ROLEY

Tag: Wordpress

  • Friday, September 27th, 2024

    Back in the early days of blogs–at least on WordPress, anyway–one could have a widget on the sidebar that provided links to that blogger’s favorite blogs. A look at what that blogger finds interesting in the hopes that you’ll find it interesting too. That’s what passed for Social Networks back in the Web 1.0 days. I’m using Web 1.0 to identify the time before Friendster, Facebook, and the like.

    I’m noticing a shift from the Social Networks and back towards Blogs. It appears to me that there’s a segment of the online population that has realized that social networks have changed dramatically over the years. The algorithm rewards engagement good or bad, bad actors use that against us while we are served ads relevant to what we’re engaging with. I don’t know why this is hard to understand. So, I understand why I’m wanting to head back to blogs. I’m just really at the end of my tether with social media. I just don’t think it serves any purpose any more than to make people mad. It certainly doesn’t bring the eyeballs to my content. Such as it is. I know. I’m trying.

    I’m not going to delete my social media, but I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be using it. My place is here, and I don’t care about the algorithm. You’ll notice that comments are turned off here. I don’t want them. WordPress is free at the dot com site, and you can get web hosting relatively cheaply. You can respond over at your place that you control. I’ll serve up what I want here.

    About that blogroll: I’m going to get rid of the Links Page over on the sidebar and figure out how to install a blogroll here. Stay Tuned on that.

  • JOURNAL: November 6th, 2023

    A little housekeeping, even if you see it right up front. I’ve changed the theme of this site to something more manageable. The momentary downside is that it’s gray, and adding in some additional CSS code doesn’t quite cover it, so I’ll work on that. I like my blue and white jam. I was using a WP theme that I had to shoehorn it into doing what I wanted it to do. This one just does it by default. Roley happy now. Almost.

    I don’t know who needs to hear this, but when you slap a sociopath on the wrist for his bullshit, it’s not a disincentive. In fact, they’ll think they got away with it. They’ll hit you with more bullshit, and it will get worse. Stop coddling the sociopath.

    I wrote a video script today. it’s very short, but it works and that’s all I need it to do. Stay tuned.

    There’s a definite upside and downside to working with a cat in your lap. Both happen to be that you have a cat in your lap.

  • Tuesday, October 10th, 2023

    Follow up from yesterday: The main problem I was having trying to fix that YT broken link is that it assumed that any YT link was for a video, and tried to treat it like an embed. I initially tried to fix it by trying another theme that was *close* to the same thing as this one, but the sidebar was fugly, and not customizable, not even through tweaking the CSS for some reason. Additionally, this theme tried to add a 2nd sidebar menu, and would not let me get rid of the one that you see. So, there was no way to have that YouTube link in the menu and have it act differently.

    Then, I got a rare good night’s sleep and came up with a different idea. What if I create a new page for all the social links, and have all the links open to a new tab. That should work, right? So I created the Social Page you see in the sidebar and put all the places you can connect with me there.

    It was then I found out that the problem wasn’t just in the sidebar, it’s any YouTube link placed anywhere.

    Sometimes I swear these things are too smart for their own good.

  • Monday, October 9th, 2023

    Here’s a reminder that functional doesn’t necessarily mean correct. I had a link in the sidebar for YouTube that you’ll notice is no longer there. Turns out that when you click the link, it treats it as if it is a video, and tries to bring up that video in a lightbox. When you create a sidebar menu from WordPress Pages, it’s doing what it’s supposed to. Hat tip to the guy who told me the link was broken.

    To fix this, I need to get more under the hood than I have in years. You may remember that this used to be a Squarespace site. If I can keep this exact look, it might be again. WordPress themes are so damn clunky sometimes. I tell you, there’s more on the backend of this theme than I think is necessary for how minimal I want it to look.

    Time to make it correct.

  • Monday, September 11th, 2023

    I had a thought to merge all of my content here. WordPress has an embed function, I can embed all my social media here.

    I tested it. Sure enough, it worked. The only trouble was that it was god-awful ugly.

    I abandoned that idea. Besides, you can all the other places I am in the sidebar.

    just because you can never means you should.

  • Sunday, February 19th, 2023

    Welcome back. That’s more for me than it is for you.

    • I haven’t had as much time for blogging–or anything else– as I have for other things that require my time. Specifically, in the past little while, my cat died, my wife’s parrot died, and my wife almost died. So, I’ve been busy. I haven’t been well, but I appear to be returning OK. It’s incredible what having access to the meds you need to be a functional human being will do for you. It would appear that my mental situation was directly tied to my lack of access to those medications. In this case, it was not my anti-depressant; it was the fact that I am now a Type 1 diabetic and am now insulin dependent. My A1C, a metric of my blood sugar levels over 90 days, was 10.1. A person who does not have diabetes would have an A1C of under 7.   Today, my estimated A1C is about 7.7, which has led to clearer thinking, more energy, and in this case, depression. I feel a lot more like my usual chaotic good self, so I’ll see if I can get back into creating more things.
    • At the beginning of the year, I set out a list of goals, separated by quarter. Due to the above, I’ve not met any of those goals for the 1st quarter. Let’s go over those:
      • WORK: Professionally, identify one area of my job where we could improve the workflow–DONE
      • WORK: Average between 700-750 items a week at my job.  — FAILED (managed 500-700 items a week. More than anyone else on the team by a lot, so might need to revise.)
      • WORK: Outline and propose Multimedia Training for my department — ADDRESSED, REJECTED due to Personal information being the hangup. PII Security is important in my line of work.
      • CREATIVE: Podcast and Patreon at least once a week in 1Q — FAILED; see above.
      • CREATIVE: Gain 25 subscribers on Patreon.  — PENDING
      • CREATIVE: One Tentpole article a month — FAILED; see above
      • CREATIVE: One Photo and one Video Essay in 1Q — PENDING
      • ACADEMIC: Dedicated Learning Time once a month in 1Q — PENDING
      • FUN:  Karaoke once a month — PENDING
      • FUN: Photo Challenge once a month — FAILED; see above
      • FUN: New song on guitar once a month — FAILED; see above
      • FUN: Something that doesn’t involve work or creativity once a month – well, depending on how you look at it, spending more time in a hospital than anyone should qualify, but FAILED in the spirit of the intention.

