FebruaryFeb 13 Friday Fri 09
I've used the TwitterCounter badge that tells people how many followers I have on Twitter for quite a while now. It's nice, but not really useful unless you're a narcissist. They've recently released something much more useful: TwitterCounter Remote. Remote is a small piece of code that adds a widget to your site that tells you which Twitter users have visited your site recently.
All you have to do to set it up is fill in a few fields and have the service auto generate a small piece of JavaScript for you. Take that and paste it wherever you want it to show up on your site and you're done.
I've already found and followed 10+ people who have visited my blog with this thing. I think it's a brilliant way to increase your following on Twitter and to create better relationships with people you know are visiting your site (something basic Analytics can't do).
I will point out that sometimes loading the JavaScript file really hangs when your site loads. I'm not sure if it's because the service is getting so much publicity or because of Twitter, but for now I'll blame the obvious person...The Whale.
It's so easy to setup and get running, I strongly recommend at least giving it a shot.
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FebruaryFeb 12 Thursday Thu 09
I recently wrote a post about some issues I was having with Ubuntu 8.10 after I've been using it as my primary machine for the past four months. To balance things out, I wanted to write about why I absolutely love Ubuntu as well.
I know there is a ton of other stuff that needs to be noted, but I think that's a good start of why I think Ubuntu is the future and why I'm going to continue using it for the foreseeable future.
What do you like about Ubuntu?
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FebruaryFeb 11 Wednesday Wed 09
WordPress 2.7.1 was released today. It's the typical bug fix release that they always do. What I think is really interesting about this release is that normally, the .1 bug fix comes about a month after the initial release. This time, however, WordPress 2.7 was released two months ago. I think that really lets you know how amazing 2.7 has been. I can't remember a release of WordPress that has been this solid.
Now the decision is, do you manually upgrade or use the built in auto-upgrade feature? I just got done upgrading this blog and I did it manually and everything went perfectly (which bug fix releases normally do since the structure of the code isn't really changing).
Anyway, get the new release of WordPress 2.7.1 or check out the list of fixed bugs
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FebruaryFeb 10 Tuesday Tue 09
I switched to Ubuntu about 4 months ago after my Windows XP system crashed and I had the choice of taking an entire weekend to reinstall, or finally make the jump. Overall I've been incredibly happy with Ubuntu. I mean how much can you really complain, it's free right?
I just want to highlight some issues I've been having since the switch. I don't want this post to be taken as a gripe session about Ubuntu, but to point out the flaws that average users are going to come across, and could ultimately hurt adoption. I think how few issues I've had and how minor they are actually speaks for how far GNU/Linux has come and more specifically, how far Ubuntu has come.
I also want to make clear that a lot of these problems aren't necessarily Ubuntu's fault, but these are things that people will expect to work normally, as they did in Windows.
I'm sure there are other things, but this gives you an idea of what I'm having issues with. They're very specific issues and some that the average user would never be doing in the first place, but issues nonetheless. I'll be working on a post about all the good things about Ubuntu as well, which should be much longer http://www.randyjensenonline.com/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley' title=My Issues With Ubuntu 8.10 After Four Months" />
What problems are you having with Ubuntu? Or more importantly, what good experiences are you having with it?
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FebruaryFeb 9 Monday Mon 09
If you don't know who Jeffrey Zeldman is, he's the web genius behind sites like A List Apart and Happy Cog. He's also written several books and is pretty much just an overall web genius with a strong background in web usability.
About a month ago he released a plugin for Dreamweaver that makes writing standards compliant code much easier. He says that it is for pretty much anybody who codes, from n00b to l33t web haxor and even said he found some errors on his site with it. I haven't had the chance to play with it yet simply because I don't mind spending the extra time to check my work and validate it...oh, and I don't want to spend $50 on it yet.
He does mention that "It will help coders at any level (including expert) who use Dreamweaver as a primary web development tool, and who know about web standards but don't spend all day thinking about them". I definitely don't want to be thinking about web standards all day, but for the most part, compliant coding has just become second nature for me in my newer projects.
I'll probably go ahead and get it when I get around to it. Mainly to test it out and see if it does make things so I don't have to constantly validate and then revalidate after major changes. When you're working with sites that have 5,000+ pages, it's gets to be just about impossible to make sure every page validates. If this thing makes that easier, I'm in.
Once I buy it, I'll come back with a review for you guys.
You can read more about it here.
Learn more about Jeffrey here
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Odd that Saturday Night Live would hold the key to beating the recession, but I think they've finally solved America's woes. If you're in debt and having trouble getting out, you may want to watch the video below.
