The Geekorium

This is the third in a series of posts where I just plonk stuff I’ve been thinking about that doesn’t go anywhere else. It’s got a stupid title because my first thought is…

1. I have a real bad time trying to come up with good titles. I don’t try too hard, so I guess it’s to be expected, but I note that my titles have a similar quality to other posts I’ve read that strike me as amateur. If I could tell you what that meant it would put me closer to rectifying it.

2. I have subscribed to a number of new “blogs” recently - as an aside, I think the word blog is awful so I will from now on refer to them as as net-logs, or personal chronicles, or whatever fits.

   After a week of posts on Hackernews about the death and resurrection¹ of said personal chronicles, I thought I’d fire up the ol’ RSS reader and brush off the dust.

   The first thing that struck me was how unpleasant the PHP-based software I had been using was. So instead of dicking around with it, I put my new Docker/Nginx skills to work and fired up a version of Miniflux which is just so elegant and simple to work with. I’ve been slowly accumulating a bunch of low-key personal chronicles by people who write about FOSS and speculate about the same kind of issues that interest me. I’ll put up a list of them somewhere soon.

3. I’m looking for some diversity in my growing list - a lot of these people are other men about my age, which is a fine thing to be - I myself am a man about my age - but other view-points and ideas are also nice. I’m interested in FOSS, internet decentralisation/federation, programming, technology so I’m looking for personal chronicles with a similar bent. I’m not looking to subscribe to stuff that’s completely outside my interests (eg. sport, cars, gardening etc.) but someone who occasionally shares their passions for those things amongst the stuff I’m interested in is welcome². Share your linkrolls!

4. Today I did a big Mastodon harvest - finding and following a lot of new people. This was just to widen the number of voices I’m seeing there. I have to walk the line I failed to walk on Twitter though - while it’s important to be politically engaged, Twitter doesn’t do political nuance well, and Masto probably doesn’t either. I don’t want a lot of politics in my feed anymore. I also need to remember that hiding people’s boosts is a thing I can do.

5. I was going to say something about the protests and riots and police/military action going on in the US, but almost everything I wrote seemed flippant. I hope that whatever happens it leads to real lasting change (or the start of it).

That’s another round up of stuff that’s been on my mind that doesn’t deserve it’s own post. I guess it’s also the third in the #100DaysToOffload³ series I haven’t officially committed to.

It’s time for round-two of a bunch of random stuff that’s slightly-interesting-but-not-interesting-enough-for-a-full-post.

• I’m sitting on a new office chair that’s called a Swopper that I got second-hand as a Christmas gift from my dear wife, and it’s bouncy and fun to sit on.

  I read an article somewhere that said active chairs encourage you to move more and put weight on your legs and fill that niche between [standing desks]({{< ref “a-standing-challenge” >}}) and vanilla sitting. What I was finding with my fancy-schmancy office chair was that I was cutting circulation in my legs, my butt was always sore, and I just felt bad after sitting for a day of work. While the Swopper has some problems of it’s own, I’m definitely feeling more active while using it, and (surprisingly) I have sore core muscles after using it, like I’ve done a couple of situps.

  I’ll get back to you if my opinion changes, the main downside is that it seems wildly over priced if you buy it new.

• We took a family holiday to Buninyong to visit my sister, and went with my brother’s family and my mum. It’s the first big family holiday I’ve been on with my mum and brother and sister since well before I got married, and it was a lot of fun to just hang out with them all.

• We took the opportunity to go to Sovereign Hill, which I visited once when I was a boy, and I remembered why I thought it was so dull when I was a kid. It’s fascinating, but not very hands-on for children, but we spent a good hour panning for gold, so the kids will have some good memories I hope.

• We stepped up our new car plan before we went so we’d have a bigger car to squash the kids into before we drove over the border. I’ve said goodbye to the beautifully cheap-to-run Prius that has done me well for the last five years, and purchased a second hand Holden Commodore wagon. The running costs are higher, but my daughter can now fit in the back seat again. Plus other men are no longer threatened by the care-free way I drove my smaller, lower-emission car.

• Australia is on fire. Well, parts of it are. Important parts that have people in them. It’s forced a lot of them to uproot, and has a lot of people very cross that successive governments have done so little to address climate change. I donned a cap of political apathy after the country decided that just because Tony Abbott was no longer the public face of the Liberal party it meant that they were probably the best party we had. I pulled the cap lower and raised my collar after the country decided a second time that a party who is very clearly uninterested in tackling the biggest issues we’re leaving to our kids was their best hope for a bigger tax rebate. These fires would be just as bad if anyone else was in charge, but maybe if we’d given enough of a shit 10 years ago we might have actually been in the middle of trying to do something now.

