Originally I was using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare to add social bookmarking links to the bottom of my posts, but I noticed that my pages started taking much longer to load. I also noticed that the status bar read “transferring data from feedburner.com”. Hmmm… I wonder what could have caused my problem.

Looking around, I noticed that other blogs were using the AddThis button on their posts. It looked nice enough, and it seems to be all over the place, so readers should be familiar with it, and if they aren’t, its purpose is pretty obvious.

One problem though. When you click on it, the URL and title of the page you’re on is sent to addthis, not the permalink and title of the post that you’re on. This is fine if you’re in the archives, but not if you’re on the front page of your blog. If you’re on the front page, or root, of your blog, then it grabs your root URL and the Title of your blog.

I started looking around, and I found the WordPress Plugin (drop-down, Non-Drop-Down). Both of these widgets add the button to your posts automatically,and they send the Permalink of the post you’re reading, as well as that post’s title, to AddThis.

The only problem with the widget is that you don’t have a whole lot of control over where on the blog the widget appears. So I decided to poke around with the code snippet that they give you.

That is when I realized that this problem was all my fault. What happened is that when I was using the page that generates the code, I chose “On a Web Site”, which is the default, instead of “On a Blog”. It also helps if you choose your blogging platform correctly.

Step 1: Choose where you actually plan on using the code.

Step 2: Choose your Platform, it will take some of the guess work out of it.

It figures that it was my fault, this morning I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting a typo.

I hope that besides exposing my mistake, this actually helps someone else.

References:

- AddThis WordPress Widget Drop-Down version

- AddThis WordPress Widget Button

- AddThis Button Generator

Posted in AddThis, WordPress No Comments »

I spend about an hour a day driving back and forth to work, and I’ve been using my iPod to keep the drive interesting. Not too long ago I ran across PodioBooks, which offers free Books in podcast format.

Although you do have to create an account, I don’t think I have received even one e-mail from them since I signed up.

You can browse through their large selection of free books, and once you have decided on what you want to listen to, a RSS feed is created which allows you to subscribe using your favorite feed reader.

New installments are delivered at the schedule you define, and that’s about all there is to it. The site is easy to use, and the podcasts are delivered in a timely manner.

The first podcast novel I listened to was EarthCore, and I liked it so much that I have downloaded pretty much everything by Scott Sigler.

I definitely recommend this site.

Posted in Podcasts, AudioBooks, Distractions 6 Comments »

I hadn’t read much about the Skype outage, but I did catch a quick bit that their stock price took a big hit.

Then today, I caught a post on Wired’s Epicenter blog titled “Skype: Microsoft Patches Were ‘Catalyst’ Not ‘Root Cause’ for Outage“. I thought this was going to be a case where a patch caused a problem in Skype’s back-end servers, which took the network down.

It wasn’t.

In “What happened on August 16” on the Skype Blog, Villu Arak explains that:

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

Of course I’m not happy that Skype had a problem, but I bet that the Microsoft Update Team is happy to hear that they were the cause. If nothing else, this goes to show that a whole lot of computers are now set to automatically download and install critical updates as they become available. Maybe we can start whittling away at the bot-nets.

More Reading:

“The Microsoft connection clarified” - Skype Blog

“Skype: Microsoft zombie network launched DoS attack” - Skype-Watch.com

“Microsoft Update Caused the Great Skype Outage” - Blog Nation

Posted in Tech-News, Skype, Outages, Microsoft 3 Comments »

Last night after I had given up on the theme I was working with, I still just couldn’t leave it alone. So I started poking around, looking for a new theme. What I found was the Cleaker 2.1 theme, made available by Adam Walker Cleaveland of Cleve Design. Thanks a lot Adam!

I was up for quite awhile modifying some items on the theme, and I plan on changing some others later on, but let me tell you, I am sure glad to finally have a new theme.

Port 16’s original theme, Redatom 1.0 by AskGraphics, was very nice, but I just had trouble with some aspects of it.

If you find any problems with this theme, let me know and I’ll do my best to straighten them out. I know that the comments box is skewed to the right a little bit, when viewed with FireFox, and I’ll get to that.

So, enough of that, let me ask you this.

How do you like this theme?

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates 14 Comments »

AKA: This is not my beautiful House! This is not my beautiful blog!

Sorry folks, the theme changes didn’t work out.

I had been playing with the theme I wanted to use over on http://testbed.port16.com and it looked good, I was pretty happy with it and I thought that all I had to do was drop in my code, and I would be good to go.

No Such Luck.

Although the widget panel in site admin looks like it works, it doesn’t. I’m not sure what the problem is there, but I didn’t feel like putting all of the widgets that I want into the theme by hand.

So, back to the drawing board.

Unfortunately I used up my “messing with the blog” quota for tonight. I’ll be back.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates No Comments »