN. That the word was the name of the thing.

Well that wraps up the interview, thanks to the Unreliable Narrator herself, and Mirrorpond IPA for helping discovered the questions I needed to ask.

Ok that was fairly fun. I had a great time doing this and almost want to interview lots of people now to get a birds eye look into their heads.

Related posts:

1. Great Interview Experiment of Angela Leach the “CelticFrog” So here we are, the first person to sign up...
2. Great Portland Experiment #2: What 5 songs sum up who you feel you are. Welcome back to the Great Portland Experiment. Here’s experiment number...
3. The Great Portland Interview Experiment So many months back I participated in the “Great Interview...

Late Saturday night I decided it was high time to finally make a webclip icon for cdcstudios. It was a total piece of cake and shortly thereafter I made another one, this time for the folks over at Silicon Florist. For those not in the know, a webclip icon is the iPhone or iPod Touch desktop bookmark icon. They’re really easy to make and quite useful as displayed in the pic above.

With this plugin you can make a custom icon for your wordpress site or your wordpress multiuser site (yep this plugin will allow each individual WPMU blog to have full support for custom webclips). Head to the plugin page to get it or if you have any questions about it.

Related posts:

1. iPhone Webclip Manager Have an iPhone or iPod Touch? Wonder how all those...
2. A WordPress Plugin a day for 30 days WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full...
3. Plugins I’ve written a few plugins, either to do things automatically...

1. Akismet - Comment spam filtering for the masses. Comes with every single WordPress install because it’s by the same wonderful folks at automattic who brought us WordPress. Currently it’s been responsible for over 23,000 comment spams caught on my blog. I’m in total agreement with Aaron that activating this is the absolute first step in deploying wordpress. Here’s what Akismet.com says about their plugin:

“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again“.

Those last 7 words say alot about their confidence in their product. Are they true? Absolutely.
2. Sociable – A quick easy way to add social media buttons to your posts (or everywhere, easily changed from the settings page, not only that but it does so easily, and beautifully (see it in action at the end of this post and feel free to submit if you like).

I can’t imagine a easier to configure rock solid way to have the social media links I want all in one place.

3. Wp-Super Cache – This little plugin will help protect your blog from the Slashdot/Digg effect of huge amounts of links swamping your server. Here’s the description WordPress superstar Donncha O Caoimh (the author of this plugin) gave it:

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.”

So far I haven’t been slammed here but if it happens I can rest easy knowing that the guy who’s done most of the work on WPMU (the multi-user version of WordPress) built a plugin to protect a blog’s uptime, which is a pretty important thing for those folks for whom blogging is their life & work.

4. WP-DBManager – This is a pretty important one. I’m often forgetful about backing up my wordpress database before tinkering with it and so with one simple plugin I get nightly backups to my gmail account, scheduled optimization maintenance as well as the ability to repair it when ever I run into an early version plugin that may break something.

5. WordPress.com Stats – This is one that should be installed with every copy of WordPress. Quick clean easy to read stats that are supported from the WordPress.com website. Rather than rewrite what the plugin site has to say I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:

“Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.”

I love it and seeing that gorgeous little flash graph show the number of hits (right in the dashboard) at a glance is as easy as it gets.

6. Fluency Admin - I’m going to cheat and add this one these two to the list (it was a tossup between this one these two and Akismet since technically Akismet is already installed). Much like the author of Fluency says on his blog:

“Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn't work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.”

I loved the Tiger Admin theme and was going to write my own until I discovered Fluency. They made a massive amount of changes to the admin area in WordPress 2.5 and not all of them seem well thought out or right. In short I hate some of what they’ve done (but that’s a whole other post). This wonderous little plugin changes and reskins the whole backend to make it; clean, simple and flow just like it should.

7. Wphone – I love my iPhone and the ability to surf the net anywhere on it is great. Posting to my blog via my iPhone though had always been a chore. Along came WPhone allows you to use a custom admin interface while interacting with your WordPress install via your phone. It contains two versions of the mobile admin interface, a full iPhone version and a “lite” version suitable for most every cellphone with a built in browser. I just noticed that local plugin author Viperbond007 (who modified rewrote and made usable my own humble CDC Clean Archives plugin into the awesome jQuery based plugin I’m now running here.

Alrighty, that’s my list of must have/can’t live without plugins. I’ll be updating with links to the other folks I invited to share their Top 5 lists with as they post them. Feel free to let me know the ones I don’t know about or somehow overlooked (I’m currently using 13 plugins total and always looking for amazing time saving, information delivery improving plugins).