I have a feeling the name of the book was changed to 'Stuff' after the shitheads employees at the FCC got ahold of this skit.
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FebruaryFeb 6 Friday Fri 09
I never used to be a big wallpaper kind of guy until I started using John's Desktop Switcher. It's a seriously cool app that has a ton of features like rotating your wallpaper as often as you'd like, or make a collage or photobook from your pictures. I found another app today called 'Desktoptopia' that is similar, but a bit more stripped down and straightforward.
The main feature I loved about it was it came preloaded with RSS feeds to their site which is a wallpaper submission site. Now John's DS can do this too, but this one just works out of the box. It's nice to get fresh desktops without having to search around and find them, then download them to your computer and then put them in the correct folder. You can also tell it how often to switch the wallpapers on your desktop and it understands dual monitors so you can have different wallpapers on each monitor.
Setting it up is dead simple. Just download the app and install it. Once it's installed, open it and give it some time to update it's RSS feeds (it crashed a couple times on me, but I think it was because I didn't let it update itself before I started playing with it :). If you like it, right click the icon in the system tray in Windows and tell it to auto start. I'm not sure how to do it on the Mac, but it should be similar.
Check out Desktoptopia now
Also, if you're a serious wallpaper ninja, John's Desktop Switcher is a must have as well.
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FebruaryFeb 4 Wednesday Wed 09
I use YUI Compressor to compress all my JavaScript files and up until now, they only way to do it was via the command line. While this is fairly easy for me, I think the majority of people don't compress their JS files because they're not sure how (or this practice hasn't permeated the masses of average web developers).
Rodolphe Stoclin has come up with an incredibly useful online tool that takes the YUI Compressor and adds a web GUI to it, making it dead simple to use. It looks like he's using jQuery to do everything on the fly with no page reload and it even tells you the compression ratio.
I tested the tool with an uncompressed version of MooTools and it works exactly as you would expect. If you're not compressing your JavaScript files, now's the time. It's not going to get any easier than this.
Check out the web version of YUI Compressor now.
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FebruaryFeb 3 Tuesday Tue 09
I think everyone should have to take a test to use the computer. Think: Driver's Training, but for computers. There are just far too many people out there that have absolutely no idea what they are doing and that will click on anything they see that even looks remotely interesting. What confuses me is why intelligent people who would never go down a dark alley on the wrong side of town at 2am and ask for directions but will go to some shady website that they've never heard of and click on anything they're told to? Why is there such a disconnect?
Enough ranting. Please make every one of your relatives watch this video. You know, the one who still thinks that 'blue e' on their desktop IS the internet. The one who downloads anything and everything that is sent to them and then asks you why their computer doesn't work. You know, the guy who tried to help that Nigerian king last year. That guy.
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FebruaryFeb 1 Sunday Sun 09
Just came across this on BoingBoing. It's an interactive YouTube game using images of Oscar movies. After you press play you will see two of the same image, but with one difference. The screen on the right is divided into 9 sections. You simply click on the section that has whatever is different between the two images. Pretty much the same as any of those games you see at bars, but just on YouTube.
There are 30 levels to it. How far can you get?
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JanuaryJan 29 Thursday Thu 09
I'm a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. I posted a video a while ago here that is one of my favorite inspirational videos ever, even though it's not really an 'inspirational' video by definition. Well, Gary recently spoke at the Future Of Web Apps in Miami and he was once again, amazing. Here are the two videos of him and below are some quotes from the videos that I love.
We live in a 'brand' world
Content is King. Marketing and branding are Queen...and you know who runs the household
Before you worry about the community, make sure it's in your heart
You have to love your community more than you love yourself
Communities know everything. They spread. But they also care
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JanuaryJan 28 Wednesday Wed 09
I've finally gotten around to redesigning Randy Jensen Online. The last time I redesigned it was probably around 4 years ago and it was a rush job for a job interview. I feel much better about this design. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!
The only 'major' issue currently is with rendering of the typeface.js I'm using to render the text in Opera. For some reason Opera doesn't display it at all. Luckily, such a small percentage of my traffic uses Opera that I decided to just launch and get it fixed as soon as I can.
The blog redesign is next on the list, but one big project at a time http://www.randyjensenonline.com/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley' title=The Cobblers Kid Finally Gets New Shoes" />
Check out Randy Jensen Online
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JanuaryJan 26 Monday Mon 09
I recently needed to run an ISO file on Windows Vista. I could have burned the file to a CD/DVD and run it from there, but since I only needed to run it once, it's far easier to mount it virtually. Here's how to do it.


