[rmfo-blogs.com]: About

JDR is back as (Columbus) Crew Hooligan McGee, starting with an exposé of, well … Carrot Top.

Not kidding.

Just a reminder to everyone; if you go more than a year without posting, we’ll shut down the blog, just to minimize the amount of administrative time required to keep everything up-to-date. Of course, we lovingly save everything in mothballs, waiting for your return.

[Yes, I'm clearing out accounts today. Why do you ask?]

Racheal wanted a fresh start.

Several of our blogs hadn’t seen new posts in over a year. That leads me to believe that their owners have abandoned them. To limit my administrative overhead—it was about a third of the overall blogs, and the amount of weekly administrative overhead I have clearing out the spam traps does add up after a while—I have applied the process I use for the shutdown policy and cleared out 21 old blogs. They are:

• april
• botter
• brian
• colleen
• exodus16_36
• gravygirl
• harmon
• jaymcpherson
• jgreen
• jim
• jonesie
• kizer
• la
• lauren
• leetaft
• lovejungle
• luke
• mike
• ross
• whitey
• zach

If this included you and you still want to blog, please be in touch.

I’m experimenting with subdomains, and I’m using this blog to do it, so … things could break.

As you may have noticed, the fine folks at WordPress have released WP v2.2.2 into the (deuces) wild. I have taken the unusual step of upgrading RMFO-Blogs users first, rather than RMFO-Pro users. Why? Simply put, RMFO-Blogs has been getting hammered because of some Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities in themes. As a result of these vulnerabilities, I made use of the WordPress scanner at BlogSecurity.net to check all activated themes as I did the upgrades. If your theme was vulnerable, I moved you to the WordPress Default theme for the time being.

There is a discussion topic on the Rumor Forum on how to fix your themes. I’m happy to help you do it, but I didn’t have time to do the fixes while trying to secure the server. Having a secure server was far more important to me than having everyone’s theme look pretty today.

2117 CDT: All RMFO-Pro users are now up-to-date.

As I noted last night, RMFO-Blogs’s WordPress installations are the reason that the server has been compromised of late. Starting in the next 15 minutes, I’ll be making upgrades to RMFO-Blogs installations. If you’ve bookmarked your WordPress admin pages, those URLs are going to change. Why? If all of WordPress’s files are in /wordpress/, things get far, far, far easier to update. That hard-to-update nature is why your installs are all out-of-date. I’ve got to fix this, and it’ll just take time tonight, but that’s why they pay me the big bu— … wait, no.

Anyhow. I appreciate your patience, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Update, 23 Jun: All re-architecting and upgrades are complete. Let me know if you have any problems.

Mike seems pretty excited.

Jonathan is giving blogging a third try.

Dave feels like he’s outgrown Xanga. Is that a fat joke, Dave?

Some of you have asked me how you get more folks to read your Weblog. [Some have asked directly; others have asked rhetorically on their Weblogs. ;)] I’ll offer you an example of mine: just post more. To wit:

IJSM.org has lots more traffic than GFMorris.com, which has more than GFMorris.org. Check the relative posting volume of the three, and you’ll see the simple correlation: posting more means more visits.

Now, if you’re concerned about getting people to post comments and interact with you—and yeah, feeling like you’re shouting into a vacuum sucks—the answer to that is simple: ask questions. If you tell a story about something that happened in your life, ask a question at the end of it: “Has something like this ever happened to you?” or “What would you have done in my shoes?” are both good choices.

Do not fret over a lack of interaction. It’s hard to know what people will respond to and what they won’t; I’ve had entries that I’ve never gotten comments on and thought no one read, but then had friends mention to me as something they thought was witty or insightful or something. I’ve also found that soul-searching and declarations typically don’t drive comments, for whatever reason.

Racheal says hello by saying goodbye. Not that she has to say goodbye, given that we can crosspost to Xanga pretty easily…

Rachel was bored with LiveJournal and wanted a change. Of course, we support cross-posting with LiveJournal … and Xanga … and others.

Howdy, it’s _steve again. Lots of you don’t know what the hell FTP is, or how to use it, or how you can make Geof’s life easier by installing your own themes, plugins, etc. Well I’m gonna show you how to do this with my favorite FTP client, SmartFTP.

Download it, install it, run it. In the address box, type in 67.19.147.148. In the Username and Password boxes, use your FTP usernames and passwords; if you don’t know what those are, ask Geof. Click on the Go button and you’ll be connected. Depending on how your windows are set up, you may or may not see the directory structure - if you don’t, click on Window -> Auto Hide All. If you get any dialog boxes asking if you want to save your settings, click Yes.

Some things you can do with FTP:
1) Install a new theme. Download a theme to your HD, unzip it if it’s a compressed file. In public_html/wp-content/themes, create a New Folder by right-clicking on the window on the right. Name the folder whatever your theme name is. Upload all the files for the theme; if it has custom images (which is likely), create a folder in your new folder called “images” and upload your theme images there. You can activate your new theme from the Wordpress Dashboard - just click on the Presentation tab.

2) Install a plugin. Once upon a time, there was something called Wordpress Plugin Manager that made this process incredibly simple for you people. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, WPPM went the way of the dodo, so we’re back to FTPing it. Download and unzip a plugin you want, and follow the instructions provided. This will almost always include uploading a file (or more than one file) into public_html/wp-content/plugins. Once the files are all in place according to the instructions, go to your Wordpress Dashboard. Click on Plugins and activate your new plugin.

3) Create bare subdirectories for stuff. Just create a new folder in public_html and upload whatever you want here. I use this for storing my videoblogs and as backup storage for academic papers.

Now you’re FTP savvy!!!

Rhea’s finally here.

Erik left us, but he came back.