• I’m still trying to find somewhere online that can scratch that itch that Reddit used to fill. I’m still resolute that I’m not returning, but I don’t have anywhere to find new things to read, and nowhere to participate in discussion. I’ve been using Hacker News, but as much as I like to think of myself as a “hacker”, only about 20% of posts there interest me, and I’ve almost never felt the desire to contribute to the discussion. In the last two days I’ve discovered Lobste.rs, Hubski, and Tildes. Lobste.rs and Tildes are invite-only, while Hubski is open for registrations.

  Lobste.rs is even more niche than Hacker News, but I love the technical design decisions they’ve made. If I wanted to make a similar site, the Lobste.rs source would be an excellent starting point.

  Hubski is less niche, but despite the open registration seems to have far less activity. As an example: as at time of writing, the fourth article down is about the impeachment of Donald Trump, posted 23 days earlier. It’s big news, and it’s off the back of the Christmas break, but I’d expect more recent news than that on the front page of a news aggregator. The discussion on it is thoughtful though a little sparse, so the community is definitely not the sort of people who left Reddit for Voat, but with so little happening, there’s not a lot of reason to stick around and see if it’s worth it.

  I’ve settled on giving Tildes a try for a week. Their community is big enough that I keep seeing new stuff on the front page, even across the space of a single day. The diversity of discussion is also much better than HN or Lobste.rs, and I’ve found myself with actual things to say while reading some threads (although I can’t do so yet). And although I don’t like using it for webpages - it’s much better for a text editor or terminal - the fact that they offer Solarized Dark as one of the out-of-the-box color schemes means that someone there understands sophistication.

• In the process of trying out Lobste.rs I have also installed WeeChat for IRC. I love the idea of IRC, but I’ve never found myself in a room where I’ve wanted to say anything. Can anyone suggest a good room for IRC newbies to just hang out in and chat with nice people? Leave a comment below, or chat in Keybase, Discord, or directly with me on the aus.social Mastodon instance. I’d set up a Geekorium IRC channel but from what I can gather, I’d need a server that’s amenable to randos making channels.

So that’s me for another four months - still trying half-hearted-ly to push air through the blue lips of this website.

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Team Human ever since the host Douglas Rushkoff was a guest on another favourite podcast, You Are Not So Smart. The basic premise of the podcast, book of the same name, and indeed the guest episode he appeared on, was about taking back society for humans.

It took me a while to warm up to the argument. Rushkoff was writing about the cyberpunk movement when I was still in high school, and wears his counter-culture credentials with pride. Me with my quiet Australian suburban Christian upbringing know nothing about what was happening in technology circles in that time, or what anyone was really even railing against back then.

So the idea that technology today isn’t really serving humans any more made me stop and think. And it’s stupidly obvious when you give it more than a moment’s thought, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that it’s the exact reason I’m lost on the internet nowadays.

Today we’re served by technology more than ever, and the internet is responsible for the feeling that we’re getting more done, and we’re more connected than ever before, but despite the vision of early internet visionaries, we’re also stuck in tiny silos, and fighting bigger and bigger monopolies for control of our data.

Instead of really serving us, technology is being used to sell us, divide us, and make us happy to hand over everything that makes us human. Which isn’t to say that we should head back to caves and poop in the open, but we need to be able to make informed choices about how our data is used.

Full disclosure: I’ve tried to write this article before, and encourage you all to switch to fastmail.com, and duckduckgo.com, but every time I start it, I see the little Google Home on my wall blasting out electro swing and telling me when my pomodoro timer is complete, and I wail and gnash my teeth for being a godless hypocrite.

The upshot is, I’m extremely interested in how we can maintain our privacy and autonomy while still enjoying the benefits of connected technology. I don’t want to miss out on the benefits that these big companies can provide, but I also want to know that it’s serving me, not the other way around. I believe we forfeit too much data to large companies, but I also believe the benefits and fun of technology can make the trade off worthwhile if we do not enter into it with our eyes closed.

I’m looking for is a community of people who are also treading that fine line between tin-foil-hattery and open embrace of our corporate overlords to work within the system to make it safer for humans.

Rushkoff would argue that this isn’t possible online. He wants people to get out there and make real face-to-face connections with people. I get where he’s coming from - by communicating online, we’re letting algorithms and companies decide who we talk to - pushing us into silos of like-minded people. That happens in real life too, but the process is manual - we have to decide to stop talking to someone whose ideas aren’t our ideas. Online, the algorithms are getting better and better at showing us similarly minded people, sheltering us from “the other” before we have to ask.

Take YouTube for instance - I recently discovered a Star Trek youtuber who also happens to also do videos about rationalism and atheism. He’s exactly my cup of tea, and I spent a good few evenings listening through his back catalogue. Then another guy popped up who makes videos poking fun at far-right youtubers and then another who makes videos about the differences between right and left. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them all, and they give me just that little tickle of satisfaction that I’ve discovered someone else who “shares my thoughts” on these topics. In some sense they play a role to help cement or crystallise thoughts I hadn’t yet properly synthesised into my own words, so it’s not bad that I get these recommendations, but over time if YouTube’s AI does it’s job, it does mean I’m going to see fewer and fewer alternative ideas, hear fewer voices, and fall deeper and deeper into that filter bubble that people talk about a lot lately¹.

