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How Things Work

One of Gawker’s most cherished tags was “How Things Work,” a rubric that applied to posts revealing the sausage-making, the secret ways that power manifests itself. The phrase has a children’s book feel to it, bringing to mind colorful illustrations of animals in human work clothes building houses or delivering mail. Of course it also carries the morbid sense of innocence lost, and the distance between the stories we tell ourselves about the world and the way it actually works. Collapsing that distance is, in many ways, what Gawker has always been about.

And so Gawker’s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work.

Source: How Things Work

Much lauded, much hated. So long.

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slotMusic

I was going to put here a full translation of my rant about slotMusic, that new misbegotten product shit out by SanDisk and the Big Labels, but it’d would be a bit redundant given the reactions throughout the blogosphere; so I’ll just list out the more salient points:

  • Big Labels refuse to accept the way people listen to music. Myself I prefer bits to atoms.
  • Here in Mexico the initiative will be an utter failure, because of costs to the user. I give an example in my original post, about a calafiero looking into slotMusic and telling the format to fuck off.
  • I’m done carrying music in binders, with the risk of getting robbed when I take it out to switch the damn little MicroSD cards on my device.
  • Big Labels are the internet’s laughingstock and are just zombified shells of their former selves.
  • We need a lossless alternative to the mp3 format, like FLAC.
  • Putting this out during the end of an economic era, during which the common consumer barely manages to have enough money to eat, takes cojones.
  • If the MicroSD cards are cheap enough, it might be cheaper to buy an album, delete the music and then use the card on your cellphone or digital camera.

All in all, an inferior product, compared to what is already out there.

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La Peor Empresa de México

On Hazme el Chingado Favor:

En México existen empresas, monopolios e instituciones públicas y privadas que al correr de los años se han creado mala fama entra la población, por justas razones como lo son mal servicio al cliente, precios estratosféricos, abusos etc. Hemos listado a 32 empresas y/o marcas para competir por el titulo de la peor empresa del país. Algunas empresas pertenecen a conglomerados más grandes, algunas empresas son de un mismo dueño, otras son conglomerados masivos representantes de varias marcas.

Go vote! And yes, they’ve taken inspiration from the original at The Consumerist.

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La Peor Empresa de México

En Hazme el Chingado Favor:

En México existen empresas, monopolios e instituciones públicas y privadas que al correr de los años se han creado mala fama entra la población, por justas razones como lo son mal servicio al cliente, precios estratosféricos, abusos etc. Hemos listado a 32 empresas y/o marcas para competir por el titulo de la peor empresa del país. Algunas empresas pertenecen a conglomerados más grandes, algunas empresas son de un mismo dueño, otras son conglomerados masivos representantes de varias marcas.

Voten! Y si, se inspiraron en el original de Consumerist.

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Security in WordPress

I’m not saying WordPress isn’t secure, but the perception seems to be

“WordPress is not secure”

It’s said in TechCrunch, it’s called out to Matt, JD of Get Rich Slowly had big trouble, and there are a lot of tips and tutorials. The Codex entry on Hardening WordPress is missing some stuff… but the perception keeps turning more and more negative. If it keeps up like this some other platform will come along claiming to everyone to be more secure than everyone else and a lot of people will migrate just because of that.

I feel to avoid this the focus of WordPress 2.7 should be security. We already have a stable and flexible platform to establish and maintain blogs, so now it must become a secure platform.

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Seguridad en WordPress

No es que diga que WordPress no es seguro, pero siento que la percepción en general es:

“WordPress no es seguro”

Lo dicen en TechCruch, se lo reclaman a Matt, el de Get Rich Slowly tuvo broncas fuertes, y hay un chingo de tutoriales y tips por todos lados. A la entrada en el Codex acerca de como endurecer WP le hacen falta algunas cosas… pero ps la percepción sigue tornándose mas y mas negativa. De seguir así va a llegar alguna otra plataforma clamando a diestra y siniestras que es mas segura que los demás y muchos migraran solo por eso.

Siento que para evitar que esto suceda el énfasis de WordPress 2.7 debe ser la seguridad. Ya tenemos una plataforma estable y flexible para establecer y mantener blogs, por lo que ahora debe convertirse en una plataforma segura.

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Poking

Earlier today I uploaded some photos from the last day of our group’s training for Macintosh tech support at Telvista to my Flickr account. After that I started poking Google Blog Search, Technorati, hi5(here, here and here) along with some other places and I found the three images I uploaded ended up on callcentering.com.