Related posts:

1. 10* Proven plugins to make your WordPress Blog pop Here it is. The presentation I’m giving right now (yes...
2. A WordPress Plugin a day for 30 days WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full...
3. Plugins I’ve written a few plugins, either to do things automatically...

This list will require that you have Firefox & the Greasemonkey extension installed.

1. Do you get email with a lot of attachments? Ever wanted to see at a glance what those attachments are right from your inbox? All you need to do is install this little script http://userstyles.org/styles/5545 and suddenly you’ll have a clearly recognizable icon for each different attachment type.

2. Print from gmail often and don’t want to waste color ink (at $8,000 a gallon it can get pretty bad) This script will solve the problem by hiding the gmail logo: http://userstyles.org/styles/2909

3. Have a massive screen with a huge number of emails? With the row highlighting script you can see exactly which email is currently highlighted, all you need is this script: http://userstyles.org/styles/4725

4. Power user time: Macros. If you’re an email power user, mobile warrior or any other buzzwordy user you’ll eventually stop using the mouse for everything and want keyboard shortcuts to make your life easier, faster and just plain sexier (your mileage may vary on that last one, but one can hope yes?) with the Gmail Macros script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/14189

Case sensitive keys (overrides any gmail shortcuts using that key):

• ‘g’ –> ‘go to label’
• ‘l’ –> ‘apply label’
• ‘L’ –> ‘remove label’
• ‘N’ –> ‘create and apply label’
• ‘e’ –> ‘always archive’
• ‘E’ –> ‘Mark as read and archive’
• ‘f’ –> ‘focus: loads all inbox/unread/starred messages in the current label’
• ‘i’ –> ‘move selected messages to inbox’
• ‘T’ –> ‘Mark as read and move to trash’
• ‘t’ –> ‘trash’
• ‘r’ –> ‘Mark as read’
• ‘R’ –> ‘Mark as unread’
• ‘X’ –> ‘Select’
  • ‘+a’ –> all
  • ‘+n’ –> none
  • ‘+s’ –> starred
  • ‘+S’ –> unstarred
  • ‘+u’ –> unread
• ‘O’ –> ‘Open all conversations in the current thread
• ‘,’ –> ‘Mark as read, all unread’
• ‘U’ –> ‘Update current conversation’

5. Filtering assistant. If you’re anything like me you’re a big fan of organizing that massive amount of email automatically so you don’t have to wade through 500 messages every morning. While there’s always been a filtering assistant this little script moves it into the email itself and makes things a lot cleaner feeling. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7997

All in all 5 easy simple ways to make your gmail experience quite a bit faster, better and more productive. Feel free to post your gmail time savers and usage optimization tips below, I’m always on the lookout for new improved tools for my tasks.

For those of you not familiar with Gmail I can’t imagine a service without all of the following:

• Better spam filtering than any other service I’ve encountered
• True instant search (for those not in the know it’s almost exactly like Spotlight on OS X)
• Conversation based email (much easier to follow the thread of a conversation than emails in order of receipt.
• A truly clean fast interface for mail on the go. Mobile mail is a anything but a chore with gmail.
• Over 6gb of storage (and always growing, in fact when I got my account it was only 2.5gb)
• New features just launched include:
  • An optimized iPhone interface
  • Group chat via the integrated google chat app.
  • AOL Instant Messenger support right in the main gmail interface
• Plus dozens more features

Related posts:

1. Google launches Gmail edition for mobile phones If you’re anything like me then you’re probably addicted to...
2. My Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins So at last night’s Beer & Blog I asked Aaron...
3. Why I love Thunderbird and Lightning part one Many people know and love Outlook as the end all...

From the official WordPress blog:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It's been in the oven for a while, and we're finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Pretty big list, but how easy the upgrade? Easy as ever. I did a quick backup at lunch (while sitting in the Roxy no less) including a database backup then deleted the site. Next I opened up Transmit (thanks to Verso for introducing that tasty little app to me). and uploaded the shiny new WordPress 2.5 and then ran the upgrader. It finished in record time (about 5 seconds less than the last upgrade script I did) which was my first nice reaction. Logging in and seeing the new dashboard was fantastic. Nice neatly divided boxes compartmentalizing each different section. Seeing the stats graph integrated into the dashboard is a masterful idea. The only real wish I had is that they were rearrangeable using AJAX and some css (might be a nice plugin if I can find the time before someone else beats me to it. Speaking of plugins I did finally have to stop using Tiger admin plugin I’ve been using for a couple years. I will definitely miss having the navigation bar on the side instead of the top. Also a nice new feature to play with is the fullscreen editing mode. No other distractions on the page. Just a big huge word fillable area.