I don’t know how to socialise in the real world any more. It’s a lost art for many people, and even close to impossible for others. The internet brought on a golden age of social interaction for some people who in years gone by might have lived lives of utter loneliness. I’m not one of them, but I’ve let myself lose a lot of the skills I once had to leave the house and be “real”. Finding the time and strength to put myself in places the algorithm can’t get me is going to be hard work. I would even like to think there might be a technological solution, but it would have to be radically different from anything else that currently exists, or it risks being susceptible to the same problems as today’s social technology.

The upshot is that I’m starting to see the cracks, and I don’t have the tools to even understand them, let alone fix them by myself. I fix problems better when I have other people to work with, and I don’t know if other people around me are also seeing the cracks and wondering if they should say something or just keep quiet. If you’re reading this, and you’re concerned about what we can do to balance safety and progress, then get in touch with me. Leave a comment here², or say hello on Telegram, Discord or now Mastodon or Keybase. Maybe you don’t think the way I do - and I look forward to it.

So I came in here to do a post about something completely different, but discovered that Wordpress has enabled their Gutenberg editor by default with the latest version of the software, and it’s both enticing and scary to try something new, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

On the surface it’s got some advantages I think for people who want to write pretty posts.

What’s immediately appealing is that everything is a block of “something” and you have to be very deliberate in what something you want that something to be. For example, if you want to insert a quote, you start a new paragraph and you select the “quote” block type and blammo, there’s your quote:

Gutenberg is more than an editor. Gutenberg contributors

Which is something that for years I’ve thought was missing from all the nice GUI editors bundled with netlog software. I’ve had to deal with the source-code HTML fallout of websites written with WYSIWYG editors, and for the most part what you see on the front end might be what you get, but how you get it is usually some form of Lovecraft-ian horror on the back end, with tags embedded in tags like they’ve been involved in a transporter accident.

The ideal goal of a “block” powered editor in my mind would be to teach your users how to think in blocks, so that their HTML is structured and formatted from the get-go with the particular idiosyncrasies of that format in mind. I’m not sure if that’s what the authors of Gutenberg set out to accomplish, but it’s the ideal outcome I can think of from such a project.

Personally I gave up on WYSIWYG years ago because I wanted precise control over what I wrote and not have the editor insert it’s ideas of how to output my thoughts. I began using Textile (markup) and have since dabbled a little in Markdown, and if I’m truly not getting the output I want, I switch to plain HTML. So, my initial reaction to having Gutenberg thrust upon me was to immediately reach for the off switch.

As an aside - I wanted to write a quick footnote here, but by default Gutenberg does not appear to support them. I’m guessing there are plugins for this, or maybe a setting I’ve missed, but it doesn’t appear to be possible out of the box - something I cannot abide.

What I wanted to write as a footnote was that I did enable Gutenberg early as a plugin just to see what it was all about, but freaked out and turned it off immediately because change is awful and should never be tolerated. It’s possible that I left it turned on, and only thought I disabled it, but I’m pretty sure it’s turned on by default, and research is for chumps.

While I’m writing, I’m noticing what I’m going to presume is a bug that’s causing the cursor to reset to the top of the paragraph I’m writing every time the page auto-saves. This is annoying. It could be a setting or another plugin I have causing the issue though, so it may not happen to everyone.

In summary, what I’m hoping to find when I press publish is a concise and minimal HTML output on my final page. The block paradigm, and the beautifully crafted interface for building those blocks appeals to me on a technological level, and I truly hope that the Gutenberg idea sticks and is embraced by the Wordpress user base. While there appear to be some minor issues (that might be unique to my setup), the idea is sound and may go some way to improving the guts of the sites that use it, which is a win.

Addendum: Gutenberg is wigging out with my Textile plugin and adding an extra <br/> tag after every paragraph. Other than that, the output HTML is every bit as simple and elegant as I could have hoped for. I will need to find a resolution to the Textile/Gutenberg conflict some time, and it might simply be switching off Textile once and for all, but if you come here and the page still has giant empty space between paragraphs, you’ll know it’s not because of Gutenberg.

I haven’t properly “blogged” here in so very long. With so many other social sites around like the Facebloops and the whatnots, it’s seemed a little pointless putting anything up here where no one would read it. I could post a pic of my kids on that site that everyone has an account for and get a bunch of interactions there instead, so putting the effort into this site seemed pointless.

The sheer lazyness of it is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg is counting on. Posting on Facebook takes no effort, it’s simple, and your pictures and rants and low effort posting gets seen and liked and commented on, and no one ever wants to leave, unless they held out for years and never joined in the first place. And if you want to chat to your mum, or your wife through anything other than SMS, are you really going to make them install something else like Telegram instead of just using Messenger?

