SilentGap

Ok, I’ve run into this problem a few times and keep forgetting what the solution is, so here’s a good reference post for myself and the rest of you wondering.

Let’s say you have in your WordPress install 5 or more categories, but to the general public, there’s only two categories you want to show (such as the case with http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/). In this blog there’s multipule categories, some of them for a public post / Q&A section and the other for the author blog posts and still, some more for the sidebar featured products section. Well, to the general public, they don’t need to see the Featured Products or the Q&A section in the general feed, but rather just the blog posts, from the various authors partisipating. So let’s say they post to the category ID’s 22 & 23, well in your link tag in the header place the following tag.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed"

href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>?cat=22,23" />

Which outputs in html as

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

title="Mid Market Innovators RSS Feed"

href="http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed/?cat=22,23" />

In the case of Mid Market Innovators, the feed was placed into a feedburner plugin, which redirects the http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed to the feedburner link. But, this should still work if you’re not using feedburner. If you run into any troubles, post a comment.

Hey everyone,

I’ve come across a problem when building out a template where we need to display one post one the home page, but it needs to be a single view (so that it displays comments on that post) but cannot impact the query that shows a list of blog posts below. So, here’s a solution: » Read the rest of this entry «

Ok, for all of you that like to laugh, here’s a new scam (or an old one, repackaged). As many of you know, I’m all mac now, at home and at work. I also set up Google Alerts for my work and church (and a few other things too). Well, spammers (or a new breed) are now setting up plain sites that have business names in it, there’s no text, just a really long title, with all of the business names. » Read the rest of this entry «

So i’ve taken a fairly big brake from the internet (a whole 3 days) by going up to my family’s cabin in the Black Hills (pictures and video yet to be posted). There’s no internet, and well, when your up in the mountain, there’s not much else, except for a few other cabins. I arrived on a Wednesday, only to find myself waking up on Thursday to 10 inches (and then some) of snow.

It was the perfect mini-vacation (except for the fact that I could still receive text on my phone and everyone decided it would be a good idea to check up on me EVERY day to see how i was doing – you know, if I’m alive, breathing, or dead). Our families cabin is a 2 bedroom, one full bath, with kitchen, dinning, wrap around porch, sleeping cabin (sleeps 4ish), and a huge slate fireplace. The carpet is a short green shag carpet, the kind you can feel the carpet fibers slip in between your toes when you’re not wearing socks).

It was a good time, complete with 2 channels on the tv, and a dvd / vcr player. I watched, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Die Hard I, George of the Jungle, Young Guns and a few other movies, all on vcr tapes, all of them in bad shape. There were Tonka Toasters you could make yourself some toasted desert pies – but you have to be careful, the toasters themselves melt if you leave them in the fire too long (a whole storry right there that i won’t go into). And I brought my MacBook Pro along & managed to get the majority of new mock done for this blog site.

The one problem I’ve noticed when you’re doing something for your own site is that you are your own worst critic. This isn’t anything new, but this past week, it really hit home. Especially since my photoshop skills are not up to par and my creativity doesn’t like to be stretched (unless i’m playing guitar).

So, in just a week or two SilentGap will be sporting it’s new skin & the new platform will be WordPress instead of Blogger (sorry Blogger, not a fan of your features – you just not my type and you don’t do it for me. It was a good time while it lasted, but I must break it off w/ you. Take care), which I’m quite supprised that a producted owned by Google isn’t done up better, but oh well, they can’t be perfect either.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

So, at 5.30am I was trying to get my kid to fall back asleep (and my swaddling skill’s have yet to improve past the point where he doesn’t get one arm loose), and in the process found myself waking up, wandering over to check my email and my reader. In it was a post recommended by boagworld from A Beautiful Web titled “Time to stop showing clients static design visuals“

The post brings up a few good points, the first one being:

Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before.

And as an example the post points the reader to http://forabeautifulweb.com/demo/2008/09/21/index.html.

I love the idea and agree with the author that a working mock up is extremely handy, and leaves a lot of un-answered questions, answered.

But for sites mock’s that are complicated or too time consuming to turn a static mock into a working build, how practical is this? And when the site requires some Ajax work, how far do you take it if the ajax has to integrate with a database?

Andy Clarke brings up some other good points about having a working mock up, read the full article at http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/time_to_stop_showing_clients_static_design_visuals/

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Jeff Atwood had a good post on protecting your site / blog from being hacked. » Read the rest of this entry «

On July 31, an article was posted on ZDNet.com about some worms on the web, squirming there way through Facebook and MySpace. The actual method of attack seems to be through,… [long pause] … Social Enginering (which means, you’re curiosity get’s the best of you and someone tricks you into thinking you’re doing one thing, when you’re actually doing another).

Some of the messages and comments posted to the social network sites include:

- Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street
- Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet
- Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam
- Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others.

The messages and comments include links to a fake YouTube-like site. Clicking on the link redirects the targer to another YouTube clone fitted with a note to download the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player.

However, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file called codesetup.exe is downloaded to the victim machine; this file is also a network worm. Kaspersky said [from Kaspershy Lab's]its security suite detected the threats proactively and signatures were added to the database on July 31, 2008.

In short – don’t download anything unless you read the file name and know exactly what it does.

Original article can be found here

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

I’ve just noticed that on the Google code site, there’s a new browser debug tool for all of us developers. The good news, it works across browser lines, that means not only Firefox, but also IE 6, IE 7, Opera, etc.

I originally found out about this guy on digg.com & the explanation is below:

code.google.com — pi.debugger is a cross browser web development tool allows you to examine web page’s structural and debug with console. A real alternative to Firebug because it works in all browsers and has more features than Firebug light.

Well, to say that it’s a “real alternative to Firebug” i think is a bit of a stretch, but for Firebug lite, it seems to be a great alternative (NOTE: I haven’t actually worked with Firebug lite – but it’s info can be found here (site currently not working) and a review on it can be found here).

Simply put – point an html script tag to src=“http://pi-js.googlecode.com/files/debugger.js” place it below your “title” tag & refresh your page. Viola.

The problem you run into w/ this type of JavaScript debugging insert is that you can’t edit the HTML or CSS at all, unlike the full version of Firebug for Firefox.

All in all, this is a handy tool if you’re lacking the IE debug toolbar or Firebug extension and is an informative ‘Read Only” tool, but don’t be expecting it to work like the full version of Firebug.

~tim