Diversions: bloggercode, nerdiness, and geourl

Posted on 2005-09-14 by Jim Vanderveen

I was looking at Mike Little’s Journalized-blue page today, to see if there was anything new there, and I ran across some “diversionary” stuff in the left sidebar. I played with investigated the following:

My blogger code: B2 d++ t+ k s+ u- f i- o++ l- c–

I’m in the 89th percentile of nerdiness:
I am nerdier than 89% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!
Scary, especially considering that I’m being compared only to the people who took this quiz, presumably self-selected for nerdiness…

Lastly, I registered my blog on GeoURL. I did this the Right Way, by getting GeoURL to ping my blog after I plugged the geotags for my location into the header. (I tried to whip up a quick-and-dirty header plugin for this, but it wasn’t doing what I expected, so I just hard-coded the geo.* meta tags into my blog header.) You can use this page to generate geo.* meta tags for your own location. I think XHTML requires all tags to be lowercase, so be sure to change the generated <META name=blah> tags to <meta name=blah>.
GeoURL

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Google sitemaps with WordPress

Posted on 2005-09-13 by Jim Vanderveen

I stopped by Joseph’s blog a few days ago and read the article about Vint Cerf moving to Google. This got me thinking about an earlier Google-related post about sitemaps on Joseph’s blog, where he wondered about a WordPress plugin to generate Google sitemaps. I figured that the WordPress community had probably finished with this by now, and it seems that they have. This article discusses the development of several such plugins and their features. If you check this link, you can peruse a menu of sitemap plugins.

I chose Arne Brachhold’s sitemap generator plugin. As usual with WordPress, installation was simple. I had two minor problems (see below), both covered by the FAQ section on the sitemap plugin page.

I downloaded the plugin to my WordPress’ wp-content/plugins directory, then activated it from the Plugins admin page, http://your.blog/url/wp-admin/plugins.php. Next I went to Options/Sitemap and adjusted the options to suit my blog, then clicked “Rebuild Sitemap” and ran into problem #1–I had forgotten to make sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz writable. Easy to fix, see the FAQ section on the sitemap plugin page. Once I took care of this, I successfully built my first sitemap file, but got a “Could not ping to Google” error, also addressed in the FAQ section (although not in the plugin sourcefile). I clicked on the URL after the “Could not ping to Google” error, which basically told me that I needed a Google account. (Yet another password to keep track of, sigh…) So, create Google account, wait for email address verification, then manually cut-and-paste the sitemap URL into the Google account manager. Am I finished yet? No! Google now wants me to prove that I have access to the sitemap’s directory by creating a particular Google-supplied filename. I’m starting to wonder if Google sitemaps are worth the hassle, but I’ve come this far and hopefully this is the final step. touch GOOGLE0123456789abcdef.html, click “Verify” on the Google’s “My Sitemaps” page, and a nice green VERIFIED message comes up. Then I went back to my WordPress Options/Sitemap page and tried “Rebuild Sitemap”:

Successfully pinged Google at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://my.blog/url/sitemap.xml.gz

Woo hoo, success! I’d better alert my web hosting company so that they aren’t blindsided by the sudden bandwidth spike. 😉

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Samir’s ‘Steam’ theme available

Posted on 2005-09-12 by Jim Vanderveen

A few months ago I installed Steam as one of my blog’s themes. I got an email from Eric S. Raymond yesterday asking for a copy of the theme, since the original author doesn’t seem to have it available any longer. I’m happy to oblige! The following files are available:

  1. Samir’s “as-released” Steam 1.5;
  2. A patch file which adds theme-switcher support to Steam 1.5;
  3. Steam 1.5.1, which is merely 1.5 with the above patch.

I figured that I might as well write up a little “how-to” as long as I was going through the effort of packaging this theme. This isn’t necessarily “best practices”, it’s just what I did and it seemed to work.