But I can’t be lazy any more. I quit Twitter years ago (and finally deleted it a week ago), and this week I’m quitting Facebook. All the cool kids are doing it, but none of the cool kids I know do, so I’m the dumbass who has to look like a hipster wannabe rebel and close down my account. So I’m not “closing” it - I’ve simply deleted most of what information there was about me, unfriended everyone, and left a public message that people should email me or visit my site here from now on. I hope people don’t get too offended. I’ve already been told off my my wife for removing the fact that we’re married from her profile… I probably didn’t think through some of the side effects here.

I’m holding out for something new and federated. Something where I can own my data, but still share it in a way that’s easy and lets old friends and family I never get to see know I’m alive. There are promising beginnings out there, but they all suffer from not being easy to set up, or not having enough people, or just plain not being what I’m really looking for. And no, Slack isn’t it - it’s just as closed and proprietary as Facebook.

If you’ve come here from Facebook to see what I’m doing or get in touch, you can email me. My personal email is Josh (my name) at demands.coffee - I know it doesn’t look like an email address, but trust me it is. And if you want to instant message me, download and [add me on Telegram] - it’s the closest thing to Facebook Messenger I’ve found that actually cares about privacy, security of your messages, and is just plain useful. And if you’re really paranoid, I’ve got a Wickr account too.

Had a strange problem using the new Microsoft Windows Live Sync Beta. It’s working fine on one of my computers, but on the other one, it drops a letter when I set up a folder to sync.

See what I mean?

For example, if I want to sync a folder like D:\My Videos, the program accepts the folder I want as D:\y Videos and then creates this new folder for syncing. Or it might sync D:\Archives as D:\rchives. On my other computer - no issues.

Investigating a bit, I discovered it doesn’t happen on my other drives (C:, F:). My D drive is different, in that I’ve moved the location of my My Documents folder to D. In a quick test, I discovered that moving it again to a subfolder of D removes the issue. It’s not a permanent solution however, as a) I like having my documents folder in the root of my secondary drive, and b) I would have to move 220Gb of data to an external drive and back again as you can’t move the location to a subfolder of the current location.

So I’ve sent feedback to Microsoft using the inbuilt “report a problem” menu in the beta. I did it in two parts though, so this post is my way of putting it all in one place, and on the off chance that someone is having a similar issue, they might get some comfort knowing that it’s not their fault (well it is, but only ever so slightly).

Previously I wrote about some plugins I love for making writing posts easier. This is a list of the little plugins I love that just do cool things around the place. They’re all useful, and most are ones I use on both sites I maintain. I would highly recommend them to anyone.

• Akismet\

  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.Matt Mullenweg

  Akismet keeps me spam free. I’m using it conjunction with Disqus for a double layer of protection. It’s pretty accurate - think Gmail spam filters for your site. Anyone who isn’t using this is asking for trouble.

• [Author

  Exposed](http://colorlightstudio.com/2008/03/14/wordpress-plugin-author-exposed/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Simple and elegant way to get more information about author.Igor Penjivrag

  I used to have a plugin here that showed more details about myself using a third party service. When I started First Waves I felt like I wanted a similar tool to promote my guest authors a bit but didn’t want to have to ask them to create an account on the service. So this plugin does something similar based on the information they fill into their profile on this site. When you click the Author’s name a little hovercard shows you their gravatar and a link to their other websites.

• AddQuicktag\

  Allows you to easily add custom Quicktags to the editor. You can also export and import your Quicktags.Roel Meurders, Frank Bultge

  I can’t stand WYSIWYG editors, so I choose to use the HTML editor to write my posts. It doesn’t mean however that I don’t want to use shortcuts occasionally. The AddQuicktag plugin lets you define custom tags to wrap around your HTML while editing. For example, I have a <code><cite></cite></code> tag in addition to the normal <code><blockquote></blockquote></code> tag and a “Caption” button that wraps my image caption text in <code><figcaption></figcaption></code> (to save me writing them out every time).

• [Broken Link

  Checker](http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.Janis Elsts

  This plugin creates an area on your dashboard that reports any broken links it finds - any sites that you’ve linked to that are no longer there, or resources that get 404 errors. Then you can go through and relink or ignore them as you like. Keeps your site tidy. You can also give it permission to cross out links that don’t work so your visitors know not to bother to click through.

• [Clicky for

  WordPress](http://getclicky.com/goodies/#wordpress “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Integrates Clicky on your blog!Joost de Valk

  Ultimate Google Analytics
  Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site. Check http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/#versions for version updates*Wilfred van der Deijl*

  These two add the Clicky and Google Analytics tracking codes on my pages so I can be silly about the number of visitors my sites get. Clicky is particularly cool, as I can see people come and go in real-time and can feel a bit like Jack Bauer.

