Badly Worded

Plugin:
Amazon Machine Tags (version 1.1.2)

WordPress Extend Page

Test Date: March 8, 2008
WP Version: 2.3.3

Plugin Description: Adds the ability to insert product information from Amazon.com into your posts and sidebar using markup tags.

Installation: Activate from plugins page

Minimum Configuration: An Amazon Web Services API key is required in order to use this plugin. A writable cache directory must be created and a snippet of code must be inserted in the sidebar of your theme in order to display the default tags in your sidebar.

Compatible with plugin updater: Yes

Administration: There are options to enter tracking ids for several regional amazon websites. There is also an option to “donate” your unused regions to the plugin author. Since I have only a US affiliate link, for example, I would check the box and all the links to the Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and UK versions of Amazon.com get updated with the plugin author’s ID. Installing an additional plugin such as “IP to Country” the linking to the appropriate website happens automatically. For the purposes of this test sticking to the United States seems fine. You have the option of inserting default tags in the sidebar of every page - at the point where you inserted the code snippet in the sidebar file for your theme.

Usage: Two options for inserting product image links. 1. Add markup tag to a post. 2. Add default tags to the options page for the plugin.

Widgets: No Widget - instructions suggest inserting code into sidebar template file

Test Notes: I started by accidentally trying to insert my Amazon Associates tracking ID in the Amazon Web services key field. Once I realized that this plugin is using the Amazon API I was able to go grab my AWS key and move on to the next step of entering the tracking ID in the right location. There are separate spots in the options page for each of the regional Amazon sites. I added the code snippet into my sidebar and used the default tags spot in the plugins options page to, successfully, insert a product into my sidebar. I then created a post with the markup for an additional product. It displayed nicely, some customization of formatting might be necessary for a production site. This seems to involve updating some files in the plugin itself. To test the necessity of the change to my theme I removed the code from the sidebar. This did remove the sidebar products but had no effect on the product called from my post. So, changing the theme is only needed if you would like products to display in your sidebar.

Final Thoughts: This was not the easiest plugin to configure, but also not the most difficult. I was able to use my existing Amazon Web Services key but the need to change a theme file threw me off a bit. I admit to being fond of widgets or at least the option to use them over editing files. I didn’t really catch the idea behind this plugin initially. But after setting all the configs and making the required change to my template I may have changed my mind. Using the Amazon API makes this a transparent. There are no context links, no fancy pop-ups, and no java script. Either you tagged the item or you did not. This plugin is definitely aimed at links to books but any amazon.com item will work. Changing the default “Further Reading” heading in the sidebar might be necessary if you do not want to use this plugin in the sidebar. The default layouts are contained in XSLT files. Changing these files would add steps to upgrading the plugin in the future.

Potential Improvements: A widget would be very helpful for this plugin. This would alleviate the need to change template files. A button or tag for the post editor would also be useful. The ability to change some of the formatting would be very helpful. Especially the “Further Reading” heading for those inserting products that are not books.

I am whitnessing increasingly more individuals who are ‘going green’, which seems to be almost completely inspired by the corporate media. When one looks into environmentalism, it becomes clear that this new environmental frame of mind is unbelieveably limited and is in part only a selling ploy of multi-nationals who try to diffuse unquestionably humane organisations such as Fair Trade and the numerous small environmental start-ups.It is apparent that a great number of people can only modify their environmental footprint at the dictat of the state and corporate PR. As an individual who has sought to be a blip on the environmental harm radar – I recycle as much as it is possible, I refuse to drive and buy next to no non-essential products – I find this new fad of going green hollow and narrow minded. In the last decade there has been an expansion in so-called environmental products and philosophy.

It is these same multi-national corporations that have quashed the rise of true alternate energy right now, not in 2100. One of the racketeer of this new idealogy are the energy and natural resource corporations who are vying to sell a new green vision by their investigation into alternate power, which they will sell us once natural resources are no longer profitable. It has been possible for many years to power your car with water right now or you can take a trip to Brazil where the majority cars run on ethanol.To persons who are disposed to explore such technologies, it will become obvious that real alternatives to energy needs have been available for many years.

It is not just our power needs that can be succseeded by truly green alternatives, but our building resources and product wrapping can become environmentally agreeable today.

