Although about as technologically gifted as a gorilla’s bum, The Leither (a local magazine I occasionally contribute to- if only in loud hand gestures and stilted opinions) has signed up to Twitter this month. This is a piece I wrote to celebrate this move. Although technologically akin to turning up late to a student party with three empty bottles of blue nun in a ragged paper bag we’re tweeting…

twitter is the latest online service to be hyped to such a lofty a lofty degree, in a rash of himalayic superlatives, that you could be forgiven for thinking it offers a cure to swine flu, a solution to toxic debt, or the answer to life’s persistent questions. it does not.

twitter (once you’ve signed up at twitter.com) lets you share a few choice words with friends. think: “anyone fancy a film tonight?” don’t think:
“anyone fancy a beer with the editor?” your message is limited to no more than 140 characters known as a ‘tweet’.
tweets can be trivial “i’m at the beach, mmh Seafeild”, or it could be a link to an article you’re reading, a photo of your new puppy. simple stuff you’d like to share. once logged in you can find and add friends near and far (you can choose to ‘follow’ bands, there’s a few celebrities on there… @BarackObama) their tweets will appear on your homepage where you can reply to messages or just keep an eye on what’s happening. friends can choose to follow you by searching your name or through invitation. by connecting with these other twitter users you create a global conversation, accessed easily through your phone, IM, mobile browser, or old- fashioned web. at home at work at play.
Read On »

i wanted to delete a plethora of posts on Meta Comment. mainly irrelevant and mostly useless i was close to just deleting everything pre-2009. fresh start. but i don’t like editing old posts, i hardly moderate comments- its a fun old world and reading some of my earlier stuff is always amusing (to me– and let’s get something straight it’s all about me).

the alternative plan was to separate the new posts from the (very) old… just this week i discovered a great hack for Wordpress that allows me to display a ‘this post is old’ banner on posts of a certain maturity. y’see when i switched over from iBlog there were a lot of formatting issues – not to mention missing images, broken links etc – i tried to weed them out over time, but got busy, so anything from ‘05/’06 is a real mess. yay for $date_check_age

this simple code checks the age of a post (set at 999 days or older here) then displays the ‘.expired’ element (must be defined in your CSS) only to visitors to those elderly posts… it doesn’t print (or echo?) the element in your new material. so:


< ?php
$date_check_age = '';
if (is_single()) {
$days = 999;
if (time() - strtotime($posts[0]->post_date_gmt) > ($days * 86400)) {
$date_check_age = 'this is an archived post' ;

}
}
?>

< ?php echo $date_check_age; ?>

Read On »

[edit: i've now added Starred Review to the Wordpress Plugin Directory as version 1.1a which from now on automatically updates itself. enjoy]

I’ve added support for Wordpress Widgets to Starred Review. Along with some minor backend formatting alterations, no where near the quality it should be, but that’s for another day. I’ve also tidied-up the actual output, a bit more readable- less of that ‘classes’ jumble. 

So Download Starred Review 1.1a, just overwrite the current plugin and make sure (if you’re not using widgets) you’ve got the new badge code:

<?php starred_review_badge('limit', 'category');?>

Starred Review 1.1 supports Wordpress 2.7.1, will soon have a Dashboard Widget for OS X and be listed on the WP Plugin Repository (if only they’ll email me confirmation?) all that good stuff just round the corner! Thanks to Peter at Apartment One Six for his widget tutorial.

If you’d like to see any future updates / additions, just let me know (via the comments feed or email). I’m pretty happy with this revision but let me know if you find any issues with this one!

Two years ago I released a patched version of a great little Wordpress plugin called “Starred Review” by Marc Hodges. It didn’t really work that well, it still doesn’t rock the casbah but is now stable on Wordpress 2.7.

Download Starred Review for Wordpress.

You need to upload the starred-review folder and starred-review.php to your ‘plugin’ directory. There’s a readme file in the folder. A changelog too. Fun, eh? Notice (old Starred Review users) that the ‘badge’ code has changed (at least this is true with Wordpress 2.7.1), it is now:
< ?php starred_review_badge('limit', 'category'); ?>

Here’s the homepage: metacomment.com/starred-review/, I promise to upload some CSS magic, an installation tutorial and make good on some old ideas. Thank you!

A real apology now. I’m sorry, I really am… about the complete lack of ‘Meta Comment’ in the last few months. This ‘blog’ has foundered on the shores of aesthetics, parody and nothing else… I understand the ‘content’ has suffered.

This site should be a personal account of things going on around me, an archive of funny little nuggets of daily life and the odd and occasionally splendid people I encounter. If this page had any mantra it would be something along the lines of ‘you should have been there’.

From an early-days defender of Web 2.0 I do believe everyone should be free to publish as much self-obsessed rubbish as they like; I also love criticism and I do wish (in line with Web 2.0’s ‘community’ spirit) there was a little more debate in the comments here.

What more is there to say: must try better. I’m not going to pander- just sayin’! Maybe I keep my best side in the notebook. Perhaps the keyboard created this deft shrine to frivolous comment.