Daniel’s afraid that we won’t stick around long enough for him to figure things out. He’s wrong, though…

Drea seems to have gotten everything moved in just fine.

Looks like Brandi has gotten settled in just fine. Me, I love the Miles posts, especially when he mugs for the camera.

In case you know of any, Allison is looking for a teaching job in Missouri.

A day late, and a dollar short, but we’re open for new business again. Please see the new FAQ on how to get an RMFO-Blog.

Hello there! This is _steve, and Geof has added me as an author here for my incessant tinkering in the World of Wordpress. Today I’m going to teach you how to add quotes to your blog using a very simple plugin.

What you need:
1) An FTP program and FTP access to your blog. FTP programs like CuteFTP and SmartFTP are available for free; and if your FTP access hasn’t been configured yet, Geof can help you with that.
2) This plugin. It’s in .zip format; right-click the link and download it to your computer. Personally, I like to download things to my desktop, so I know I won’t lose them in the maze of directories and subdirectories that makes up a computer.

After you’ve extracted the files from the .zip file, you’ll need to do a very simple bit of uploading via FTP. I’ll show you how to do it, don’t worry; just do what I tell you and you won’t break anything.
1) Upload edit-quotes.php to public_html/wp-admin.
2) Upload wp-quotes.php to public_html/wp-content/plugins.

Now go to your Wordpress dashboard (that’s the admin screen where you write posts and do all those other cool things), click on Plugins at the top, and look for “Random Quotes.” Activate this plugin.

Now click on Manage at the top. You’ll see that “Quotes” now appears as an option under Manage. Click on Quotes and add/remove/edit whatever quotes you want. Providing an author for the quote is optional.

The only thing you might be concerned about is the length of your quote, depending on how you want to use the plugin. There are two principal things you can do with this plugin:
1) Create a page of quotations. This is incredibly easy. All you have to do is create a page and insert <!–wp_quotes_page–> into the text of the page. If you only want a page with the quotes, then just create a blank page and only put this in the text of the page.
2) Insert a quote into your theme. There are any number of ways you can do this, limited only by the design of your theme and your imagination. Below, I’ll show you two common applications - creating a randomizing subtitle that changes with each page reload, and inserting a random quote into your sidebar.

Creating a randomizing subtitle
Whew…that sounds tough! But I promise you that it’s very, very easy. Once again, you’ll need FTP access to your blog. And you’ll also need a theme that already has a subtitle encoded into it.

Geek Note: It’s actually possible to create your own class in style.css and, by playing around with the pixel-notated margins, to insert a randomizing subtitle into a theme that otherwise has no subtitle. I’m not going to expound any further on that, though, because if you understood what I just said, you’re smart enough to figure out how to do it on your own. I only mention it here because this was how I first created a randomizing subtitle in WP 1.2.

Now, using your Wordpress Dashboard, click on Presentation -> Theme Editor, and scroll down to the bottom of the file called Header. You’ll see a bit of code somewhere near the bottom, probably surrounded by other code you may or may not understand, that reads like this:
<?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>

All you have to do is delete exactly and ONLY that bit of code (and none of the other bits of code surrounding it), and replace it with this:
<?php wp_quotes_random(); ?>

Now save the file…and that’s it! Now you have a randomizing subtitle on your blog. If you find that you can’t edit the file, contact Geof and he can fix the problem for you.

Inserting a random quote into your sidebar

This is only a tiny bit more difficult. In the Theme Editor, click on Sidebar. You’re going to be inserting the same bit of code as above - <?php wp_quotes_random(); ?>

Now here comes the only tricky part: figuring out where to put the quote. You definitely do NOT want to put it above the code that reads <div id=”menu”>…but where you do put it is up to you. If you don’t really know what you’re looking at, try experimenting with different places. Just remember to ONLY insert the code above, and don’t delete anything unless you know what you’re doing. If you put it in a place that messes something up, or if it just doesn’t look good there, don’t worry; just go back to your Theme Editor, erase the code you added, and try putting it somewhere else.

Once you’ve found that place…that’s it! You’ve successfully added a randomizing quote to your sidebar. Congratulations!

Geek Note: the website and various instructions/recommendations for the plugin is here. The quotes are stored in a specially-created table in the database, so if you ABSOLUTELY MUST delete the quote data you’ll need to use your cPanel install to delete the table called “wp-quotes” in phpMyAdmin. Warning: if you don’t understand any of this, just ignore it. Even if you deactivate and uninstall the plugin from Wordpress, you’re not hurting anything by leaving the quotes table in the database. In fact, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s better to just leave the database alone.

The upgrade to WP 2.0.2 will be finished by tomorrow (Sunday) night. I’ll re-open signups come Monday.

With the release of WordPress 2.0, I’ve got a ton of upgrades to do … 82, in fact. RMFO-Pro bloggers get priority [they'll be done in the next week], and after that, everyone else will get done. My no-later-than date is 30 days from today, 26 Jan 2006. I hope to be done well before that.

If you’re curious as to where your install lies in the priority chain, leave a comment or contact me otherwise.

As a result, signups are suspended until further notice.

Given the bugs that have shown up in the 2.0 builds presently available and the likelihood that 2.0.1 [or some other numbering scheme] will come out, upgrades have been suspended until further notice.

While I wasn’t paying attention, Rich Manalang updated his WP-Amazon plugin. I have taken the time tonight to roll out that plugin to all [rmfo-blogs] users.

I have inputted the old [caedmonscall.net] Associates ID on everyone’s installs. If you use this plugin to grab images or add links to books you’ve read or music you’re listening to and people check out those links and then buy stuff on Amazon, we get a cut of the sale. As you know, [rocksmyfaceoff.net] is a non-profit, so this is another way you can help us out.