        Since I feel better and things are getting as close to normal as things get, I intend to try and catch up on some of those pending and failed items, but we’ll see how it goes.


    • I didn’t go into much detail about this, but you’ll notice that this website has returned to a WordPress site. I don’t have a bad thing to say about Squarespace; I no longer require or desire the bells and whistles they provide. Still, even WordPress doesn’t quite capture what I want. The closest thing that captures what I wish is Dave Winer’s Scripting News, run on Dave’s outliner program Drummer. To get as close to that as possible, I make one post a day with all the items I want to cover. I don’t believe I have the ‘fu’ required to create something in Drummer. I intend to try, and if I’m successful by some quirk of fate, I may redirect the domain there. In a perfect world, I’d try to run it from my server, but it doesn’t look like that’s possible. I could be wrong. In the end, what I want is (maybe) simple:  One date per day, my writing for the day underneath with anchor tags for each item, and the ability to post those items to Twitter, Mastodon, etc.
    • Speaking of social media, I’m frankly getting sick of it. Facebook sucks, Instagram no longer focuses on photography,  Elon is intent on making Twitter a garbage fire, TikTok is OK, but mainly for fun, and LinkedIn is not what I’m trying to reach. Mastodon is OK, but I feel meh about the whole thing.   I no longer have a clear understanding as to why I’m on social media at all. It was to try to direct eyeballs here, but I spend so much time on those platforms that I spend next to nothing here where I should. I’ve half a mind to cancel all my social media accounts and work on optimizing everything for search to come here. That sounds like the direction I want to go. Or, I cross-post links to those places and not deal with them outside of that. The bottom line is that I no longer think that social media serves any purpose other than to agitate, and I don’t need that drama anymore. I certainly don’t need the distraction.
    • Not sure how this post is going to work going forward.  I’ll either post it in the evening, or write a bunch of stuff and post it the next morning.  Frankly, I’m leaning towards the latter.  That waym I might have the time to research anything that comes up and give you something more than my usual gas-filled take on things.  We’ll see.  if that’s the case, the next post will probably be Tuesday.

  • Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022

    • I might be nitpicky here, but I saw an ad for a product called the Bionic Spotlight last night. I don’t want a Bionic Spotlight. I don’t know who they’ve been. A roundabout way of saying that words mean things.

    • From the Wayback Machine, ABC News from 11/8/1979. The show that would become Nightline was originally a daily recap of what was happening with the Iranian Hostages. So early on that Ted Koppel was a reporter, and Frank Reynolds anchored. Koppel was at his Alfred E. Neuman best.

    • I have reached the point that the candidate who tells me that my mailbox is not going to be stuffed with election bullshit, and my phone isn’t going to blow up with text messages will get my fucking vote. I’m really more upset about the mail, trash that just takes up space.

    • I may have mentioned this before, but I think I have figured out one of my main problems. The experts call this object permanence, which is a fancy way of saying if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. That’s why I’ve been so unsuccessful at keeping a journal of any substance. On the other side of the coin, having all that shit out on my desk looks cluttered, and my poor brain has to reconcile that. No wonder I’m fucked. I literally have a journal that I wrote “DON’T PUT ME AWAY” in Sharpie. WHY BRAIN DO THIS?

    • Last night, something happened to my website, it caught a critical error. Anytime I’ve run across this in WordPress, where it happens suddenly after having been writing a draft earlier in the day, it’s a plugin. What I didn’t expect after deactivating the plugins in PHPMyAdmin and reactvating them one by one, it was Jetpack that was the error. It had updated during the day automatically and borked my site. I think what I need to do is control when these plugins activate and not let them auto-update. Hive mind, what say you? Yeah?

    • Update about the Patreon podcasts: They’re public for now. I think I’ll keep them public until January 1st, and then flip the switch to put them behind the paywall. Everything will be that way until after Jan 1st, I think. …and there was much rejoicing…

  • I’m Not That Fancy

    So, here’s a little bit of a switch. As some of you may be aware, I’ve been a Squarespace customer for almost a decade. I like them, and their customer service has been excellent. However, over the course of the pandemic I’ve been thinking about what it is I actually *need* for a site, and that feeling has intensified over the last few weeks. I’ve also been giving thought to the anxiety I give myself trying to make my multimedia talents a thing, and I just don’t need to do that. I need to have fun doing this stuff, and this hasn’t been fun for a while.

    So I’m scaling back. I have made the switch back to a WordPress site, and the first decision I had to make was to whether or not to go look for a fancy theme or not. I don’t need some magazine theme or a portfolio theme, and I don’t need something that has my face plastered all over it like my last Squarespace site did. I need the content to be front and center; more steak than sizzle. This theme does that. It also serves as a platform for me to relearn some of the WordPress development things that I lost over the past ten years or so.

    This new experiment—and let’s be clear, this is me playing mad scientist for the first time in a dozen years or so— is meant to do one thing: force me to look at a blank background until I get annoyed enough to fill it with something. I make no promises, but if you’ve been with me for a while, you know this. Of course, you know where the door is if you’ve had enough.

    I haven’t.