Technically you're done. If you want to configure CloneDrive there are a few options you can play with. Open the actual CloneDrive program (via the shortcut that was placed on your desktop, or through the Start menu).
The main option you may change is the number of virtual drives that it can mount. If you need several .iso files to be mounted at once, CloneDrive can handle up to 15 (no idea why...). For the most part, 1 is fine, but there are some cases where it's nice to be able to mount several files at once.

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JanuaryJan 25 Sunday Sun 09
I woke up this morning to find I had a plugin that needed to be updated. Not a big deal. It was the cForms plugin which is constantly being updated. This time, however, it came with a special note:
In light of special circumstances, cforms will not continue to be available on wordpress.org. Future updates may only be available on http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin.
(image)
That's odd. This is one of the best plugins the WordPress community has to offer. Why would WordPress.org being pulling it down? Clicking further took me to the official cForms plugin site with another 'special' note:
cforms has been removed from wordpress.org as a result to this post. Future updates may be released on the main cforms home page, chances are that support and further development will end with version 10.2
In light of the circumstances, the forum is currently closed (read-only), until further notice.
Being curious I had to see what amazingly terrible thing someone could have written about cForms that would have gotten it pulled from the mighty WordPress.org site.
Testing it out, I noticed a link at the bottom of the contact form. It pointed to Oliver Seidel's web site. He's the developer for cforms II. I didn't like the placement for the link (my friend has a credits page where I would put it). So I immediately Googled how to do this. Lo' and behold Mr. Seidel has deliberately made it difficult to remove the link. That's fine. His software... sort of.
See, here's the thing: All plugins on wordpress.org are supposed to use GPL-compatible licenses. That means that users get the source code, and they can do nearly whatever they want with it. Turns out that Mr. Seidel never actually included a license in the download (so far as I can tell). And on at least one page on his site, Mr. Seidel claims the license for cforms II is not open source or GPL compatible. Specifically, he says that users may not modify or redistribute the plugin or it's source. That's not GPL.
It seems that this guy was pissed because every plugin on the WordPress site must be licensed under the GPL license and cForms was clearly not.
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. I'm a big open source advocate myself, but plugins like this are major reason why I can comfortably tell someone to use WordPress and not some other blogging platform. I suppose this thing will die down shortly, but this is a bit of a blow to the WP community.
This also feels a bit Apple-appstore-ish. Why was the plugin ever allowed? If it was a small obscure plugin, I can understand. But just about everyone I kknow who is serious about WordPress is using cForms.
I also think this leads to a bigger issue of Open Source in general. This exact problem is something that could be considered the Achilles Heal of the OSS community. Mark Shuttleworth has already taken tons of heat for including code that wasn't 100% open source in Ubuntu...but this is some of the code that makes Ubuntu usable by average people.
Will removing cForms from the WordPress.org site kill WordPress? The Community? All the other amazing plugins for WP? Of course not. But this is where the average user knows they can go and get good, quality plugins and install them incredibly easy (even more so with 2.7). This plugin repository is the iTunes for WP Plugins. If you don't exist there, you don't exist to the average user.
What do you think about cForms being removed? Who's fault is it? The post author? WordPress for allowing it in the first place? cForms for not GPL'ing it?
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JanuaryJan 22 Thursday Thu 09
Thought I'd create a quick video to show you how to add 'Open With Adobe Photoshop CS22 command to your right-click menu in Ubuntu. It's my first video tutorial and the quality seriously sucks. If people like these, I'll start doing more and spend more time on the QA side of things. Until then, here ya go...
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JanuaryJan 20 Tuesday Tue 09

