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Tag: blogging

Four and Twenty and Housekeeping

March 30, 2010 • • 3 Comments

Two things:

1. While I was out of town last week, I forgot to link to Four and Twenty, where one of my haiku was featured as the “Four and Twenty of the week.” Check it out.

2. You may have noticed the type on my site is larger. Ever since I redesigned the site in Jan 2009 to ditch the 2nd sidebar and widen the content area to accommodate larger photos something has bugged me about the font. I’ve tried different fonts but after reading iA’s The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard (h/t Dave for the link), I realized that what was bugging me was the size of the font relative to the expanded line length.

I tried a larger font, and I like the results. How does it look out there in blog land? Easier on the eyes?

Gone Mobile

January 14, 2010 • • 2 Comments

I just installed the WPTouch plugin, which generates a slightly different more mobile-friendly version of Coyote Mercury should you visit the site on a mobile device. It looks good on my iphone. Check it out and let me know if it looks jacked up on any other devices.

I’ve been playing with other plugins and doing some general code-tweaking lately as well. Notice the nice little seagull favicon up by the URL?

Other Places to Go

September 29, 2009 • • 2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but blogging has taken a backseat, so at long last, some links to cool sites I’ve discovered of late…

Stop #1.

For months, I’ve been meaning to write about fellow Austinite Lavanna Martin who has one of the most interesting blogs I’ve seen in quite some time. She paints people in coffee shops, often without their knowledge, and posts them on her site: I Stare at People. Lately she’s been painting people in her studio as well. I love the coffee shop portraits as they capture these quick moments so nicely. Her portrayals of her subjects’ faces are especially interesting as they seem to contain the beginnings of stories we’ll never really know.

Stop #2.

Last spring, the online literary site qarrtsiluni announced a chapbook contest. The winner, A Walk Through the Memory Palace by Pamela Johnson Parker can be read online or ordered from qarrtsiluni‘s bookstore. I haven’t read it yet as I’m eagerly awaiting my print copy.

Stop #3.

Visit Lucy over at Box Elder. I can’t recall how I found my way there, but I’m glad I did. Beautiful photography and thoughtful writing from France (but written in English which is how I can say honestly say Lucy’s writing is fantastic).

Stop #4.

George at I’m Not One to Blog, But… is calling it quits, at least for now. Go on over and say so long to George and the boys (greyhounds Nigel and Mookie) and thank them for making it a better blogosphere.

Stop # 5.

In all honesty, I don’t really have a 5th stop. It’s important that I be upfront and honest about that because almost a month ago Fred at Ironicus Maximus gave me the Honest Blogger Award.

If there was an academy, I’d thank it.

I’m supposed to list 7 other honest bloggers, but I’m not going to do that. The sites I’ve listed above would certainly qualify as would nearly all of the sites on my links page.

My Other Blog: a gnarled oak

March 10, 2009 • • Leave a comment

I started another blog about a month ago, but kept it under my hat until I had a name for it. The name came this week: a gnarled oak.

It’s from this haiku I wrote last week:

I watched and listened—
a gnarled oak full of stories,
birds turned into words

a gnarled oak is a microblog where I’ll be posting short observational poem-like things mostly about birds and nature.

This started from my experiments with Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter where the gnarled oak stuff is automatically be cross-posted). The notion of posting every moment of one’s life is kind of silly so I just twittered short little poem-things and haiku. I discovered there are a lot of people who do this. Many quite well. I wanted a more personal and simpler space for these besides Twitter, and I discovered Tumblr, a microblogging platform that works nicely for this.

The things I post there are the things that often got written and lost in my paper journals, but after being inspired by a small stone, a handful of stones, The Morning Porch, TWITTERKU, Open Micro, Paiku, Haiku Habits, Full Moon of November, Oversouled and numerous others whose RSS feeds and tweets I’ve been enjoying, I decided to have a go at this style of blogging. Many of these sites are powered by Tumblr and that’s how I found it, so thanks to all of those for inspiring me.

Coyote Mercury is still my main joint, but you’ll find these other bits of writing that seem too small for a “full-size” blog laid out for large images at a gnarled oak where they won’t be overwhelmed and can kind of live by themselves in a simpler region of the blogosphere that lacks sidebars, comments, spam, and upgrades.

Check out a gnarled oak and have a look around. There’s even an rss feed for those who use readers.

Meanwhile on Other Blogs…

January 8, 2009 • • 2 Comments

I’ve found a lot of great stuff lately, and so, a links post.

Heather wrote a very nice review of A Place Without a Postcard.

Jon Swift included a post I wish I never had to write on his compendium of the Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves). Okay, so I picked the post, but it was nice to be invited.