• [Organize

  Series](http://www.unfoldingneurons.com/neurotic-plugins/organize-series-wordpress-plugin/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  This plugin adds a number of features to wordpress that enable you to easily write and organize a series of posts and display the series dynamically in your blog. You can associate “icons” or “logos” with the various series. This version of Organize Series Plugin requires at least WordPress 2.8 to work.Darren Ethier</em><

  Wordpress doesn’t come configured out-of-the-box to incorporate posts into series. This plugin makes it feel like it does. This plugin post is an example.

• [Page Links

  To](http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/page-links-to/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.Mark Jaquith

  A good plugin if you want pages in your menu that go to pages off-site (like First Waves and nunnone email in the menu above). Create a new “Page”, and in the new option at the bottom of the post tell WordPress where you want the item to link to.

• [YOURLS: WordPress to

  Twitter](http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/yourls-wordpress-to-twitter-a-short-url-plugin/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Create short URLs for posts with YOURLS (or other services such as tr.im) and tweet them.Ozh

  This is the best plugin I’ve found that lets me use my Bit.ly pro account (using my own domain for shortened links) to display a short link on my site for each post. I was originally using YOURLS to shrink my links, but when bit.ly offered theirs I switched over. Comes with a widget too, to display the link in the sidebar if you’d prefer.

• [Smart

  404](http://michael.tyson.id.au/smart-404 “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.Michael Tyson

  This is such a simple plugin, but it can make such a difference to your site. When visitors try to visit pages that don’t exist, normally your site will give them a 404 Error (telling the browser that the page doesn’t exist). What this plugin does instead is tries to match up some content with the URL they entered, so for example when you try “//the.geekorium.au/batman” (a page that does not exist) you will be automatically redirected to the page for my Batman tag (of which there are quite a number). Or if you tried //the.geekorium.au/disqus, you’d be taken to a post with “Disqus” in the title. There are a lot of queries that it won’t work with, but it’s neat when it works.

There are a few more extra-special plugins that I want to share, but they’re the sort of plugins that you dedicate whole posts to, so I’ll share them soon. In the meantime, if you like the sound of any of these features give them a whirl. The great thing about Wordpress is just how easy it is to install and try out new plugins.

A teacher is after a new laptop, and asked if they should “just buy a Mac”.

A few years ago the answer would have been “absolutely”. Not because I was a Mac fan-boy (I was) but because compared to XP or even Vista, the Apple operating system and overall computer experience was just much better. Nowadays my answer is not so clear cut. I told him that of course “it depends”. What’s changed?

Microsoft released Windows 7, and slowly pushed itself back to it’s feet to fight another round with Apple.

1. Win 7 is faster, easier to use and lighter on resources than XP/Vista and is just a joy to use.
2. A standard Dell Vostro¹ with an i5 processor, 4Gb memory, 500 Gb space and a 15“ screen will cost you $1500 (plus $250 for a three year warranty if you want). An equivalent Mac will cost $2570 (add $580 for a three year warranty). That’s an enormous difference.

Once upon a time, a Mac was harder to compare - they used completely different technology and the operating systems were chalk and cheese. Microsoft had effectively stalled for 10 years on the desktop, and Apple was releasing new features and innovations every couple of years. Now it’s different. I’m just as happy (happier?) on my PC than I was on my Mac - largely owing to the fact that I could get more power under my keyboard for the same money.

There are of course still a lot of arguments for the Mac operating system. Used in conjunction with an iPhone/iPod/AppleTV/Airport it can seem like magic. The idea that “Macs just work” is still very pervasive². At the end of the day it’s about what works for you.

1. Do you already have a Mac? Maybe get another - the things they can do together are sometimes pretty neat.
2. Do you like top notch industrial design? Macs cannot be flawed for how well they’re designed and built.
3. There is speciality software on the Mac that just have no competitors on the PC in the same price bracket - software like Delicious Library, Transmit, Coda, Rapidweaver. They’re all wonderfully crafted tools for doing their jobs in simple and intuitive ways. I’m yet to find anything that can match any of them in style on the PC. Of course, I’ve found functional alternatives (often free) that do the job just as well, but it’s personal preference.

For me the choice was a lot more simple with the introduction of Win 7 - I get all the pretty glossy stuff that appeals to the part of me that likes shiny new things, and the day-to-day management of my computer is now just as easy as it was on my Mac.

This “newbie friendly” post is the first in a new category of [Tech for Newbies]({{< ref “/categories/tech/” >}}). Got anything to add? Leave a comment below!

I’m gonna try to get a new series going here on the Geekorium where I answer some of the questions I get asked in my job. I get asked for advice every day, and it’s often more interesting than the sorts of things I actually do to get paid. Ages ago I toyed with the idea of making a site where I would break down technical concepts for the less technically minded, but wasn’t sure it would have an audience. The advice I get asked for though already has an audience - the people that asked in the first place. So when I get asked a question I think warrants some fleshing out I’ll put it under the new category [Tech for Newbies]({{< ref “/categories/tech/” >}}).

