Author Archive
Testing a new WP UI Options Plugin
March 31st, 2012 | 
Author: What if adding tabs and other great UI items was as easy as 123?
With the new WP UI Plugin, this maybe just a click away. Below I added a tabset with an embedded article from my blog.
Testing a new plugin
The Era of App Based Intranets has Arrived
I have written in the past about making blogs look and function well on iPad and iPhone, but those were just cleaver front-ends on WordPress blogs.
Second Test Post
Test Driving Blogsy - REVISION
Blogsy is an awesome new app for the iPad.
Photoshop Tips
High Pass Filter: One of my favorite Photoshop techniques
Photoshop is a fantastic tool for the working Web Developer and it just seems to get better with every version that Adobe puts out.
That was a tabset done from the WordPress built-in editor, took about a minute.
About me
That was a Spoiler with a blue theme, took about a minute to point it at an article and publish
Titleist Velocity Golf Ball Review
Titleist Velocity Golf Ball Review
I was playing golf with my buddy Travis last weekend and he realized that he was out of golf balls so he picked up a sleeve of the new Titleist Velocity two piece distance balls. He really liked them as much as I liked the Callaway Hex Blacks I reviewed in my prior post. By the seventh hole I tossed him a Callaway and he tossed me a Titleist.
Callaway Hex Black Review
Callaway Hex Black Review
I remember a time just a few years back when I was not a fan of Callaway golf balls. They were crispy, is how i often described them to friends. They felt hard and made pop sound when you really struck one true. When compared to a ProV1 with its buttery feel and spin for days, I just wasnt a fan of Phils brand.
All that changed last year with the introduction of the iS and iZ golf balls.
How I helped the 49ers beat the Saints
How I helped the 49ers beat the Saints
OK, this is one of the most bizarre headlines I have ever published on a golf blog but hang in there with me and I will explain. Like most golfers I am a bit superstitious but not to obsession. Sure I like to mark my ball with a gold dollar with President Buchanan on it but I don’t panic if it is in my other pants, and yes I read my horoscope for fun, but my level of superstition is just to respect a streak.
End of season golf ball round-up
End of season golf ball round-up
As the calendar on the wall says, it is the end of the 2011 season so it is time to wrap up the year with a series of equipment reviews starting with golf balls.
In 2011 I primarily played 4 different balls, Titleist Pro V1, Callaway i(S) and Callaway i(Z), and Taylormade Pentas. The Pro V1s, as always, are outstanding golf balls and still the name to beat.
Playing Golf with My Daughter
Playing Golf with My Daughter
Last weekend I managed to talk my 12 year-old daughter to play golf with Dad. Of course the bribe of letting her drive the golf cart tipped the balance in my favor. It doesn’t hurt that she is 5’8” and looks like she is old enough to drive already. We had a great time and we will definitely play more often.
Wow, very cool multiple Rss feed area, I really like this one, many uses.
Highly recommended click here to get the plugin for your WordPress install
Posted in 
Test Driving Blogsy – REVISION
Major Revision of this Review
Blogsy is an awesome new app for the iPad. As I originally wrote in my first review, Blogsy is a vast improvement in blog authoring for the iPad.
Here is my evaluation of a new version of the Blogsy editor for multi-platform blog authoring and administration. First off Blogsy has an awesome interface, the buttons are obvious and it only took a quick glance to get this app. The editor window in rich text mode is really nicely done. The default font is about perfect for the iPad. Images are a bit more tricky but with just a little practice it becomes pretty intuitive. The first thing you have to get used to is that you don’t insert the image into the paragraph like you would do with most WYSIWYG editors. Now on first glance you might think that this would be awkward but in fact it works better the way that Blogsy has implemented it. So you insert an image between the paragraphs, above the paragraph that you want it to appear in and then you select the image and align it. So far it has been flawless and what I like about this method of image handling is that you don’t have the frustration of trying to hold and drag an image into a paragraph and having the text sliding all over the place. I have often had to flip other editors into HTML mode and manually code my image position or at least have to add padding (a gutter) around the image. So A+ on images.
So now it is time to try publishing my article. I have already setup my BlogSchlager WebTech blog credentials so let’s go!
