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firsttube.com 10.2

Feb 19th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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I’ve applied a new theme to the site, so I’m now billing this as firsttube.com 10.2. Whereas prior to version “10″, each look-and-feel revision was likely a major increment, since converting to Wordpress, a new theme is really much more cosmetic than programmatic. I’d love to hear your feedback, but I imagine the majority of my readers are reading via RSS anyway, so for those of you syndicated, here’s a screenshot for you:
firsttube.com 10.2

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But It’s a Good Thing

Jan 10th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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Life has gotten in the way of blogging for awhile. I will love you again soon, firsttube.com.

firsttube.com 10.1

Sep 29th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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I’ve updated firsttube.com to a new theme. It’s not significantly different from my old theme, but it’s a nice one that isn’t quite as hacked up as the last one. I’m in the process of deciding what to do with comments. I’m thinking I’d like to outsource them to disqus or Intense Debate.  Either way, check it out and let me know what you think.

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…And We’re Back!

Apr 27th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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Small Axe Hosting firsttube.com is now live on our new server, proudly hosted by smallaxesolutions.com. Yes, I’m now running my own hosting (shameless plug: I can host you for cheap, including installation of WordPress) and I have migrated all of my domains over. That means my old host will be offline in a few days, once I’m sure DNS has fully replicated.

So far, I’m hosting about 5 domains with another one potentially in the pipe. I’m giving everyone cPanel access, which means MySQL, phpMyAdmin, mailboxes, forwarders, Fantastico, and much more. You shouldn’t have to do anything: your feeds should remain intact and you should see no interruption of service.

You’re So Money, You Don’t Even Know It

Feb 20th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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$2,146,840   

According to Web 2.0 friendly site Stimator, firsttube.com is beach front property. According to Stimator, firsttube.com is worth $2,146,840. Of course, the only people who might actually find it worth more than a few twenties is a spammer, since I’m rich in search engine placements and backlinks. Still, nice to be loved.
Why Stimator put so much effort into designing an awesome interface and then decided to leave a major grammatical problem in their badge is beyond me.

Thank a Plugin Developer Day

Jan 28th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress and skipper of Automattic, has declared today, January 28, “Thank a Plugin Developer” Day. In thanks, I will list all of the plugins I use in my firsttube.com Wordpress install.

  • Akismet is a comment filter that uses a “karma” type algorithm to analyze comments and separate ham from spam. According to my internal stats, Akismet reports 37,512 spams caught, 284 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.934%. Not too shabby. As a result, this site no longer has a captcha.
  • Blip.It iPhone Handler is a neat little tool that creates a method to display embedded flash as Quicktime on-the-fly, ideal for iPhone compatibility.
  • Cache Images, another Mullenweg gem, let me fetch remote images and store them locally. I prefer to host all images locally if possible, so this is fantastic.
  • “ftBlogrollerWP (ft)” is my own modified plugin that creates a page with all of my links, as seen here.
  • Google XML Sitemaps is a tool for creating a sitemap that Google and other search engines can use to spider your site. This would take forever by hand and would be very hard to keep up manually, but this plugin makes it effortless.
  • Limit Login Attempts. No sense in letting someone hammer your Wordpress admin login eternally. Basic security that ought to be part of Wordpress core.
  • Similar Posts is a snazzy little plugin that tries to find similar posts to any given post. I use this on each post’s page. In pre-Wordpress firsttube, I did this by searching for other articles with the same tags. In Wordpress-era ft, I do this via a plugin. Similar Posts requires the Post-Plugin Library.
  • Tangofy is a simple plugin to modify icons in the stock Wordpress admin pages.
  • TTFTitles is a sweet little plugin that creates images from text. I do this on entry titles and sidebar titles. It allows you to add a dimension of professional typography and to use fonts that aren’t in the eight “web safe.”
  • WordPress Database Backup: you’ll never guess what this one does!
  • WordPress Hashcash does the spam filtering in conjunction with Akismet. Whatever Akismet misses, Hashcash catches. Essentially, it catches *everything* Akismet misses and only really reports problems when users have javascript turned off.
  • Wordpress Popular Posts provide me view counts, plain and simple. I used to keep track pre-Wordpress, but sadly, I lost my hit count (many of which were in the thens of thousands of views) and only started again this month. Nonetheless, it’s in the sidebar.
  • wp-cache is a caching program, but I’m not currently using the cache.
  • WP-Lytebox automatically adds a lytebox effect to inline images, which is spectacular.
  • WP-Optimize is a database optimizer that does optimization not only of MySQL overhead, but also removes autosaves and other space wasters from your database.
  • WP-Syntax makes my code pretty, and that’s all.
  • WP iPaper is a plugin for embedding scribd stuff.
  • Lastly, WPtouch iPhone Theme is a stylesheet that makes this site look native on the iPhone. It’s truly a beautiful skin.