Keep in mind if you’re technically minded, that the people I give this advice to aren’t. My answers are simplified and often lacking some of the stuff us geeks find very important. Feel free to point this stuff out in the comments, but try not to be too harsh on my for leaving it out! Also sometimes I don’t actually have an answer - it doesn’t mean I won’t try to put them on the right track.

And if you’re not a geek maybe I can help you out. Leave a suggestion (there’s a suggestion tab just over there to the right) if you have a question you think I could answer. Make sure to read what the geeks have to add though!

The first topic I’m tackling is the age old dilemma - [Should I Buy a Mac?]({{< ref “should-i-buy-a-mac” >}})

The decisions Google makes don’t normally annoy me, except in small geeky ways that most people would pfft at, and you may well pfft at me now but they are seriously annoying me now.

://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/21469363/ The Google Master Plan http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

On one hand we have the recent integration of Buzz into Gmail and Google Reader. The upshot being:

1. You cannot disable Buzz without disabling your carefully tended Google Profile.
2. Because you cannot disable Buzz, you end up slowly accruing followers - you could ignore them, but you start to look like an ass.
3. So you follow back and this breaks Google Reader.
4. So the choice is between using Google Reader OR Google Buzz to read content from others. Google Buzz is so tightly integrated with Google Reader that I can only choose one or the other. There is no way I can see to effectively and simply use both at the same time.

But then on the other hand:

1. Nothing looks the same as anything else - the interfaces of some products have similar elements, but there’s no universally consistent theme to the products.
2. Google Translate (which is so nicely integrated into Google Reader) is not integrated into Buzz, so all the non-english-speaking people I follow are just so much noise to me.
3. Google Bookmarks (which I used to use a great deal) now houses the annotations you make to Google results (starring results and so on) but
4. Google Chrome doesn’t use Google Bookmarks to store your bookmarks (!?) it uses Google Docs.
5. On top of that, I am yet to be able to actually produce a two-way sync across Chrome at home and at work.

So riddle me this Google: why are some products tightly integrated - inextricably so - while others barely work in ways that would make absolute sense to the user? Normally I can see where you’re going with things - heck, I write a site just about Google Wave - but in these couple of cases, it seems you’re making decisions not based on what’s best for the user, but forging ahead with integration only when it will push a product that you deem worth your time. No one was clamoring for Buzz. They thought it would be nice if Google entered the Social Networking space, but not at the expense of your other products. But users have been asking for years for tighter integration of products that matter to them - translate, bookmarks, the defunct notebook, docs and calendar.

I realise these are all different teams of people. I realise they’re all working as hard as they can on what they’re doing. But Google the Company needs to stop occasionally and say “Maybe we need to focus on fixing and integrating what we already offer before we introduce this new shiny toy”.

Google, you have a lot of excellent products - please pay them some attention occasionally and get them talking to each other.

Tonight I disabled Disqus and tried to implement some of the same features manually. Rubenerd has been pushing his anti-disqus agenda for some time, and it ramped up when Taryn proclaimed it’s virtues and Zombie_Plan bleated and caved too¹.

So as an experiment (and due to my underlying desire to stop handing stuff over to third parties), I turned it off. Here’s what I installed in its place:

• CommentLuv - puts a link to the commenter’s most recent post under their comment.
• Gravatar Signup - if a user doesn’t have a Gravatar associated with their email, offers to sign them up for one.
• Simple Facebook Connect - lets a commenter register using their Facebook account.
• Simple Twitter Connect - lets a commenter register using their Twitter account.
• OpenID - lets a commenter register using their OpenID account.
• Subscribe to Comments - Adds a check-box so a commenter can have follow-up comments emailed to them.
• Live Comment Preview - Shows a mockup of the comment being left as it’s written. Kinda neat.

So that’s seven plugins, plus an hour or two mucking around with site templates and CSS to get them looking vaguely acceptable (so many themes have very ugly comments). I had to style my comments separately, fix the threading, and alter the layout of the comment form. And I still have less functional comments than I did with Disqus. The only benefit I have is… I… don’t know. I can say I don’t use Disqus?

That’s not including the plugins I decided not to turn on - Backtype to pull mentions from Twitter etc., and Ozh’ Absolute Comments to enable reply by email (for me at least). I’ll miss reply by email the most.

Maybe those of you who can’t see the point of Disqus don’t care if your commenters can’t log in with Facebook. And I’m yet to see anyone but Techcrunch with an attractive and functional comment area using a vanilla Wordpress setup. Disqus isn’t gorgeous, but it’s a lot better than what Wordpress out of the box can do.

So now I’ve done it I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. As an added bonus, none of the comments that were in Disqus are threaded any more, and if I go back to Disqus it might screw up the comments people have left since disabling it. And none of my comments before today are associated with me as administrator any more. All in all, I probably should have left it alone. But at least I can maybe help some one make up their mind about their comments - use Disqus and get a whole bunch of features, or install some of the plug-ins listed above.

