Torn Elements

I’d decided I wanted a ‘Random Thoughts’ area in my sidebar for little tidbits worth mentioning but not worthy of posting about.

So, off I went on a plugin hunt. After a half hour of hunting and asking around in IRC I was finally given a link. By that time I’d come up with a better idea.

Text Widget. By creating one line of HTML within a Text Widget I managed to get my sick little thought out into the open.

Keep in mind that Text Widgets obey the laws of HTML very nicely. If you can do it on a HTML web page, you can likely do it in a Text Widget as well.

<ul><li>Ever notice how Puritan Stew comes in the same size cans as dog food?</li></ul>

That’s all the code I needed to scare readers off Puritan Stew forever.

I could likely fancy it up a bit using CSS but it seems to fit well into the sidebar as is.

As far as maintaining something like this… It can’t be any more work than maintaining a plugin. A quick line of code, save, and we’re done.

<li> <i>Give a man a program, you frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, you frustrate him for a lifetime.</i> — unknown</li>

Plus, as an added bonus, you’ll never have to worry about those pesky upgrades that plugins seem to go through so frequently these days. It’s all you!

So, next time you’re thinking about something simple for your sidebar, think Text Widget first, plugin second.

Plugins Plugins, WordPress

Sometimes I think I take the long road just because the short road may not be interesting enough. Today’s post illustrates this perfectly.

Now that the site is somewhat complete my thoughts have been turning to getting the word out. I’ll be joining several social networks in the coming days (weeks?), so I’ll be posting about them once I’ve formulated a few thoughts in their use.

My first stop in doing this was Twitter. Great little social utility and appears simple enough. The hardest part of using it is the selection of a suitable Twitter Client.

The Long Road

The first client suggested to me was twirl. A brief visit to their website informed me that Adobe Air needed to be installed on my system first. Great! More overhead to strain FrankenPuter (a computer built from the dead bodies of 4 other computers).

Deciding to pass on installing more overhead, my thoughts turned to a .NET application. At least I already had that installed!

I decided to give a .NET client a try as I figured it would require no additional installs to get it to run. A simple solution to my aversion to installing more stuff, right?

Wrong! Sure, the client installed in seconds, but it also initiated a download/install of additional .NET crap which took approximately 30 minutes to install. Then, the horrors of all horrors presented itself. A reboot. Gah! (This was seriously starting to cut in on my ‘goofing around’ time!)

Once rebooted the above mentioned client installed itself quite quickly. After taking a quick (?!) 5 minutes to restart all my desktop apps, I launched it. Cannot connect and other error messages dominated the rest of my hour.

Where did this simple task go wrong? Join Twitter, grab a client, done! How hard can this be? As it turns out, not hard at all.

The Short Road

I was not getting any younger here! This above process had now wasted an hour and a half of my life. Screw it!

Install AIR, twirl, done! (With NO reboots!)

I was installed, connected, and ready to tweet within minutes. Ah yes, the boring Short Road.

FrankenPuter will just have to deal with it.

If you’re interested at all, you can follow me: http://twitter.com/LarryMonte

Blog Promotion Asides, Blog Promotion, Social Media