Category: Meta

Posts about this blog.

datetime

On recent weekends, I’ve been playing around with my blog. I’m not an engineer, so working on my site is a time when I get to try my hand at basic coding. One thing that most of you have probably noticed is that my blog was returning the incorrect value for the datetime attribute on posts. I apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused my readers. Specifically, my site was displaying the PDT time as if it were UTC. On my previous post, you would see something like this:

<time class="entry-date" datetime="2014-10-31T22:01:56+00:00">October 31, 2014 10:01 pm</time>

Weird, huh? Doesn’t that indicate that it was posted at 3 PM in California? After reading how to format the date and time, I ended up manually creating what I think ‘c’ should return by doing this in my functions.php file:

esc_attr( get_the_date( 'Y-m-d\TH:i:sT' ) )

That seemed to do the trick. Now that same post looks like this:

<time class="entry-date" datetime="2014-10-31T22:01:56PDT">October 31, 2014 at 10:01 pm</time>

For comprehensiveness, here’s what I currently have. It might be helpful for someone else or for me to refer to later. I’ve certainly benefited from others sharing their code.  And yeah, I know that I’m calling stuff that I’m not using but I didn’t want to change the numbers around:

// Set up and print post meta information.
 printf( '<span class="entry-date"><a href="%1$s" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="%7$s">%3$s at %6$s</time></a></span> <span class="byline"><span class="author vcard">By <a class="url fn n" href="/about/" rel="author">%5$s</a></span></span>',
 esc_url( get_permalink() ),
 esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ),
 esc_html( get_the_date() ),
 esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ),
 get_the_author(),
 esc_html( get_the_time() ),
 esc_attr( get_the_date( 'Y-m-d\TH:i:sT' ) ) // Did this because using c as per the template default was returning the local time without correctly specifying the offset or timezone, so I did the formatting manually after reading http://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time
 );

Let me know in the comments if I was misinterpreting the old behavior as a bug.

Update on February 22nd, 2015: The Twenty Fifteen theme uses a function called twentyfifteen_entry_meta. To get this to work, copy that function from /wp-content/themes/twentyfifteen/inc/template-tags.php over to functions.php in your child theme. Then replace any parameter set to ‘c’ to ‘Y-m-d\TH:i:sT’ instead.

Fewer Ws

Now that I’ve moved to wysz.com (from thewysz.com), I decided to trim my URLs even more by not using the www subdomain in my URLs. I usually prefer www on URLs because I’m used to seeing it, and I think we’ve been trained to use it to recognize URLs. However, since “wysz” starts with a W, I think the www prefix was actually hurting its readability. It looked like URLs were mistyped with four Ws.

Let me know if you see any broken redirects as a result of this change, and thanks to everyone on Twitter who convinced me to go through with it.

Moving!

I’m about to start the process of moving thewysz.com to wysz.com. I will almost certainly screw something up, and my blog will get b0rked at some point in the process. I’m turning off comments for now so nobody’s input gets lost during the transition.

Stay tuned to Twitter for any updates, and please contact me via Twitter or wysz@thewysz.com if you notice things that need to be fixed.

Update: Okay, looks like most things are working now on wysz.com. I’m having a few minor issues, but let me know if you see anything that’s broken. If you don’t notice it, I might not even bother fixing it. 😉

Slowing down

Today is October 26th, 2008, and this will probably be my only blog entry of the day. On October 26th, 2003, I published a whopping 20 blog entries. Why do I blog less often now? My life certainly hasn’t gotten any more boring than it was when I spent most of my time sitting in a dorm room watching Strong Bad cartoons and missing home. Now I do much more exciting things, like read movie plots on Wikipedia.

I often feel like I have writer’s block, but I can think of a few reasons why I don’t have as much to say on my blog. First of all, I have more places to share things now. I use Twitter for quick updates, and I use Google Reader to share links. Go ahead and follow/subscribe to those if you want more constant updates from me. I’d also like to think that I’ve become more picky about the quality of my blog entries. This should mean a better quality experience for you, my readers.

It looks like it was five years ago that I first tried a video chat. I’ve been using it so long now (to talk with my family) that I forgot how novel the concept used to be. On this day in 2004, I blogged four times, all about Wesley Willis. I hear Mike is a fan. In 2005, I blogged about my dreams, science, and zombies. I wish I could remember what the dream was; I guess it was too personal to blog. Maybe I need a diary. I didn’t blog at all on October 26th, 2006 or on this day last year.

If you read this, then please read this

Short version so you don’t really have to read:
Don’t take anything you see on this blog seriously.

A note to my readers about context:

This is my personal blog. In case you haven’t been reading since the beginning of my blogging existence, let me use this post to explain why you should not take anything you find here seriously, unless you find some other reason, outside of my blog, to do so.

I started a website in college because I was hitting the size limits of my AIM profile, where I posted silly thoughts. This is the same profile where, during high school, I announced that I was selling the top 25% of my “senior page” in the yearbook to the highest-bidding advertiser. To the people who I chatted with online, it was obviously a joke, since they knew I liked to make ridiculous claims about corporate sponsorship, including offering to have an Apple logo tatooed on my forehead so we could get more video equipment. In college, after hearing that my high school alma mater would be getting unifoms, I quickly mocked up a sample shirt that would bring extra money to the school:

Back of a polo shirt with school logo on top, followed by corporate logos including Marlboro. Also includes the logo of Penn Charter.

Again, I really hope that anyone who paid attention understood that it was a joke, especially since two of the logos are pretty extreme. Penn Charter could be considered a competitor, and Marlboro is, well, a cigarette company.