Just so you know, although I’m a fan of the software, I’m not such a fan of Disqus the company. Trying to get assistance for a problem is like pulling teeth, and there’s at least one feature they promise when you set it up that just doesn’t work. When I tried to ask them why my comments weren’t “real-time” they told me they were and that they were disabled for maintenance - which seems odd, since it’s been at least a few months now… So take from that what you will - if you don’t think you’ll need support, Disqus might be perfect.

This might be my next phone…

In about June or July my iPhone contract expires. Looking at the new 4.0 software that won’t run on my 3G phone, and knowing that the next model will be out about then with (hopefully) the newer faster processor and better battery life, I’ll probably be looking to upgrade. The problem is despite loving my iPhone, and what is to come, I abhor that what my iPhone can run is subject to the whims of Apple, and I hate that I’m tied to iTunes in any way.

So this is my wish for all the makers of Android handsets and iPhone/iPad competitors:

Get your shit together by July. Get a decent range of Android competitors out here to Australia by then. Bring your Dell Pads and Smartphones, provide me with some choice! Everyone will get a fair viewing - I’m prepared to sacrifice the money I’ve invested in my iPhone apps if you’ll provide something compelling! The Dell Tablet sounds great - I’d like a bigger screen, but I want only one device to make calls from - so make a bluetooth headset standard kit and I might get one. Or I’ll get a Nexus One, or one of the HTC range. I’m not fussy so much on brands, but I am fussy that the experience be as fun and intuitive as the iPhone. I’m fussy that it not lock me in to software that makes me fume. I’m fussy that it not be a step backwards - that I can surf the net, that I can get some great apps, and that it remains the hub of my communication.

Please think of Australia. You have 4 months max to make this decision difficult for me. If the next iPhone gets here before you get it together, you’ll have blown it for at least another two years. The next iPhone promises to be a cracker. Make yours a cracker too!

There are a number of Wordpress plugins I use to do various bits and bobs around the Geekorium. The Skribit tab and the Blogroll at the side are both produced with plugins for example. But there are some plugins that you never really “see” as such - they do their work silently behind the scenes, and most of them are primarily there to make my life easier. If you run a Wordpress site, you might be interested too. These are the plugins I have both here and on First Waves because they’re just so damn useful. Below is an introduction to each, and my explaination for why I use them:

• After The Deadline Adds a contextual spell, style, and grammar checker to WordPress. Write better and spend less time editing. Raphael Mudge

  This plugin adds options to your profile page to check for grammar and spelling errors. Chrome usually picks up most spelling errors anyway, but this is great for picking up my awful grammatical errors. I use a lot of Passive Voice for example, and this highlights it.

• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved Easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without having to modify the code at all. Uses Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter v2.0.320 and some code by Andrew Ozz of Automattic.Viper007Bond

  I can’t pretend I write a lot of code, but this one is so pretty and useful I can’t leave it out. It highlights code blocs in whatever language you specify. Check out this post to see it in action.

• Smart Link Lets you write links as link text (explicit link), or as link text (implicit link). Denis de Bernardy

  This one was useful for the couple of times I remembered to use it. Kinda superceded now by the Textile plugin (see below) but for a while it was useful. Adding a link was as simple as:

  [this is the link text ->http://example.com]

• Textile 2 (Improved) This is a wrapper for Jim Riggs’ PHP implementation of Brad Choate’s Textile 2. It is feature compatible with the MovableType plugin. Does not play well with the Markdown, Textile, or Textile 2 plugins that ship with WordPress. Packaged by Adam Gessaman.Adam Gessaman

  I’ve only just installed this plugin, so I’m yet to get used to using it. One of the annoying things about blogging is that I often include a lot of strong and emphasis tags, but hate typing them out. In fact, using the correct markup often puts me off doing what could otherwise be quite enjoyable. So after a bit of experimentation I settled on textile. Now I just use asterisks and underscores, and links are done like so:

  "This is the link text":http://example.com/

  There are a whole slew of other formatting options that will make marking up a post a heck of a lot faster and easier now, and much simpler to do on my iPhone.

• wp-Typography Improve your web typography with:

  • hyphenation - over 40 languages supported,
  • Space control, includes: widow protection, gluing values to units, and forced internal wrapping of long URLs & email addresses,
  • Intelligent character replacement, including smart handling of: quote marks, dashes, ellipses, trademarks, math symbols, fractions, and ordinal suffixes, and
  • CSS hooks for styling: ampersands, uppercase words, numbers, initial quotes & guillemets. Jeffrey D. King

  Using the correct typography is as important to me as correct grammar. I love a good em-dash and my ellipsis must be the correct three-dot character, not just three full-stops! Doing it all by hand can be a PITA (Pain in the Arse) though (particularly with HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) entities) so why not just get a plugin that does it for you? It even transforms acronyms into proper small-caps and swaps out maths symbols with nicer ones!

