Apres Sunday night dinner, looking for a relaxing tv show to watch with the ferals, and choosing NCIS.

Needing to multi-process, but I can’t decide which device to use whilst watching tv avec doona: the android tablet or the laptop. So I bring both into the living room, grab a couch, and a glass of red wine.

Pose the question to the youngest feral: which device?

His answer: you’re asking me? you made the right choice. (I brought both)

I prefer WordPress as a blogging platform, because it’s fantastic for SEO, has so many more functions and plugins than Blogger, despite it being owned by Google. In particular, adding Blogger feeds to other websites is annoying.

This week I was investigating how to add a Blogger feed to an x-cart site. Yes I could have manually written some PHP to extract the feed, but this was for a client who didn’t code.

The standard Feed URL for Blogger is yourname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.
Or if you’re using Feedburner, something like feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/yourname
Compared to WordPress feeds, which as yourwebsiteurl/feed

Option 1: Blogger is supposed to have a Feed gadget, but it wasn’t available.
Option 2: The Google widget creator at http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=yourfeedURL also didn’t work – it kept saying information was unavailable for the client’s blog.
Option 3: Another cheap and nasty option was to simply iFrame the blog feed, as in iframe src=’yourfeedURL’ /iframe, but this was ugly, embedding the entire blog content, although obviously you could style the iFrame size and border.
Option 4: Using Feedburner, there were options such as a rotating animator, but I prefer to see multiple titles at once. However you do need to login to your Feedburner account to generate the code – simply substituting someone else’s blogspot feed into the code for my feed didn’t work.
Option 5: Eventually I found a lovely free feed widget, that didn’t even require email signup, at http://feed.mikle.com/en/. Truly excellent.

Then at night, while I was in the mood for Feeds, I used the Social RSS app at Facebook to embed my WordPress feed to my Facebook page. It was as simple as adding the application, selecting the page and URL, saving the settings and voila – the feed started appearing on my page.

And whilst Googling the above solution, found a Facebook post on adding WordPress feeds to LinkedIn. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=199481223424093 explains how to use the builtin LinkedIn WordPress application to grab your feed with one click. Beautiful!

How my feral fourteen-year-old created a local mini meme.

It was morning. He was sleeping in. It was Spike’s birthday and I had a giant bone from the butcher’s for his birthday. But the feral wasn’t functioning.

So I gave Spike the birthday bone and took a photo with my camera. Came back inside and messaged it to the feral. Such a cute photo that he had to get up then, and go and see how Spike was enjoying it and give him a hug.

Uploaded it to his Facebook account, and tagged it ‘bday bone’. The photo got 50 likes from his friends, who spread it. Can’t verify this – he has great privacy, and won’t friend me .

On the weekend the xbox was on, playing Call of Duty. Some unknown guy on another team called out something like ‘when they give you a bday bone, you gotta grab it’.

Does that qualify as a meme, when it’s got a life of its own, with people you don’t know?

I can’t believe how easy it is to use WordPress with an iPhone, to upload pictures and maintain a blog.

The one thing I hadn’t done with my iPhone was upload pictures when I’m out. I’d been manually uploading them to my laptop first, and adding them to applications later.

There are actually a few platforms I need to do it on – Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter – and I hadn’t played with photos on any of them, mostly because I hadn’t had time to research how it used up bandwidth.

But I’ve come nowhere near using up mymonthly bandwidth, so it was time to play.

I created a new blog for free, at wordpress.com.

I already had the free WordPress for iPhone application on my phone.

I setup the username and password for my new blog, on my phone.

Took a quick photo of the flowers in my garden.

Went to WordPress on the phone. Logged in. Selected Photo. And the application asked me which photo I’d like to upload. Added a comment. Clicked save.

And voila. A photo and accompanying text uploaded with no hassle to my blog.

Beautiful.

And the blog was free.

It’s a bad first photo, because it was evening and you could barely see the flowers.  But check it out at Flowers Australia.

Geez  it’s a pleasure with the one-click upgrade available at WordPress.

Both the core, and plugins now have one-click upgrades available. I’ve done plugins in the past, but this is the first time I’ve upgraded the core (to version 2.7.1).

No need to download, unzip, upload and run the upgrade.php. It just works.

If only Drupal, PHPFox and x-cart ran this smoothly.