I just finished reading the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. This book is amazing. It details how we continually, and seemingly predictably, make the same 'bad' decisions over and over again. Ariely focuses on 'The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions' and conducts several experiments proving this 'predictably irrational behavior'.
If the opportunity presents itself, will you cheat? ...Probably.
In one of the experiments, he has several groups of students take a test. The first group (the control group) must take the test and then hand it in to the proctor. The second group was asked to recall 10 books they read in high school and then take the test. Once they are done, they checks their answers with the correct answers. They then shred the test and tell the proctor how many they got right. The final group is asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they can and then are asked to take the test. Once they're done with the test, they do the same thing as the second group of students.
The control group got 3.1/20 questions correct. The second group that recalled 10 books they read in high school got 4.1 questions correct, or 33% more than the control group. What happened with the final group? They answered on average 3 questions correctly, even though they had the same opportunity to cheat as the second group.
How can you use this information?
I can't tell you exactly how you should use it, but as a higher ed marketing expert, here is where my mind takes this example. During peak registration times, no matter how many people you have working, the line of students always overwhelms even the most seasoned advisor. How about this: Crossword puzzles filled with words related to 'patience' and 'success' for the students to do while waiting in line.
Will it work? After this idea is passed through enough committees and sub-committees to make the Federal Government look amateurish, I'll hopefully report back with my finding.
Conclusion
This is just one of the many brilliant experiments that are documented in this book. I would strongly recommend this book to just about anybody, especially marketers. I would go as far as to say you MUST read this if you're serious about marketing and want to better understand what your customer is thinking.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
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JanuaryJan 19 Monday Mon 09
Being a pretty avid Flickr user, one of the first things I looked for when I switched to Ubuntu was a good Flickr Desktop app. I looked everywhere and ended up settling on an app conveniently named 'Flickr Uploader'. Although this app only did one thing, it did it quite poorly. The upload button didn't work, but the upload option in the drop down menu worked fine. The app overall was clunky and poorly designed.
For some reason I decided to look around again and stumbled upon something much nicer and more robust. It's called 'Desktop Flickr Organizer'. I will mention that this is more than just an 'uploader', it really is a way to manage your entire Flickr account from the desktop. With this added functionality, comes the added complexity. It took me a bit to find my way around the app, but once I did, everything made sense for the most part.
Search for 'flickr' in Add/Remove. Choose the 'Desktop Flickr Organizer' and click 'Apply' in the lower right hand corner
Now that we have DFO installed, let's get it setup with our Flickr account.





Overall, this program is definitely the way to go if you're running Linux and want to organize your Flickr account from your desktop. It has a bit of a learning curve initially, but after you've figured it out, it's a very nice program.

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JanuaryJan 16 Friday Fri 09
If you've decided to run antivirus software on your Ubuntu machine, it's more than likely ClamAV aka ClamTK (the GUI frontend for ClamAV). I went to update the definitions just for the fun of it the other day and I got this...

Luckily this problem is easily remedied. Open a terminal and type...
sudo clamtk
You should now see a green ball next to the Update Signatures field, letting you know that you are currently running as root, and able to use this option.
That's about it. However, this does raise an issue that I will be covering in much more depth in a later article: Why Linux Is Still a Hobbyists' Operating System. Flame on.
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JanuaryJan 14 Wednesday Wed 09
A couple weeks ago I showed you how to share files between two Ubuntu computers. Well yesterday I decided to install Windows 7 Beta on my secondary machine, that was running Ubuntu and had the share I created in that post. Since the computer is pretty old, I decided to just wipe the drive and install Win7 natively, rather than in a VM.
After I was done with some testing, I threw Ubuntu back on the machine and setup my shared folder again with the exact same name. Then I reconnected my main machine to the share with SSH, but was greeted with this error
Basically what's happening is that when you create an SSH connection, 'authentication' keys are created on the host machine (the machine with the shared folder on it). Since I had wiped Ubuntu and reinstalled, I obviously reinstalled SSH and then created my share again, but with different keys since they are randomly generated. So now when my main computer is looking for this share, it's finding it, but not able to verify the keys that it currently thinks are correct and then create the secure connection...and SSH is pretty worthless with the 'secure' part:) Luckily, there is an incredibly easy fix for this.
If you are only running one SSH connection you can simply run this command from the terminal
sudo rm .ssh/known_hosts
This command is going to go into your SSH folder in your Home directory and delete the Known Hosts file that tells the server connection what the keys for the shared folder should be. Again, these keys have changed because we reinstalled SSH on our machine and the keys were once again, randomly generated.
Run this in the terminal
sudo gedit .ssh/known_hosts
You will be presented with something similar to this the image below. Delete the connection that you no longer want to use (in my example you would be deleting connection 2)
That's pretty much all you have to do. Your connection should now work again.
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One of the things that instantly annoyed me the first time I really started using Ubuntu was that the num lock was turned off by default at boot. A very small thing, but one that seems odd they wouldn't fix since it's so incredibly simple. Here's how I did it.

Reboot your computer to see if num lock stays on this time. If it doesn't, there are some more configurations on the official Ubuntu site that you can follow.
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Currently a graphics and web designer in Dallas, TX. I also run my own technology blog at http://www.randyjensenonline.com/blog.