links for 2008-07-25

Update: Images and WordPress 2.6

I may have been too hasty to condemn the WordPress for iPhone app. One of my criticisms was that it couldn’t upload a photo to my site. Well, I just discovered that I couldn’t either, even using the browser. This appears to be another issue with WordPress 2.6.

Fortunately the fix is simple: fill in the otherwise optional Full URL path to files (optional) field on the Settings » Miscellaneous section of your control panel with the actual path to your images–usually http://yourdomain.com/yourwordpressdirectory/wp-content/–and save the settings. The forum doesn’t have a consensus on what caused this optional field to become mandatory, but that appears to fix it for most users.

I’m going long in arks.

Seriously, people, what is going on with the rain out here? We have had deluging thunderstorms every day this week. There was a stranded van on my commute this morning. On Route 2A in Burlington, for heavens’ sake.

On Monday this week, I was picking up some things at the Walgreens in Arlington Heights, which has the World’s Smallest Parking Lot™ — and shares it with a Trader Joe’s and a Starbucks. The parking lot abuts the Minuteman Trail, which runs alongside some six feet below street level between the parking lot and a field behind. On this particular day, there was a lake about fifteen feet across in the middle of the parking lot, of unknown depth. I skirted it carefully as I parked my car, but when I got out I heard a noise like a waterfall. And I realized that there was a storm drain in the middle of the lake, which connected to an overflow pipe that emptied out beside the trail. Well, there must have been a few hundred gallons a minute going through that pipe:

(That’s the overflow pipe on the left. The lake in the background is the bicycle trail.)

It was raining so hard on Monday that Mass Ave flooded in Arlington Heights in front of the Panera. There were still sandbags there later in the week. And it was raining harder than that this morning.

All I’m saying is, when I start to see animals coming up the hill to get to higher ground at my office, I’m cornering the market on gopher wood.

links for 2008-07-24

Outlook 2007 annoyances: keyboard shortcuts

Things you can’t do with Outlook 2007: assign custom keyboard shortcuts to Ribbon items.

This is annoying if you have certain keyboard shortcuts hardwired. For instance, in Outlook 2003 (and Word) one could access the “Paste Special” command (which gives a number of optional formats in which content can be pasted into a document, including unstyled text) with the keyboard shortcut alt+E, then S. Alt+E is an old Windows keyboard shortcut that allows accessing menus using their accelerator key, and for several Outlook releases, “Paste Special” has had S as its accelerator command.

Fast forward to Outlook 2007. The editing window uses the Ribbon, rather than menus, and so alt+E doesn’t do anything. However, alt+S does. So if you happen to hold down the alt key and type E S, thinking you’re going to paste something in the message, Outlook will merrily send it, minus whatever you were going to paste, instead.

Is there a solution? The only way around the issue that I’ve found requires writing a macro to invoke the functionality, assigning the macro to a custom toolbar button, and then mapping that button to a keyboard shortcut (say, alt+E). Convenient? No. Quick? No. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it work consistently in Outlook at all.

Sigh. Hope we can get this fixed at some point.

links for 2008-07-23

WordPress for iPhone

I’m writing this post with the released WordPress client for the iPhone. It’s simple to use. Enter the URL for your WP blog (self hosted or on wordpress.org), a valid username and password, and the app connects to your blog and configures itself.

As you can see below, not only does the client support categories and tags, but photos as well. You can either incorporate an existing photo from your library or take a photo from within the app.

Concerns:

  • the text editor doesn’t provide any shortcuts for markup, so even creating a simple list is pretty arduous
  • the app only prompts for a password once–convenient, but a security risk. If you lose your iPhone, your blog is compromised.

Overall, though, a killer 1.0 and a good way to really mobilize blogging. I look forward to giving the app a proper shakedown next week at Tanglewood.

Update: Okay, there are a few other bugs to shake out:

  • The UI for actually posting a post is a little non-intuitive. Rather than a big Publish button, you have to change the status of the post to Published, then save the post. This is probably so that you don’t hit the button with your thumb by mistake, but it’s still a little annoying.
  • The publish process seems buggy. My post at first failed to publish–the app crashed–then published, without sending its image. To attach the screen capture, I resorted to emailing the photo to Flickr, then adding the URL to the post. Not trivial, and without copy and paste impossible to tie the photo back to the post without going to the computer.

The photo thing is annoying. The crashes on posting are a big big problem.

links for 2008-07-22

Why some website redesigns work

Generally, it’s because they aren’t just slapping a new coat of paint (er, HTML+CSS) on the same pig. In the most successful cases, they’re a complete rethink of what the site is trying to communicate and a complete new set of ways to make that happen.

That appears to be the case with the redesign of the MIT Sloan website. It’s a sign of how bad the previous site was that I missed the redesign happening back in March of this year. But the b-school that I came from has come a long way since I was the sole MBA blogger back in 2001-2002. There are podcasts, official and unofficial blogs, and news feeds galore, all of which combine to give a much richer picture of everything that happens at the school. Compared to the 2004 site redesign, which put a thin veneer of Annoying Flash Movie on top of largely the same static content, it’s revolutionary.

It all conveys what I think is the unique strength of Sloan: it’s a school that’s focused, despite its size and institutional veneer, on empowering individuals and encouraging entrepreneurial endeavors. And to that end, it’s great to see the aggregated feed of Sloan student blogs right alongside official podcasts and other school-developed content, all together in the Sloan master feed. Of course, it would be nice to see everyone posting more often, but nobody’s perfect.

Friday: too busy working …

… to write anything halfway intelligent, so you get this instead.

But Estaminet has been writing a fair bit; check out her travel journals from her Oregon trip.

She’s back staying with us, and our parents come in late tonight, so it’ll be a fun full house. This is, of course, the other reason I’m not writing so much–lots of stuff to take care of before I pick them up from the airport.

And I’ll be checking out the temporary James Hook lobster shack this weekend to see if they’ve been able to resume any level of retail operations. It would be great to get some in time for my dad’s birthday.

links for 2008-07-18

Basement library complete


Here’s the after to Tuesday’s before, with my row of Bestå shelves from Ikea fully assembled. The doors went on Monday night, and the books went in the last few nights. I’m still waiting on one glass door and a few DVD organizers for the small shelf to the right, which will help with the clutter there.

The hardest thing about the shelves is probably just deciding where to put them to maximize storage. The shelves that meet the bottom of the glass doors need to stay fixed, and there are LPs behind the bottom doors, so that dictates the position of two shelves; and there needs to be another fixed shelf about a third of the way down for stability. But there are a lot of options for the other shelves. I ended up doing something I swore off years ago: sorting books by size and spacing the shelves accordingly. I bought five extra shelves for the units I bought (comprising four 75-inch bays and one 50 inch bay), and I think I still need to buy one or two more extras.

Bonus: click through on the photo and look at the “original size” version on Flickr, and you can get a pretty good look at the titles in my library.

links for 2008-07-17