Not long ago I found this great green home website, which will give you an idea of some of the alternatives that are available. The blog is continually refreshed with new environmental items and news from the environmental arena. The posts cover a great numer of subjects, such as green home buildings and green home designs.

HD screencaps (1914×816) for the “The Golden Compass” trailer have been added to the gallery. Please link back to the site when using. Thanks!

Did you read the books? How well do you think they are going to do translating this to the screen? I hope they do well so the entire trilogy of stories gets the green light. Some stories need need to be told all the way through.

The WordPress Codex says that “WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines“. Well, that may be true … to a certain degree, but there is more than enough work that you’ll need to do after you’ve installed WordPress in order to get it playing nicely with Google (and other search engines).

What most people don’t realize is that, while Google does love WordPress, it’s WordPress THEMES that actually interface with search engines … not WordPress itself.

So, that means that a WordPress theme could very well be hurting your rankings in the search engines … not helping!

So over the last several months, I’ve been developing a list of tips for bloggers that will help them embrace the natural flow of good SEO in the form of a well optimized theme. This guide can’t guarantee you first page rankings, and certainly can’t get you quality links, but it will teach you every step you must take to ensure that you’re theme is completely search engine optimized.

In the next few days, I’ll be writing posts that give a detailed explanation on how and where to modify your theme in order to optimize its search engine rankings, but for now, here are the 9 things we’ll be covering:

1. Generating a sitemap for Google
2. Getting your site indexed by Google
3. Getting Google to index and follow the right stuff
4. Using Keyword-rich Permalinks
5. Optimizing your
6. Optimizing your header tags
7. Using META descriptions
8. Using META keywords
9. Keyword Density
10. Deep Linking

We’ll also be discussing things like the image replacement technique and other SEO techniques for getting the right content indexed and followed.

For those interested, I’ve already done all the heavy lifting in my newest theme Proximity News. All the theme mods I’ll be discussing have already been implemented in Proximity News, so if you’re looking for a theme that’s ready to attract search engine traffic right out of the box, then why not go pick yourself up a copy of my latest WordPress news theme!

So, stay tuned for the next few days while we discuss the methods to making your theme the ultimate in SEO! And if you haven’t done so already, go ahead and subscribe to my RSS feed so you’ll get these tips delivered straight to your RSS reader!

Some exciting new beginnings today. On the technology front a buzz began this morning with a discussion about Twitter’s upcoming launch of their first localization outside of English - in Japan! This was followed by watching the actual press conference at their Digital Garage headquarters in Tokyo which motivated me enough to realize this really was an important story! My first thoughts were to share it OUTSIDE of Japan since there are plenty of commentators WITHIN Japan to cover it. The first answer to come to mind was Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, an excellent blog out of New York covering the world of 2.0, conferences and other happenings in the world.

Allen was VERY accomodating and we had the article up and running within a few minutes… long before most of the other networks were aware of the story. So is the advantage of actually being here.. rather than getting a second or third hand report of the news.

I’m really excited about what Twitter is planning for the future, and even though it may be slightly laced with advertising, it still will be a big push for the platform internationally.

I’m also really excited about my new relationship with CenterNetwork. A great guy and a great team moving forward with new media and technology. Thanks Allen and looking forward to working with you again soon!

Tags: blogging, CenterNetworks, Digital Garage, guest blogger, Japan, Japan, media conference, New York, Personal, press conference, Robert Sanzalone, RSS, techmeme, Technology, tokyo, twitter

Apple was yesterday stung into denying its head Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. The false internet rumour had briefly slashed his company’s stock value.

It once again highlights the problems of the troubled relationship between traditional and new often totally amateurish and unregulated gossip mill new media.

The video posting on iReport.com - a site owned by Time Warner’s CNN - caused confusion among investors. It was pulled after 20 minutes but not before the company’s stock temporarily dipped by almost 10 per cent…causing panic share selling.

Apple quickly denied the rumours about its chief executive, who is regarded as almost irreplaceable, but the report had claimed Jobs was rushed to hospital after suffering “a major heart attack.” CNN deleted the posting from iReport.com and disabled the user’s account.

