Headed to San Francisco for five days to see my family and some of my friends from a previous job. I’ll probably be on at some point during the day thanks to my Windows Mobile phone and my Asus Eee, but I am not sure if I’ll be posting all that much.

Be good while I’m gone :)

Thanks to Roclar and Starbuck for letting me know that the RSS feed for comments was broken. Apparently the WordPress 2.5 update changed the comment feed path to “/comments/feed/.”

You can now subscribe (or re-subscribe, as it were) to the comments by clicking on the RSS icon in the comment box. You may also click the link that says “Comments RSS.”

Gibberish will be down from 10PM Pacific until approximately 6AM Pacific time tomorrow. My hosting company is moving some of their servers to a new datacenter, and Gibberish is among some of the “lucky” ones. Keep your fingers crossed!

I buy a lot of stuff. Sometime I buy it because I need it, sometimes because I want it, and sometimes because I think an item is just plain whacky that it deserves a review on Gibberish.

With “Black Friday” kicking off the retail season I thought it might be interesting to go back through some of my old reviews (and future reviews, too) and tag a few products that might make great goodies for the little nerdy geek on your gift list.

I am tempted to turn this category into a year-round kind of thing, in case you need a birthday present, graduation gift, or whatever. I have also considered breaking the items down into subcategories based on price: $25 and less, up to $50, up to $100, and over $100. But for now, let’s keep things simple.

Look for this little icon at the bottom of reviews:

I did some work on Gibberish today. It was a mix of maintenance and some feature/usability tweaks. I got rid of the archives in the left sidebar — no one was really using it according to my user logs, and it took up a lot of real estate. I would have used Stilt’s pulldown menu script again, but I had problems with the javascript triggering with more than one pulldown (I had one for archives, and one for categories). I could have fixed it, but that required :effort: and I haven’t been up to it. You probably noticed the categories are all listed out again, this happened at the same time as my upgrade to WordPress 2.3.

I also updated my Akismet anti-spam plugin. It was painless and just involved dropping a new PHP file into my WordPress plugin directory.

I got rid of the voting/star ranking feature for my posts. Despite some “oooh shiny!” participation when I first enabled the feature, no one has really been voting. I think a big drawback to the plugin is that you have to be logged in to vote. 90%+ of Gibberish “users” are spammers trying to get around my moderation queue. I don’t blame any of my real readers for not registering, who the fuck wants to keep track of another username and password?

Google Analyticator was upgraded from version 1.4 to 1.54. It was another easy upgrade: just upload the files. There was a file structure change and the addition of a javascript library of some kind, but I didn’t have to configure my GA options so for now I’m not too interested in what changed. If you’re part of the GoogleAnalyticator team, it would be nice if you included a version history in your README file.

I upgraded Subscribe to Comments to the latest version. Simple drag and drop, but again no version history. I blindly upgrade!! That couldn’t possibly cause any problems, could it? So far so good, but this plugin is mostly for the benefit of my readers who post in a thread. Thread participants should be getting an email when someone has commented to the thread. Please let me know if this is no longer the case.

I nuked a few plugins I’ve had deactivated for awhile, such as Visual.SpellCheck. Visual.SpellCheck worked just fine, but I use Firefox 2.x’s built in spell-checker now and didn’t need it. I deleted the podcast plugin that now ships with WordPress by default, as well as a plugin to aid in QuickTime embedding that I never got to work right.

Anyway, a mix of feature changes as well as site admin news for the other Gibberish readers who use WordPress. I know that Gangrene over at Bunkerguts was nervous about upgrading to WordPress 2.3 and we’d emailed back and forth about it. So far none of my plugin upgrades have caused any conflicts or have thrown any errors, so if you’re running a WP install you may want to consider upgrading as well. Even if you’re not really writing as much as you used to (Stilts, I am looking at you). ;)

So, I thought I would be a good little computer user yesterday and change the password that my databases use on drfaulken.com. I used KeyPass (my review here) to generate a new random password, then I changed the configuration file for my image gallery. I totally forgot to change the config files for Gibberish, my forum, my Shopper request site, and the Tome of Useless Knowledge. I then proceeded to do work and run errands the rest of the day, while the rest of you were unable to get your Tuesday dose of Gibberish.

I feel like a toolbag for forgetting to set the password correctly on so many services, but it makes me feel good that a lot of you emailed or messaged me to let me know things were FUBAR. Sorry for the downtime, and thanks for helping me out.

You may have noticed some slight changes with the Gibberish layout. With the list getting a bit lengthy, I implemented a pulldown navigation scheme for categories and archives. A big thanks to Roclar for coding this up. If you’re interested in putting this feature on your own WordPress blog, please post a comment here and I’ll see what I can do in helping you set it up. I know that the category pulldown extends into the main content area; I haven’t figured out how to extend the left column yet. I’ll fix this up in the near future.

The other new feature is the ability to rate a post. Right now it’s just the traditional five star rating — expect some Gibberish-esque customization in the near future. The Post Star Rating plugin handles all the magic. While the Web site is in Spanish, there are English instructions included in the download. It’s easy to set up, although you may need a grasp of HTML knowledge in order to put the stars where you want them. You must be logged into Gibberish in order to vote. This is the first feature on Gibberish that requires you to have an account. You may register for an account here. In the future, it may be possible to have special roles on Gibberish, including article writing, editing, or moderating. I know that you don’t want one more account to keep track of, but this is the only way the plugin will work.

One of the problems with an interactive blog is that comments can get lost in the shuffle. Many Gibberish readers come from Google searches on products I’ve reviewed, or from people researching some of my C&R rifles. Someone may comment on an article that is months old. These comments may go unnoticed under the default Wordpress layouts. A few months ago I placed the most recent comments in a content block right underneath the search — and comments have gone way up as a result.

Today I’ve enabled an RSS feed for all comments. If you’re just interested in the comments of one entry, this isn’t for you. However, if you’re interested in following/participating in the general Gibberish discussion scrum, you’ll want to add this to your feed aggregator.

Some of my readers ask me why Gibberish is devoid of ads, banners, buttons, or affiliate links. I write a fair number of product reviews, and as one of my friends pointed out I might make enough revenue from AdSense to buy coffee or pay for my hosting each month. I have also received emails from vendors asking me to put a link from Gibberish to their site, or to participate in their affiliate programs.

However, Gibberish has always been, and will be in the foreseeable future, free of revenue-generating programs. Here are my reasons.
Read the rest of this entry »

Just in case you haven’t seen it on your WordPress dashboard, there is an emergency update to take WordPress to 2.1.2. There was a problem with the 2.1.1 version because a cracker modified the WordPress code that would allow for remote PHP execution. Here’s an excerpt from the official WordPress news release:

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

If you are running 2.1.1, as Gibberish was, please update immediately.