Perfect! This is a five-star app, the WordPress folks have some serious competition for iPad editor apps and in my opinion Blogsy has it over them now.
I definitely recommend Blogsy, go out and get it.
Tags:
LibXML2 Fix Plugin is the Fix!
IT WORKED!
The LibXML2 Fix plugin did the trick. Finally after 4 or 5 days of frustration, I found a fix for my server issue. It all started when I downloaded a new iPad 3rd party blog editor named Blogsy. I started my usual play-by-play of the new app, was very very impressed and when I published my review with it everything went wrong. All of the HTML tags were stripped off, and that is how they went into the database too.
So I started with the output and had to figure out what went wrong. Well that is what the google machine is for, so I started with a couple of ideas from experience. First I figured I screwed it up somehow, that is a good place to start so I undid everything I had done to my WordPress install, turned off all the plugins and reset it to the default template. That was not it. Next, I searched around to see if there was a new feature in WordPress 3.3 with some sort of new shorthand code. OK, that was out there, but I figured go to the extremes first, it was me or it was WordPress. Having eliminated me and WordPress I was left with the server as the issue.
Turns out that it was the server and I had not done enough publishing since I moved my domains in the fall to notice. The fix started with a Google search for WordPress stripping HTML and after clicking around a bit I found links to folks having what looked like my problem. Come to find out my host has a build of PHP with libxml2 that causes fits with the XML-RPC requests mangling the output. Luckily as with most WordPress problems, someone very cleaver built a plugin to address my issue and it is called LibXML2 Fix available through the WordPress Plugin Directory.
I installed it and, YES, it worked out of the box. Here is the proof, I have been writing this with Blogsy.
Below is my test post that actually worked, phew!
Your password must:
We recommend using a mnemonic to generate a password that will be unique and hard to guess. |
|
Test of Lib2XML Fix Plugin
What a mess, sorry folks but this one is a real head scratcher. I have chased some funky web things in my day but this RPC/XML bug is killing me. I am all about 3rd party editors and I am hosed with a bug that only seems to effect 3rd party XML/RPC based editors.
Below is the output I get from all the editors I own, it really bites, oh hey, Happy New Year!!
Richard
table width=100%tbodytrtd class=norm colspan=2 style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.5em; padding-left: 0.5em; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;Your password must:nbsp;
/spanul style=margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 2em; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; li style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;be at least 6 characters long/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;contain at least one lower case letter and one upper case letter/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;contain at least two numbers/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;contain at least one special character ( one of !@#$%^*?_~,./lt;gt;?-=_+()[]{};:`|\)/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;not be the same as your username/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;not be the same as your recent passwords/span/li/ulspan class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;Wenbsp;a href=https://secure.ipage.com/knowledgebase/article.bml?ArticleID=1287recommend using a mnemonic/anbsp;to generate a password that will be unique and hard to guess./span/td/trtr/tr/tbody/tablenbsp;
New test of Blogsy, text only post
OK,
Sorry to my friends on LinkedIn and Twitter who saw this post last night as I tried desperately to get the promising app Blogsy to work on my WordPress 3.3 blog. Well, nope! If you look at the example below you can see that even a text-based post does not work as advertised. Blogsy adds or non breaking spaces between paragraphs. I have to say that is just annoying. It is bad enough that it is not handling images correctly, but text, ugh!
I’ll keep looking but for me Blogsy is a bust!!
-Richard
Below was posted by Blogsy:
This is a text only check.nbsp;
nbsp;
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using Content here, content here, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for lorem ipsum will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
Test driving Blogsy for WordPress
Here is my evaluation of a new version of the Blogsy editor for multi-platform blog authoring and administration. First off Blogsy has an awesome interface, the buttons are obvious and it only took a quick glance to get this app. The editor window in rich text mode is really nicely done. The default font is about perfect for the iPad.
Images are a bit more tricky but with just a little practice it becomes pretty intuitive. The first thing you have to get used to is that you don’t insert the image into the paragraph like you would do with most WYSIWYG editors. Now on first glance you might think that this would be awkward but in fact it works better the way that Blogsy has implemented it. So you insert an image between the paragraphs, above the paragraph that you want it to appear in and then you select the image and align it. So far it has been flawless and what I like about this method of image handling is that you don’t have the frustration of trying to hold and drag an image into a paragraph and having the text sliding all over the place. I have often had to flip other editors into HTML mode and manually code my image position or at least have to add padding (a gutter) around the image. So A+ on images.