I and the Bird #91 is out on From the Faraway, Nearby, very cool travel/nature/photography site that I intend to start following. Also discovered in this month’s installment of I and the Bird, are some really interesting and compelling sites that will likely become regular reads: Nature Remains, a celebration of the natural world by a gifted writer; the unclassifiable Via Negativa, which is definitely worth a detailed exploration, and Teach me about Birdwatching!!! where I hope to learn more about South American birds.

A few weeks ago, I discovered two really good sites: Flint Hills, Tall Grass and Coyote Crossing. And, let’s face it, blogs with coyote in the name are just cool.

Today, I learned from drivelocity how to put a favicon on my site.

Well. That all makes for a good day of reading.

Coyote Mercury’s New Look for 2009

January 1, 2009 • • 1 Comment

For several months I’ve been wanting to change the look of the blog. I searched high and low for a theme that would have a simple, uncluttered look. I wanted compatability with WordPress 2.7’s new features as well as image pages and a larger content area to display larger images.

Then, inspired by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (see my post about Zen and the Art and its impact on this blog), I decided that it would be of higher Quality to learn CSS and do the theme myself.

I used some pieces of my old Gila theme (which I had heavily modified over the years), but rather than thinking thoughts like “what can I make Gila do?” I tried to focus on making the site look how I want it and then learning how to do it myself.

More than anything, I wanted something that had a clean and simple design, if not exactly minimalist. The home page, my book page, stories & poems page, and the about me page reflect that. The blog page differs because there’s just more that I like on the sidebar there.

Click the photo below for a look at the image page. Most of the photos I’ve posted since mid-November will link to their own pages now.

Some trees near the pond
Some trees near the pond

Additionally, I wanted to minimize sidebar clutter and focus on sidebar info that’s actually used by people who visit this site. Archives and most of the links on the blogroll now have their own page (friends/family/favorite links are staying in the sidebar). I also rewrote the about me page to make it more personal.

I’m pleased with the end result, but I’ll probably tinker with it a bit more as things come to mind.

Please let me know if anything looks wonky in your browser or if there’s something obvious that seems to be missing.

Gravatars in WordPress, or What the %$#@ is a Gravatar?!?

December 4, 2008 • • 10 Comments

The other day Mike from 10000 Birds left a comment here. What startled me was the fact that there was a picture of him next to his comment in my admin interface. How the devil did he do that? I thought.

I checked the image properties and found that it was served by gravatar.com, a site that allows you to upload a picture and associate it with an email address. Then whenever you use that address to log into a forum or blog that supports gravatars, your picture comes up by your name.

The latest WordPress versions support this, and so I studied the default theme and adjusted my comments.php file to show gravatars. A little CSS styling to tweak and there it was.

If you comment here, consider visiting gravatar.com and signing up for a gravatar, then leave a comment and your gravatar will appear alongside your comment.

If you don’t have one, WordPress will just generate a little pattern. I can also set it to display cartoon monsters for each commenter. Should I do that? Hopefully nobody would be offended.

Want to add gravatars to your WordPress theme? Here’s how:

Simply open your theme’s comments.php file and add the following code (the 40 gives the size of the image in pixels):

< ?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 40 ); ?>

Before this line (assuming your comments.php is based on the default theme):

< ?php comment_author_link() ?> says:

You’ll probably need to make a few adjustments to your CSS as well. I just lifted these lines from the default theme’s style.css and adjusted them to suit my theme:

.commentlist li .avatar {
	float: right;
	border: 1px solid #eee;
	padding: 2px;
	background: #fff;
	}

Easy as can be.

For more, visit the WordPress codex.

Hacked Off

November 28, 2008 • • 5 Comments

Last week, while trying to fix a plugin that had stopped working after the last WordPress upgrade, I noticed an odd bit of code. Upon further investigation with the use of Google’s text-only feature on their cached page search, I found that my blog had been hacked and turned into a spam blog.

Didn’t notice did you? Neither did I. I think it happened back in April. Basically, the hackers get in and hide hundreds of links in your header or footer that are then rendered invisible by some kind of CSS trick, all accomplished through the use of an invisible plugin.

Then your blog looks and works like it always did, but the Googlebots see hundreds of links to sites selling porn, gambling, and various pharmaceutical delights.

This appears to have happened back in April at exactly the time I quit blogging regularly so I never noticed. It seems hundreds of WordPress blogs were affected and so there is plenty of info out there about fixing this hack, both on the WordPress support forums and elsewhere.