So after testing all the rest of my plugins I didn’t see any other problems. I did notice that Gravatar’s had an upgrade notice on the plugins page. I clicked the upgrade now link and after quickly typing in my server info it upgraded perfectly. Ironically I just noticed that I no longer need that plugin since the functionality has been written into the core code. Excellent!

Next up is an attempt at using the new media manager and gallery tool (now added to the neatly upgraded TinyMCE toolbar in the write window). I’m using some old artwork as well as an unused rough draft of the redesign of this site since it was handy.

Pretty easy to add. Select the files you want, click upload and then using some nice ajaxy goodness you can edit the description of each photo and alter the title.

All in all this is an amazing upgrade and quite a nice bit of work both under the hood and on the front. It’s nice that so much from the old “shuttle” concept has finally made it into the code. Looking forward to continuing to experiment with the theme design as well as figuring out what other surprises I might find as I explore the tasty goodness of wordpress’ php.

Related posts:

1. A WordPress Plugin a day for 30 days WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full...
2. Converted over to WordPress 2.7 beta 2. So since I had planned on having a release date...
3. My Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins So at last night’s Beer & Blog I asked Aaron...

So 8 years ago I had service through AT&T, my contract was almost up and I was about to start a job working for Sprint. One of my last deeds as a “loyal” AT&T wireless customer was to refer my parents. At the time they were offering $50 per line for referral activations. This would have brought my account down to the point to pay off the remainder of my contract would have been under $50 nice right? Well too bad for me since AT&T never actually gave me the referral bonus. I was taught by my wise and cynical mother when it comes to corporations to NEVER throw money at a problem so I told AT&T until they fixed the issue I wasn’t paying them anymore or using the service either. Well the kind folks at AT&T customer service said no problem it would only take a few days to resolve the issue.

Let’s fast forward now to last July when I bought my iPhone. I was as excited and giddy as a young schoolgirl (pay attention and get the thoughts of those plaid skirts out of your head) as I plugged my iPhone into my Macbook Pro and awaited the iTunes activation. I entered in my SSN and omg! declined. What the hell I thought and called AT&T to find out why. Apparently I owed them over $400.00 for some reason. Wanting to learn more I got a copy of my credit report and discovered not one but two separate (yet identical) debts on my credit report. It seems that AT&T charged me a full $300.00 disconnection fee plus money owed with interest.

At this point I called AT&T back and asked them to look into it (I also notified the credit bureau of the double listing and they said it was verified that I owed both companies? (wth??)). Hilariously enough I was told that the records from that far back probably don’t exist so there is no way to honestly resolve the issue with full information.

Fast forward to this year when I tried to move from a gophone account with my iPhone (yeah I had to get a pay as you go plan which is really code for “gouge the people with bad credit plan which doesn’t actually improve their credit while being gouged” which is a mouthful and makes perfect sense as to why they shortened it), anyways I wanted to add Zoe (my wife) to my plan and make it a contracted family plan (which means her buying a phone and them earning more money off of us both on a contract since I bought my iPhone at an Apple store.

DECLINED! (or we could pay $400 per line deposit). The gentleman I spoke to at the AT&T store said no problem we can get the deposit waived. This sounded excellent. So thus began the dreaded 6 hours at the store. Everyone there was fairly helpful except the asst. manager on duty refused 2 hours worth of requests for a chair for the aforementioned wife (who is 7 months pregnant).

This same assistant manager also made a habit of frequently interrupting and even better ignoring politely worded questions. Amazingly (especially to the 5 or 6 customers who saw my treatment) I managed to keep a clear calm head until the bitter end when I did drop a harsh word the last time he interrupted me. I was trying to ask for his manager’s number as well as the district manager’s number to complain about him and he interrupted to tell me “he was done helping me”. I said continued interruption of a paying customer who wants to give the company more money is a really douchebag thing to do. At this point the elderly security guard told my wife and I to leave since we were hurting the feelings of the staff. At this point 2 of the staff members volunteered to go on record that my family was ill treated by the asst. manager.