So now it is time to try publishing my article. I have already setup my BlogSchlager WebTech blog credentials so let’s go!
Houston, we have a problem. I am finishing this post up on my MacBook in the native WordPress 3.3 editor. Blogsy has some serious bugs when it comes to adding images to a WordPress 3.3 install. Everything was awesome until I hit the publish button, and everything went pear-shaped. I spent the last half hour trying various things to get Blogsy to correctly display an image to no avail. Ugh, I really do hate it when things like this happen, because I actually do route for the apps I evaluate.
But the Blogsy editor could not get the image code to work on WordPress 3.3, all I could get was a broken div, no opening < anywhere I stuck an image. I tried, left and right alignment, no alignment but nothing worked, so I switched to HTML mode in Blogsy and had all the code correct, pushed publish and got the same messed up div and junk. I added a screen grab from my blog to the left.
So much promise
I really hope that the developers of Blogsy are working on this because I really do like what they are doing and I definitely will look forward to future updates to see if they get the WP 3.3 bugs fixed.
For now I cannot recommend Blogsy but I reserve the right to change my mind and I hope that the developers of Blogsy do get this app polished up, it would be a gem!
The Era of App Based Intranets has Arrived
I have written in the past about making blogs look and function well on iPad and iPhone, but those were just cleaver front-ends on WordPress blogs. What I have developed since is a true app based intranet. What I have done is create an internal VPN enabled app that aggregates RSS feeds from our internal blog based intranet into an extensible app that can be configured to display custom slices of internal content for various audiences.
In a prior article I showed how to create a simple, blog based Intranet infrastructure using WordPress blogs and PHP. This new app based infrastructure takes it a step further and integrates the new tablet computing paradigm with the existing web 2.0 infrastructure. Over the last 4-5 years new infrastructure and application platforms have emerged that have one thing in common, RSS feeds. So you can have great success integrating and single sourcing content within and across departments which is huge on an Intranet.
Taking it all one step further, creating an new internal app that aggregates RSS feeds from multiple sources and departments into a single iPad app. The app can take advantage of all of the RSS feeds that are available across your company resulting in a single app that can be customized to show content from many sources and multiple departments. This moves beyond browsers and laptops and ushers in targeted focused content in one highly flexible and extensible app.
Kicking off a new blog site
This is my first post on my new domain, BlogSchlager.com. I have been blogging on AlturaVista.com for about 3 years now and I just felt it was time for a name change. As you can see the content is carried over from Altura but I intend to move this space in a slightly more edgy direction. To say a lot has changed since I started writing about blogging back in 2008 is an understatement. The environment has continued to mature and more and more companies of all sized and types are using blogs and Web 2.0 systems to market themselves and communicate internally.
I am going to begin a series of new articles on the challenges faced by companies adopting blogs, CMS, Social Media, and such. In the past I have been focusing on how to use the tools and technology but I realize that there are many issues that don’t have anything to do with the how of setting up a social media presence and instead have more to do with the why, management, policies, training, and costs.
So Welcome to BlogSchalger!
Richard
Taking myWPEdit for another test ride
I actually read the manual for myWPEdit and I thought I would try out another of my stream of consciousness posts where I try out features. First, I love the auto-correct as you type spell correction. It works a lot like the other Apple iOS devices I know and love. They say I can use inline HTML too, so that last part should be blue. Cool, the preview says it is. Looks like in the middle of a sentence I can add an HTML tag like an h2 and style it as inline
Boom
big text!! OK, looks great in the preview window but on my blog the inline part of the H2 doesn’t seem to work, could be my blog. Nope, looks like the style was rewritten and the display:inline was stripped out, ugh!
| This | is a | table header |
|---|---|---|
| 125 | 250 | 554 |
OK, tables are nice, code seems in tact, kind of a pain to have to hand code a table though, it would be nice to have a table editor built in. I am afraid that a lot of my friends who are not HTML gurus will be a bit unhappy with that.