Here’s what I discovered:

  • a hidden user account on my blog that couldn’t be deleted through the admin interface
  • a plugin that didn’t show up on my plugin screen
  • several files in my directory and various subdirectories that were not placed there by me or WordPress

After reading up on this, I deleted everything from my directories that was not put there by me. I also deleted all the old subdirectories left over from my site’s first pre-blogging incarnation (while rediscovering the cool sky you now see in the background) and a very old test blog I created and never upgraded.

Then, I had to go into the mysql database, which forced me to learn a lot more about both mysql and phpmyadmin than I had ever known previously. Messing with the database is risky. As the warning says on the WordPress site, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

I figured it out, though. I was able to go into the database and delete the phantom user, turn off the phantom plugin and delete a mysterious table that shouldn’t have been there.

Had it not been for the following sites, I would not have had the foggiest idea how to do these things so big shout-outs to: BlogBuildingU.com, WordPress Philippines, Marketing.com, Ms. Adventures in Italy, and especially to Get Rich Slowly for their detailed instructions on dealing with the database cleanup. (How odd that 2 of these sites are from The Philippines and Italy, both countries in which I’ve lived).

The WordPress support forums were also helpful as always.

Once the database was cleaned up and the directories cleaned, I reinstalled the latest WordPress and changed every password associated with my web host and this blog. Probably a good thing to do from time to time anyway.

Now that the site is cleaned out and the hidden links are gone, I have to get back into Mr. Google’s good graces. The Googlebots have apparently determined that my site is a spam links blog and so my site no longer shows up in Google searches. I had noticed that my traffic dropped tremendously back in April, but I had assumed it was because I had slowed down on posting. Fortunately, Google has a tool in Google Webmasters to have a site reevaluated, so hopefully, my traffic will come back.

This wasn’t an awful experience. I was lucky and I managed to learn alot.

I am no longer afraid of phpMyAdmin and the mysql database (even if I don’t totally get them yet).

I was reminded of the importance of regular upgrades.

I was reminded of the importance of keeping my directories neat and clean.

I learned to periodically check over the code in my theme files and look at cached pages for anything that might be awry.

I learned about Google Webmaster Tools and the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, both very useful for anyone running a website.

I wrote a few months ago that one of the things I like about running a self-hosted WordPress is that I’m running more than just a blog, I’m running a website. That still holds true even if I have to spend a week dealing with the mess created by some worthless waste of skin who decided to use my blog as a tool in their nefarious link scheme.

For those who may be wondering about the missing comments issue this week, that was a totally unrelated thing. Two days after cleaning up the hack mess, my host had a problem with their mysql server that temporarily ate the comments and caused a few other problems, which they have happily fixed. Thanks to Kevin Dewalt and whooami for their help in figuring out that issue.

And, now, everything seems right with the cyberworld and hopefully, Mr. Google will come back too.

3 and Meta Thoughts

October 11, 2008 • • Leave a comment

I’ve been at this blogging business for 3 years now so I mark the day with a post linking back to my first one, which originally was, and still is, on Blogger with my original blue look and everything.

Thursday’s post on Zen and the Art of Blogging is probably a better reflection of the whole blogging experience so I won’t delve back into that today.

Mainly, I want to think about obligations and hobbies. Or how this blog tried to become a blogligation. It was the Weekend (and later Friday) Hound Bloggings, the Monday Movie Roundups, the Friday Random Tens, the Old Photo Fridays, the write ups of every book I read from the time I started this blog until I made a conscious decision to stop back in March of this year.

Each day, I had a to-do list and the only remedy seemed to be a to-don’t list. And so the hobby, which had been fun, became more of a chore. I posted because I had to, not necessarily because I wanted to.

The lesson here at three seems to be that unless you’re doing this for money, do it for fun. For me, obligations are not fun. It’s something I try to remember but sometimes forget. It’s why I think carefully about setting goals involving things I love.

I know several people who try to read x number of books per year. I could never do that. I would begin to feel I had to do what I originally wanted to do, thereby crossing the line from having hobbies to hobbies having me.

Perhaps that’s why this blog became more and more about birds over the past year. Birds are a reminder of freedom, and while their lives are full of their own have-tos and necessities, there is nothing about the act of birding that makes me feel I have to do anything. Or be anything. I suspect I enjoy birding for many of the same reasons fishermen fish. I may not see a single bird, but I never consider it a waste of time.

Birding and writing have a similar effect on me as well. When I am through for the day with either activity, I am always surprised by the time, how much of it has gone by. It is like waking from a dream, and I feel refreshed and at peace.

Back to the top, and I can see that this site was a hobby that became an obligation, but by stepping away from it for a while, and only using it to express another hobby, the obligation seems gone and now, at three, I’m back to one.