CNN tried to trace the user - based on information given at registration - but was unsuccessful. The all-powerful Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating “Johntw,” the unidentified rumourmonger.
The iReport.com site carries a disclaimer stating: “CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com.” In this case it is unlikely to help and “Johntw” may become a form of swear word if the SEC uses its draconian powers to cut off the severs-for-all market in the US.
It IS being discussed.

There has been a rapid reaction in the USA and there are urgent talks re the risks involved with mainstream media organisations leeching from what is often referred to as “citizen journalism,”.

News media are not always blameless…they often get it wrong but this incident brings the subject of unregulated and unmoderated sites into high profile. CNN pulled the plug on this user and others will be closely monitored from now on. The I.P. is known and was given…immediately…. to the Stock Exchange officials now attempting to track the culprit.

The difficult for CNN, supporters of the new media and even little old embattled us here at Anorak is this…unless there are checks and balances, unless journalists check the facts much of what is said and done in the “citizen journalism” area is untrustworthy and, because it is unregulated and unmoderated, it is a dangerous area.

The danger for bloggers is prosecutions are probably not very far away and those UK sites which think they are secure in having USA servers had better do a very rapid rethink. The USA-UK extradition treaties are notoriously one-way and if the infringement stings the wrong person then the NatWest bankers will not be the only ones to have collars felt. The other issue, of course, is the risk to sites devoted exclusively to one prominent story of late. Lawyers will be lightening quick to spot that when pressed the hosts handed over the I.P. at once. How could any UK site refuse after that?

I doubt there will be any sympathy expressed from the conventional media, it has had to deal with regulation and install expensive training programmes to keep on the right side of the law. The glee if a UK site is nicked would be unparalleled. When the Feds/G-Men/Woodentops or Policia call I may be forced to name at least two for the martyrs’ funeral pyre.

The issue has tickled the world’s printed media today because it justifies an attack on its now biggest rival - the well-run media site, but, it is rapidly becoming recognised the two communications forms are actually symbiotic, they each nurture the other.

Jobs, who has survived pancreatic cancer, has not discussed his health despite appearing extremely thin in recent appearances.

- AGW

City Bends To Flexible Working Hours: Home Office Free iPods

The response to the Agregado release has been fantastic and the folks at Smashing were great to collaborate with.

Here are some changes we’ve already made:

1. Permissions have been set automatically for all scripts and folders
2. The “Tags/Categories” bar at the bottom of posts should wrap correctly
3. Any jQuery calls within header.php now point to WP’s native jQuery installation. This should prevent any collisions with plugins like Lightbox.
4. Subpage menus should now be consistent
5. Archives link now uses ‘url’ instead of ‘template_url’ parameter. Should resolve any broken links.

We knew if the theme was ambitious, the potential for quirks would be much higher. Still, 1000+ downloads in the first day with just bit of breakage! We’ll continue taking feedback from anyone having issues.

Following my review of Defensio, Michael Hampton (of Bad Behavior fame) left a comment on the same post assuring that Bad Behavior would run just fine along side Defensio without causing any sort of hiccups for the latter. My thoughts exactly - since Defensio operates more or less on the same principles as that of? Akismet, whereas Bad Behavior’s modus operandi is a bit different.

Instead of filtering spam and diverting them to a hold (quarantine), Bad Behavior entirely denies access to your site to suspicious IPs (the ones from where there are an excessive number of requests within a short period of time). Logically, this shouldn’t hamper Defensio in any way. Michael’s comment had got me wondering if I should enable BB again and today’s incident gave me a hard shove in the same direction.

What happened today? Well… Defensio went for a toss, and that too for a good while (it’s till not back up as I’m writing this post). This is the second downtime I faced ever since I installed it, though I’m not certain of the cause. It may be because of lack of infrastructure to handle such high volumes of network activity or some other temporary server outage. Either ways, what I faced was a massive spam flood - the likes of which I never encountered while using the Akismet + Bad Behavior combination. Luckily, I had comment moderation turned on! End result? Here’s a snapshot of my inbox. See for yourself

Motivation enough to start using Bad Behavior again? I totally think so. Besides, as Michael pointed out earlier, it can’t hurt Defensio in any way other than denying their spam-harvester its share of spam.