Over time, as I really got into the blogging thing, I developed a bit of an online persona, who was different than the “real” me. Some features were exaggerated, and others were completely new. I created an angry arrogant character who constantly proclaimed to be awesome, and sought to avoid all interactions with people. In reality, I actually like people, I’m generally happy, and I’m more social than ever. (If you don’t think I’m social now, ask someone who knew me a few years ago. It’s all relative.) It didn’t really matter who this character was, because most people who read my blog would never meet me in real life, and those who did knew me before the blog, and understood it was an act.

As my blog developed, it became a mix of satire/humor, venting about college life, miscellaneous announcements about my life, and other random thoughts on subjects such as technology. While I did have categories, the posts weren’t explicitly labeled as “joke” or “serious.”

Sometimes I would create fake news stories:
Shopping is Random
Apple announces move to all-black product lineup
AOL to Shut Down Free Instant Messaging Service
Analyst: Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store Doomed to Fail

Or stories that were only partially accurate:
Apple NEWS ALERT

Or just make stuff up:
My First Lecture
Inside The Blog
News Bit and/or Announcement 

They weren’t labeled as humor, because it’s generally not my style to announce a joke. I later learned that this is similar to Steve Martin’s approach, where his jokes don’t have punch lines. I am a bit more extreme, since my jokes aren’t all in the context of a standup act. As I said in the previous paragraph, they’re listed right along with my serious posts. With some jokes, I don’t even expect anyone to find them funny except for myself. Like when I tell people that I’m Canadian. I don’t find it hilarious, but I do it anyway because it’s a harmless lie that nobody has a reason do disbelieve. It’s like telling someone that I had spaghetti for dinner last night when it was actually angel hair pasta. It’s only funny to me because it’s such a random thing to lie about. So on this blog, I may be joking at any moment, and it may not always be obvious.

When it came to the complaints on my blog (I even promoted it as “mostly bitter complaints” for a while), in most cases they were about things that didn’t really bother me. I only blogged them because I thought it was funny to make such a big deal about it. People do this all the time when they pretend to be really concerned about something like donut-cutting etiquette. Seinfeld made millions doing this. If I really was upset about something, chances are I would consider it too personal to blog about. As I’ll tell you in an upcoming paragraph, my blog isn’t a diary.

I understand that this lack of distinction may cause confusion for people, but since it’s my blog, I don’t see this as a bad thing. I’ll make the content appropriate for me, and not worry about what everyone else on the Internet may not like about my approach.

Now someone may say that I shouldn’t treat everything in life as a big joke. That’s true, but this blog is not my life, and it’s not about my life. If this blog was about my life, it would be one of those boring diary blogs, where nearly every post would look like this:

Today was pretty good. Nothing hilarious happened, but nothing made me notably upset either. I spent a lot of time on the Internet. I had a sandwich for lunch. It tasted like it always does and that’s why I like it. Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.

But that’s fortunately not how my blog is. I generally only blog about things that I find exciting, annoying, or funny. If some people misinterpret my blog as my general, everyday thoughts or mood, then they probably don’t have an accurate impression of the “real” me. I get to be the real me in real life, where I (usually) am careful not to say anything too extreme if I don’t think people will know it’s a joke. My blog is where I can do whatever I want. For example, today in the café someone had left a folder on a counter that said “University of Calgary” on it. Someone asked me if it was mine, and while a potential joke queued up in my head where I would pretend to be offended that someone accused me of being Canadian, I decided not to go with it and just said, “No.” On my blog, I totally would have gone for it, and not really cared if she got it or not.

WordPress 2.5

This is my first post using WordPress 2.5. I’ve never posted about a version upgrade before, but I have a few comments this time. I didn’t even read the blog entry about it before upgrading, so I didn’t know what to expect. I’m a pretty reckless early adopter.

The upgrade went smoothly until the end, when I couldn’t access the upgrade page because the Maintenance Mode plugin blocked me. I don’t know if I did something wrong, but I just temporarily renamed the plugin’s folder to deactivate it, and everything was fine.

The next thing that I noticed was that WordPress was again inserting the WordPress version number in my HTML, which I like to remove for security reasons. I had previously removed it from my theme in the header.php file, but they’ve started generating it a different way now. Fortunately, there’s a quick one-line fix that I discovered on Safirul Alredha’s blog. Just add this line to the functions.php file of your current theme:
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);

You can put it right at the beginning, after the <?php line.

Finally, when I opened the Write tab to compose this entry, I saw how different the new layout is. I’m a little disappointed that so much has been moved from the right sidebar and put all vertically on the left. Unless I write a really short post, I have to scroll down just to choose the post category. I wish I could just drag these modules around and arrange it how I want. The good news is that when I clicked Preview, it looked like that annoying Safari line break issue has been fixed, so I won’t have to wait for Firefox to open every time I create an entry.

How should I roll?

I first launched Wyszdom without a “blogroll,” which is a list of links to other blogs that the author reads. I like to recommend reading to my visitors, but I’m not sure of the best way to filter my list. I’m subscribed to 69 feeds in Google Reader, so simply publishing a list of all of my subscriptions would be impractical. Only about 30 of these feeds are actual blogs, and I’d guess 20 of them would be blogs that you’re not already aware of. So do I just list this subset of 20, which is mostly my friends’ blogs? Would you, my reader, be interested in that?

Of course if I do decide to go that route, where do I draw the line? Only my best friends, or anyone who can call me an acquaintance? What if I disagree with what they write? Am I endorsing them? I’m not really sure what to do.

For now, I think I’ll stay without a blogroll, and just mention any of my subscriptions as I have things to say about them. Especially if Mike says something exceptionally stupid.