It’s been a while since I’ve actually wrote a blog post (as a blog post). I’d call it writer’s bloq, except that’s not really true – I’ve been writing and commenting over at Jill Stanek’s blog with some old friends.

Of course, I’ve also been following the impact technology has had on both getting the message out and suppressing it, as we recently saw in Iran. Apparently, the regime in Iraq waited until they identified the organizers using deep packet inspection, then sent goons in the middle of the night to take them away.

I started a post on the wayward South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, but the more I learned of what was going on, the more I realized there’s a little more info that’s needed for perspective.

I’ve been digging into technical stuff, exploring a collection of Internet apps, and helping Jill Stanek change over to a new design.

And with this particular post – I’m checking to see how scheduled posts work in WordPress. The Moveable Type update at Jill’s broke that feature, and while an easy fix, it poured a pile of error messages into the email server, which then kept serving them up. Ah, technology.

General blog

Mon 22 Jun 2009 – 20:39 – Okay – found it. Talk about strange. The bug was how a function was being passed by reference (as opposed to a variable) in custom PHP code that handled commenting in the iNove theme. Apparently this had to do with the 2.7.1 update. It’s amazing (and rather disconcerting) how a single line of code can break that much of both back-end editing and front end display. Not a very robust system. (So much for moving away from compilers into this run-time environment.) To be fair, the error message showed exactly where the problem was when I looked at the editing environment, but what doesn’t make sense is why it showed up now, and didn’t break when I initially installed 2.7.1. Back to business.

Mon 22 Jun 2009 – 20:39 – Issue is related to commenting, and how that’s handled.

Mon 22 Jun 2009 – 20:30 – Issue is related to the theme I use (which is a modified iNove). Substituted a theme for time being, until I can get to root of problem.

Apparently I’m having a problem with the main page of the blog. Trying to track down the source of the problem. Thanks for your patience.

General

Writing tweets indicating where you are focused in a browser requires effort.

How about a bookmark bar script that takes the current front URL, makes it tiny, inserts it into a tweet dialog, you write comment and off it goes?

Has this been done yet?

General tool