• WP-Footnotes Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post.Simon Elvery

  This is seriously my favourite plugin of all time. It’s so simple it’s stupid, but I use it at least once in every post and often more. All it does is generate footnotes, but it’s so simple to use I can’t help but do it all the time.

  Simply type your text¹

  It’s as easy as that. Instant footnote section at the bottom of your post! It gives me so much scope to just throw in asides and afterthoughts without ruining the flow of the text. I’ve resisted installing it on First Waves, because I strive to be somewhat more professional over there, but for my rambling stream-of-consciousness posts here it’s the bomb.

So those are my favourite post-writing plugins. Hopefully there are one or two that might appeal to you too². If any one is interested, I’d be glad to share a couple of other useful plugins I use. What plugins do you use for your site? Which could you not live without?

Some updates:

Spurred on by the outpouring of comments and (!) blog posts after asking for feedback, I got stuck into a few posts here and on my other site. Thank you everyone who responded and wrote replies - it gave me some much needed confidence and meant the world to me. I was buoyed for days afterwards (and loved the commentfest that followed here and elsewhere).

I officially quit Twitter (with my joshnunn account at least). I was leaving it open ended so I could come back without looking like a fool, but now I’ll have to hang my head in shame if I DO return.

First Waves is going great-guns. tjb654 tweeted “Wave on Slow Cook” and was retweeted by Pamela Fox (one of the Wave API evangelists). So I got a bunch of new readers and some more Facebook Fans!

I began re-working my portfolio site. I couldn’t be bothered installing a test environment on my laptop, so I put it up and started editing it live. It took me a little longer than I expected to make it usable though, as the documentation for MODx¹ went down just as I started, so I couldn’t figure out how to build menus. Eventually I got something I’m happy with up just before…

Lifehacker (!!) linked to my site What the F is that about?! I suspect I’ve stepped into a mirror world where the Joshua Nunn of this world produces things that interest people and that they want to read. I kinda feel sorry for the poor schmuck who got sucked into my universe, but then I remember he probably goes around with a goatee, so it serves him right.

Tonight I published a massive post on First Waves. I suspect that because I’m massively proud of it, it won’t be read by anyone and I’ll realise that my mirror-self managed to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and switch us back… bastard. Or I could be pleasantly surprised that I get some people reading it. I’ve paid for a Clicky account, so now I’ll know when YOU are reading this… unless you’re using a feed reader… or I’m not on my computer when you do… What was i saying? This point has descended into a Rubenerd-esq sort of ramble. My apologies.

When I started the Geekorium (back then, just “nunnone”), I decided to do it without ads. It was a protest against the appalling punch-the-monkey type ads that were most common at the time, and something I felt proud of. My website was not made to “generate revenue”, it was a place to be me and as such I was happy to pay for it out of my own pocket. It’s sort of my only expensive hobby that Mil looks away for.

Then a year ago I briefly dabbled with putting ads on my site, then in my feeds. I never generated any money from them, and they cluttered up my site so I killed them, and I’m still happily ad free here.

But I kinda feel the pressure to have ads on my First Waves site, so I’ve done it. I feel kind of dirty, but as someone who wants to make money off of this thing called the internet, I feel it’s my duty to understand how the advertising world works. If only so one day if someone asks me to help them set it up I can do so without looking like a goob.

But I still can’t help feeling a bit dirty about it. Ads have improved a lot since the days of AOL and Yahoo “start pages” where the ads almost drowned out the useful information, but now when I visit a site that I enjoy, I still have to wade through layers and layers of ads that push the content to the side and intrude on the reading. I never want that to be the case on my sites. Advertising should always be secondary in my opinion, but is that an unrealistic ideal? My biggest concern is that the ads I have are distracting and ruin the look of the site. I realise that’s kind of the point - to draw attention to them, but I can’t help but feel like the ads have killed what little aesthetic appeal I was able to impart to the site.

I know most of my friends with websites have ads, so maybe I can guess what they’ll say. I also don’t want to accuse them of being sell-outs - it’s purely my own misgivings about advertising that make me feel a bit like I’m selling out my “principles” such as they are.

But I am curious to know what you all think? I happily pay enough of my own money to keep my Geekorium running ad free, and First Waves currently adds no extra expense, so it’s not vital to have ads. I also don’t really make anything off the ads I have at the moment, so it’s not like I’ll miss them if they go. It’s just the “cha-ching” I hear when I think about it that’s got me a bit worried I’ve gone to the dark side. I also love the idea that one day¹ I might have a few people writing articles for FW, and would love to be able to pay them to do so.

So should I keep FW ad free and uphold my vision for ad free content that people like to read? Or should I forget my concerns and happily take the cash? Should I put even MORE ads on? Ads on my Geekorium? Monetise my Twitter Feed? Actionise my synergy? What do you reckon?