TQuizzle.com

Aggrevating Things

So the past few days have prove quite interesting.

It started off with me starting to feel bad on Friday and just escalated from there. All weekend I felt like crap, forcing me not to go to Church on Sunday and missing both Monday and Tuesday of work.

To make things just a bit more exciting, I got to have another root canal on Monday afternoon. After that, I was in a great mood! Jumping into the car, and forgetting that the A/C in the car wasn’t working properly, this is image is what my reality was.

Also on Monday, the A/C unit on my renter’s house stopped working. In the thick of the Oklahoma heat, this is no good. I started calling around to local A/C places to find out that they couldn’t come out and look at it until like Thursday or Friday. Obviously, I couldn’t expect my renter to wait that long so then came the favor calls.

I ended up calling a friend of a friend, and it paid off big time. He was able to get it up and running at 3am. Yeah…that’s right. This dedicated guy came over to my rent house at midnight and didn’t leave until 3am. What a guy! All was good, until…

The next day, during the hottest part of the day too, it failed again. This time, all the refrigerant had leaked out due to a bad valve and they’re back to where they were…hot as hell in the house. Another call, lots of freon, lots of sweat from my renters coupled with their patience; and its cold and working again.

Hopefully it will stay that way.

MacDaddy Storage Upgrades

I love my MacBook. In all reality, it’s still @justinshattuck’s MacBook, but I’ve actually had it for over a year.

He’s a great guy to give his buddy one of his MacBook’s that he wasn’t using…especially since at that time I wasn’t a Mac enthusiast. That all changed last February when I got a call from @justinshattuck that he wanted me to come over and look at some stuff we were going to be starting to work on. During the course of this conversation, I was offered this glorious piece of hardware and absolutely fell in love with it.

Now I understand what Mac enthusiasts have claimed all along…there’s just nothing that compares to using a Mac. It’s sleek, its sexy, it works (almost ALL of the time) without reboots, memory leaks, etc… It just works!

I will admit it was hard making the switch after being a career-long PC user, but after about a week or two…there was no turning back.

Upgrades

After just a few months, I ran into a problem with the MacBook. It had a small hard drive. It was only 60GB, and that’s not near enough for a digital packrat like myself. After suffering long months, and constantly moving things back-and-forth to make enough space to do whatever it was I needed space to do…I finally sprung for a new hard drive. Luckily, these are easy to swap out.

I’ve got instructions & pictures of how to swap out a MacBook hard drive after the jump.

Feed Me Seymore

So I noticed something wrong today…my feed. It was returning an error, and not displaying correctly.

Since I don’t subscribe to to own feed (I’m not that vain), I didn’t see that it wasn’t displaying. It essentially was blank with an error.

Checking out FeedValidator.Org, I saw that it not only wasn’t validating, it had errors on lines 1 and 2…which were empty. Empty I said? Good thing FeedValidator is so smart, it knew what I was using (WordPress) to produce the feed then offered some suggestions to fixing it.

I guess it’s a known problem with some plugins and theme files having empty lines after or before their relative opening <?php or closing ?> tags.

So began the journey to find out what was causing this…

Per FeedValidator’s recommendation, I checked wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php both of which were fine. Then checked wp-config to see if the problem was there…still no love. I checked my theme’s functions.php file since I use that immensely in customizing the look of this blog but it too didn’t have any empty lines. Next step…checking all the plugins.

For some reason, I started alphabetically from the bottom and checked WP-Super-Cache. Boom. There’s the culprit. Right at the end of the file there was a ?> followed by two empty lines. I deleted those, and all-of-the-sudden the feed validated again. W00t.

Now you 30 people or so that subscribe to my feed…it’s working again. Thanks for hanging in there.

Excuse me, Rude!

One thing that drives me crazy is when I’m on a elevator and arrive at my floor only to find that someone is standing right in front of the doors and tries to barge right in the elevator. C’mon man, you know that you have to let people off before you can get on, its common courtesy. Furthermore, don’t assume that I owe you an apology for being in your way when you’re the one who stormed into the elevator without even looking up.

What is with most people nowadays? Do we all just think that we are the most important person around? Is everyone so ideal and individualistic? What gives?

My mother and father taught me well when I was young. They taught me respect, courtesy and chivalry. Are all three dead now? I think they are for a lot of people. If we’re wanting a better world, a better place for our children; shouldn’t we be practicing these fundamental things?

Contributing to WordPress – Feedback, etc…

WordPress is a thriving, diverse and ever changing community. The people behind WP need your feedback. Weigh in, be heard.

Google’s Help for your 404

So you’re already ahead of the game by having a good 404 page, right? Good, now you can even add a bit more spice to them.

While on Google’s Webmaster Tools page, I noticed this little gem:
<script type="text/javascript">
var GOOG_FIXURL_LANG = 'en';
var GOOG_FIXURL_SITE = 'http://www.mydomain.com';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/wm/fixurl.js"></script>

Since users need to find what they’re looking for within 7 seconds to avoid them leaving your site…use this little guy to help out. It will make it easier for them to find the information they’re looking for. So, you’re probably wondering, “What does that do to help me?” Good question, here’s a rundown of what Google says:

• It adds a search box for your site with appropriate search suggestions.
• It tries to provide alternatives to incorrect URLs.

New Plugin: Twitter Links Plus+

I was looking around one day trying to find a simple plugin that could take any mention of a twitter username (eg. @tquizzle ) and link it to that user’s Twitter account page. The idea was simple, yet I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

Everything I found was for either comments only, or simply didn’t accomplish what I wanted. So I sat down, dissected Matt Freedman’s Twitter Links to see how he did this with comments, bounced the idea off of @justinshattuck and @tshaiebly, and then added a little more functionality as far as being able to do the same with post and page content as well as comments. So its a trifecta!

You can jump on over to the Plugin page to see more about it.

Getting Hacked, Taking it down & Ressurection

I haven’t really payed much attention to this blog for quite some time now. The only thing I’ve updated on there was the Lifestream page.

Not too long ago, someone exploited by non-updated WP installation. And in the process, injected <IFRAMES> all over the place. They even managed to infect all files ending in .html with a trojan. Weird, but it happened.

So I took the site down for a while, launched a photoblog…then tonight, up late and in the the mood for some Wordpress bench presses, I decided to bring back TQuizzle.com with a “sha-bang”! All the content is still here, none of it really worthwhile, but I just decided to ditch my old “BlueQ” theme for this simple one.

What’s Eating the Quizzle?

You may be wondering, “is this guy ever gonna update his site and/or his theme?” Valid question, but umm…no I’m not.

Basically, I’m just too busy to write much anymore. Writing takes time, and time is something that is so precious these days. What with meetings during the week (after my day job), preparations to go on a mission trip soon, side business, and working at the Church…I just don’t have any “free” time anymore.

That said, I can’t say that I’m unhappy with this scenario. Right now, my life is good, my family is good, my work is good, my side work is great, and all-in-all…I’m feeling good. That’s the most important thing.

Maybe soon I’ll write, code, or something on here…but for right now — I think I’ll wait.

Don’t Stop Believin’

Journey Lives in Tulsa.