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• on eduglu - part 1: background - D’Arcy Norman dot net

  From D’Arcy Norman, something that fits in well with my LMS revisioning schema. Wonder how it relates to something like Profilactic?

  tags: darcy, dnorman, eduglu, ple

  • EduGlu is a concept that came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 - almost exactly 2 years ago - as a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple - a person publishes a bunch of stuff, and all they need to do is pull it into a course-based resource. On the other hand, it’s really quite hard - how can software provide what appears to be a centralized service, based on the decentralized and distributed publishings of the members of a group or community, and honour the flexible and dynamic nature of the various groups and communities to which a person belongs?

• wpng-calendar from Google Code

  Integrating Google Calendar into a WordPress blog

  tags: google, calendar, g-cal, googlecal, wordpress, blog

This was what I said to the chillycraps this morning in my attempt to ‘out-crap’ him. I told him that the Tali-PAP government gahmen should just hire me as the PR Minister for $300,000 a year (1/10 of what our PM is paid) and I’ll make Singaporeans far less unhappy with the ERP, the seemingly always rising power tariffs and the controversy surrounding the housing subsidies. Basically, I will be the best lackey and supporter this gahmen has ever known if they would pay me that kind of money. Here’s the details of my craps:

1. ERP

   First of all, drop that nonsense about the ERP being a measure for easing congestions. The sooner the people are told that ERP is to car usage just like GST is to spending, the better. Easing congestion can be the secondary objective of the ERP, but if the people are really dying for the gahmen to deal with the road congestion problems, then the number of new cars will be limited and they shouldn’t complain when they can’t get a COE to buy one. And try an imagine your fellow Singaporean making a living by being a car salesman. The poor guy is gonna eat grass very soon!

   In short, the ERP is nothing more than an attrition tax just like your road tax. Not only that, ERP is a far more elegant system compared to the current road tax system whereby only owners of vehicles are paying for the maintenance and construction of roads. You use the roads more, you pay more ERP because you wear down the roads more. Can we find a fairer system than the ERP where all road users and not just car owners are taxed? Is it fair that only car owners are paying for it?

   If you have better ideas, tell me!

2. Electricity Tariffs

   It is not true that your electricity tariffs only goes up but never come down in tandem with oil prices.

   Here are the facts: In June 30th 2006, crude prices was US$74.15 at its highest, and electricity tariffs per kWh is S$0.2115 on July 1st. On April 1st, 2008, crude prices was US$105.10 at its highest, and electric tariffs per kWh is S$0.2388. When you take these figures into consideration, the percentage difference of crude prices between June 2006 and April 2008 is 29.44%, but the percentage difference of electric tariffs is 11.43%, not even half of the fluctuation in oil prices!

   Thus, if you chart oil prices and electric tariffs over all these years, you might actually notice that overall, while both lines will show an upward trend, the 2 lines do not exactly have the same gradient. In simpler terms, oil prices rises more steeply than our electric tariffs. In short, when prices shoot up, you are almost enjoying some kind of subsidies, but when the prices come down, you are just paying more so you won’t have to pay more in the next price spike of crude oil!

   Come on, Singapore! Be reasonable!!

3. Housing Subsidies

   Look at your HDB flat prices from a different perspective!

   Quit listening from Chiam See Tong and the opposition and free yourself from suffering! Stop griping over the fact that tje cost used for the construction of each unit is far lower than the price it was sold to you, and stop feeling indignant over the figures seemingly pulled out of thin air to justify the cost of the land!

   The fact is, when you consider any kind of pension fund in any part of the world, it is always the case that the younger generation will pay into the fund so the older ones can draw it out when they reach the magic age.

   Now, after you have paid out of your CPF to buy that house, while funds in the CPF is paid interest, do you not want that money you paid for your HDB flat to also rise in value? Can’t you all see what we are doing here? Is that so hard to imagine?

   Singaporeans, you have wounded your caring and loving gahmen deeply. You should be ashamed of yourself!

Ok.. enough craps for one day. Don’t kill me if my logic is flawed. It’s all done for laughs and if you enjoyed it, I am happy for you. But should you find this perfectly reasonable and logical, I am also happy for you.

Have a good weekend ahead!