That is all. Thank you to all the above developers. As a reward, please accept this pingback!

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New Look and Feel

Jan 20th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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If you’re not reading this via RSS, you may have noticed that I’ve completely changed the look and feel of firsttube.com. It’s something I wasn’t expecting to do regularly, but since I’ve moved to Wordpress, this will be my third theme.  The first one lasted only a few days, to be fair, and I settled on the beautiful Librio.  However, I did a lot of customization with Librio, which meant I couldn’t really update the theme, and it was far from 2.7 ready.  On top of that, I hacked up some areas I didn’t like and I was never able to get it just right.  

Fast forward a bit, I’ve gone ahead and modified instantShift’s Christmas theme that was designed for Smashing Magazine.  I am, at least right now, very happy with this theme and I think I’ll stick with it for awhile.  

Today is a new beginning for the US… and a little change is in order.

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RSS Cloud

Dec 12th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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Tag Cloud 

Behold! The firsttube.com RSS cloud generated by www.wordle.net (doesn’t work here without the www.  Lame!).   I got the idea from Kroc.  This is based on a snapshot of my RSS feed the morning of 12/12/2008.

firsttube.com Upgraded To Wordpress 2.7

Dec 12th

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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So far, one problem, two gripes.  My problem is that I can’t seem to get posts with dots in the slug title to work right, even though I once solved this problem before.  What’s worse is that it won’t fetch those posts anymore, which really sucks.

Onto my gripes. I can’t get inline replying/threading to work.  There is very little documentation on it so far. The functions are called comment_reply_link() and get_comment_reply_link(), and there’s nothing anywhere in the codex that helps, there’s little on the internet, the only place to get any real detail is the code itself, which explains:

from wp-includes/comment-template.php starting at line 949 on WP 2.7.0

 * Retrieve HTML content for reply to comment link.
 *
 * The default arguments that can be override are 'add_below', 'respond_id',
 * 'reply_text', 'login_text', and 'depth'. The 'login_text' argument will be
 * used, if the user must log in or register first before posting a comment. The
 * 'reply_text' will be used, if they can post a reply. The 'add_below' and
 * 'respond_id' arguments are for the JavaScript moveAddCommentForm() function
 * parameters.
 *
 * @since 2.7.0
 *
 * @param array $args Optional. Override default options.
 * @param int $comment Optional. Comment being replied to.
 * @param int $post Optional. Post that the comment is going to be displayed on.
 * @return string|bool|null Link to show comment form, if successful. False, if comments are closed.

It doesn’t matter much, because it doesn’t work, period, even though I’ve followed the instruction here to a t. So I’ll have to fix that in time.

My last gripe is with the new wp_list_comments() routine. I understand this is all new, but the idea that templating comments requires a callback function as a wrapper to all comments, pings, and trackbacks is clumsy at best. The codex on wp_list_comments() have nothing to explain it to people, so while I’ve dug in and gotten things working, it’s not for the feint of heart just yet, since you need to build a PHP function in your theme in your functions.php file (or create one if it doesn’t exist, which cannot be done via the Dashboard). I’m a little sad, since the theme system is so flexible and the new plugin system is just incredible, to see the new comment loop be so manual compared to the single file approach used so successfully in the past.

I know that Scoble says Wordpress 2.7 rocks, and it does. Scoble doesn’t realize the shortcomings because he hasn’t tried to play with the new features, and fortunately, it very gracefully degrades. But it’s got some work to do to be perfect, for me at least.

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A Bit of a Redesign

Sep 3rd

Posted by Adam S in Meta

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Yes, I’ve redesigned firsttube.com once again, but I’m only christening it 10.0.1.  There are no major changes here other than the look and feel overhaul – no new features, no new tricks.  This theme is a bit lighter, a smidgen easier on the eyes, a touch cleaner code-wise, a trifle easier to manipulate, and a notch more organized, CSS-wise.   As a result, those who visit the site will get a neat surprise.   That is all.

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