Fast forward to me calling customer service the next day to make a complaint. The customer service rep took my complaint and said that behavior wasn’t tolerated and then offered to call another store saying “it’s an easy situation to override a deposit and give a waiver”. I said sure and he contacted the downtown Portland branch. The salesperson and he talked for about 5 minutes and then I was warm transferred to the salesperson and he got my email, mobile number and name and said he’d get back to me within 3 days. Excellent I thought finally some resolution.

3 days later I received an email from this salesperson letting me know that the PacNW operations dept said no. At the bottom of the email (which also contained the email to and from the operations center I noticed:

• My full legal name
• My mobile number
• My home address
• My internal customer id number
• MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

I immediately called the store and asked for a manager was told “none were on duty” and so called customer service who said that there was no way to take a complaint about email.

So I searched the consumerist.org website until I found the CEO’s office and called. The person who answered the phone put my call through to an executive care specialist who could barely speak english (no accent just not that coherent in his speech patterns) who told me “yes that’s against policy but there’s not anything we can do besides say we’re sorry”. Sorry? I’d like to buy a home soon and with the possibility that my SSN was sent in clear text and to who knows how many departments and I have no way of knowing who has my SSN now? For the record I gave the sales guy my email over the phone with no one ever verifying my identity. So apparently you can get SSN’s from AT&T by simply social engineering them now. Hooray for security.

To think this all started with my simpleminded idea that I’d be able to sign up to give more money to the corporation. It’s sad that AT&T is the only company in the US able to offer the iPhone. The worst part is I paid full price for the iPhone. Not subsidized by Apple or ATT like most other phones are. If AT&T had paid for part of the phone then I’d see it from their side but asking me to make a deposit almost equal to the cost of the phone is ludicrous.

I’m not a greedy person I just want to be able to talk to my wife regularly without having to pay a ton for the privilege. At this point however I do have some specific terms that AT&T can fulfill to keep me as a customer and to make right on a horrible run of bad customer service. I just want the plan I originally wanted, no contract, 6 months free (for the 48 hours plus invested that seems fair) and for risking my SSN an upgrade to a 16gb iPhone. All told it’s vastly less then the courts have awarded other people who’s SSNs have been released by corporations.

Related posts:

1. Update on powerbook that went poof.. About 5 weeks ago I wrote about how my gorgeous...
2. 5 easy ways to make Gmail work for you. If you’re like me and absolutely can’t live without your...
3. Healthcare & the modern feudal system So a week and a half ago I woke up...

Last week I ordered a 22″ viewsonic from my midwestern campadre Nick Singley with PC Mall (best sales, vendor guy ever!) and got it today with a hole in the side of the box and styrofoam hanging out (see below for a pic). I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt and try it out but if there is one single solitary dead pixel I’m getting a replacement.

In other news, the pesky database bug has reared it’s head again here meaning I’m likely going to be changing hosts or servers with the host. This hardware seems unstable lately.

Anyhow I’m going to get back to fixing workstations, servers and doing my best to spread the word(s) (literally) of a presenter @ Ignite Portland (I think it was Kelly Guimont) who said “but is it wrapped in bacon good”.

Related posts:

1. Website DNS Migrations made simple Yeah there’s a million articles on how to handle site...
2. Learning from your past (Hole-y smokes!) Ever find yourself in a hole you dug yourself and...

I’ve still got a bunch more work to do (cleaning up the widgets, tweaking here and there, bringing the iphone theme to be more in line with the main theme (based upon n-design studio’s excellent iTheme) and putting the big ass links list I had back up. I’d thought there was a plugin to help manage large link lists but I seem to have lost the link (alliteration much?). Anyhow enjoy the new site and now that I can more easily update the themes I cando things like release more plugins and new wallpapers.
In other news, just a few days till Ignite Portland hits and I’m quite excited to hear all of the presenters, plus hopefully meet more awesome folks to talk tech with.

In totally unrelated news I’m currently turning into an Obama fan, partially because the cynical part of me is intrigued and partially because Randall Munroe of xkcd fame is endorsing him and Randall is the awesome.

Now I’m off to enjoy my xbox 360 and play some Burnout :)

Related posts:

1. Reboot edition launch of cdc|studios Well after a few different rough layouts that had differing...
2. Countdown to the reboot. So just like last time I did the reboot, I...
3. Zoe’s Rants & Randomness Theme So Zoe had been getting frustrated with the inability to...