Why did that happen? I’ve got absolutely no idea; they’re not what I’d qualify as “call center news”. My guess is the site’s webmaster setup an aggregator looking for anything tagged “call center”… including RSS feeds from Flickr. That’s my guess and it could be either right or wrong but the theory is there.

I mean… we’re going to be famous now, right? xD

I’m going to keep poking around to see what else I can find besides negative criticism and “watch your boyfriend” warnings”…

PS. Found a nice little video with dubbed audio.

Well I’m bored now, so I’ll go setup a Macinteltosh group on hi5. Props to noesh for the logo.

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Picandole

Hace rato subí unas fotos a mi cuenta en Flickr del ultimo día de capacitación pa’ Macintosh en Telvista. Después de eso me puse a ver por aquí y por allá… y picando en Google Blog Search, Technorati, hi5(aquí, aquí y aquí) y otros lugares me encontré con que las tres fotos que subí fueron parar a callcentering.com.

Por que? No se la neta; no son lo que yo calificaría como “call center news”. Lo mas probable es que el webmaster del sitio tiene un agregador buscando cualquier cosa tagueada con “call center”… incluyendo feeds de RSS en Flickr. Pero esto solo es una suposición mía; puedo estar bien o puedo estar mal, pero la hipótesis ahí esta.

Ay wey, ahora hasta famosos vamos a ser xD

Igual sigo picándole a ver que más encuentro aparte de críticas negativas y advertencias de cuidar novios…

PD. Encontre un bonito video con audio doblado.

Ya me aburri, voy a hacer un grupo de Macinteltosh ahi en hi5. Echenle porras a noesh por el logo

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Widgetize

Recently noesh changed her template, just in case you hadn’t noticed. Thanks to WordPress’ flexibility in this regard, changing themes is pretty easy to do.

But along the way there were a couple of issues: The first one is, when changing, pretty much all of the custom code noesh manually added to the template was lost; the second one is the new template uses widgets. When the WordPress widgets are activated all the code that’s not part of the widget code – usually in the ‘sidebar’ file – is ignored.

As I figure it, there are a few ways to use the old code>

  • 1. Copy the XHTML code from the old template to the new template
  • 2. Look for updated versions of installed plugins and install those new versions, hoping they have widget functionality built into them
  • 3. Create new widgets from the existing plugins, modifying the plugin code to widgetize it.
  • 4. Use the old code in a widget-like way by way of an additional plugin or script

All of them have their benefits and their drawbacks. In my case I went for the last option, for it entailed the least time spent, because I don’t know much PHP to write plugins/widgets for wordpress and I’m not about to spend my energy learning how. Maybe some other time.

With this decided, I looked for a plugin that would let me do what I had in mind. After a while I found this plugin, which lets you use any PHP file in the template directory and add its contents as a widget in the configuration page.

Second step was to create a PHP file in which I put a fragment of code. In noesh’s case, it’s a call for the AJAX shoutbox which was originally on the sidebar code file:
< ?php jal_get_shoutbox(); ?>

In ruidoz’s case, it’s a call to the phrases script.

For all this to work, the file must begin with ‘widget_’ or ‘widget-‘ as the filename. Upload it to the server and save it on the active template directory. If it’s put somewhere it just won’t work. After that the necessary amount of theme widgets have to be activated on the widget configuration page. Read the plugin instructions for more details.

With these steps all those plugins that had to be called from the template sidebar file can be added as widgets without having to muck around the code itself. Helps a lot with themes that had the widget coded added to them and with plugins that don’t have widget functionality built into them yet.

This is great for PHP… but what if you had a bit of XHTML code? Not to worry; all that needs to be done is to add it as a text widget. This is useful for fragments of code like a flickr badge. For this the theme widgets plugin doesn’t have to be installed, since the function is included with the widgets plugin itself. For example, noeshtiosita’s badge now looks like this:
HTML Fragment.

The total time spent? Just about an hour and a half, which – for the effort – is nice. Another good thing is it lets you change theme quicker and easier since no coded needs to be added or removed from the template code. Just move the ‘widget_’ or ‘widget-‘ files to the new template’s directory and reactivate them at the widget configuration page.

Now, keep in mind this is pretty much a temporal solution until most plugins have widget funcions implemented. Until then, this is something to do to avoid code headaches.

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