The patch was created per this article. The 1.5.1 theme was packaged using gnutar:
tar -czvf steam-1.5.1.tgz steam-1.5.1/*

To use this theme, download Steam 1.5.1 to your WordPress’ wp-content/themes directory. If your web browser doesn’t automatically extract the files, use gnutar:
tar -xzf steam-1.5.1.tgz
If you have Ryan’s wp_theme_switcher installed, activated, and your current theme supports it, you should be all set. Otherwise, go to your blog’s admin page then select “Presentation” then “Themes”, then select the theme you’d like to use, (presumably Steam 1.5.1).

Hope this helps!

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Using Google search for gymnastics meet results

Posted on 2005-09-12 by Jim Vanderveen

My wife was trying to find gymnastic competition scores for some of the past seasons, so I whipped up this Google query for her:

site:norcal-gymnastics.org “meet results” 2003 firstname lastname

No big deal, but she’s going to need to do these types of queries quite a bit. Having this here will save her a lot of time.

This works very well for 2003, but NorCal Gymnastics is currently tweaking the 2004 files which is making it difficult to find last year’s results. The 2005 season has only recently begun, so there aren’t many results available yet. And obviously since I’m querying NorCal Gymnastics, it will only return results from Northern California. If you’re in another region, you’re on your own! 😉

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Tigris & Euphrates, f2f and online

Posted on 2005-09-11 by Jim Vanderveen

Tigris & Euphrates cover
Last month I stopped by Viking Hobby and bought myself a new boardgame, Tigris & Euphrates. I would have preferred to give the game a trial play at one of the Sacramento Boardgame Meetups, but I hadn’t seen anybody bring it. Since this is the highest rated game (after Puerto Rico) on BoardGameGeek I figured it was a pretty safe purchase anyway. I’ve played this game twice and been very pleased with it. It’s proven very popular at game nights, but sadly my family hasn’t been interested in playing at home. 🙁

Lucky for me, Simon invited me to play an online version of the game hosted by BoardGameGeek. I’m a few turns into my first PBEM game, and the mechanics seem perfectly faithful to the original board game. The only thing I don’t like about this implementation is the lack of socializing–I much prefer playing in person, especially at The Fox and Goose with some friends and a few pints! 😉 But in all honesty, there are some advantages to the online game: scheduling is a non-issue, since all the players don’t have to be “present” simultaneously; one can spend more time considering a play, since there’s no rush; and finally the game accurately tracks the score. (I often forget to collect points for monuments when I play. Doh!)

I see in this post that Nicholas enjoys Tigris & Euphrates. I hereby invite him (and any other readers) to join this game. The password is “sonicchicken”. You’ll need to know how to play already, as this isn’t a tutorial. If you’re not a BoardGameGeek member, just register (for free). Leave a comment here when you join so that I know when to start the game, as well as to see who’s playing.

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“Kinda captcha” on acetylene blog

Posted on 2005-09-10 by Jim Vanderveen

Hmm. I just left a comment on one of Nicholas’ articles and was promped for a “Kinda captcha”. I’ll have to ask him what that’s all about when we meet tonight. I wonder if this is the add-on for Spam Karma 2?

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Bush: One of the worst disasters to hit U.S.

Posted on 2005-09-10 by Jim Vanderveen

Sky News in Ireland has apparently clued in to the fact that Gee Dubya is “one of the worst disasters to hit the U.S.”:
Funny caption under Bush's picture on TV

Hilarious! But did this really appear on television? According to snopes.com, it did!

I know it’s true,
oh so true,
’cause I saw it
on TV!

— John Foggerty

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Caitlin’s upcoming gym meets

Posted on 2005-09-09 by Jim Vanderveen

Caitlin has two more gymnastic competitions this weekend and next. A few of her fans 😉 have been asking me for details, and I’ve been embarassing myself by forgetting where, when, etc. I’m posting the information here so I can just tell people to check the blog. I get the “good Dad” points, without needing to remember anything beyond my blog’s URL and my daughter’s name–“Just search the blog for Caitlin!”

The first meet is the 2005 River City Classic, tomorrow (2005-09-10), at Byer’s Gymnastics in south Sacramento. Caitlin’s group starts at about 17:30, and I’m guessing that they will finish by 20:00. (That’d be 5:30-8:00 PM for those who can’t handle 24-hour time.)

High-Tech Invitational logo
The next meet is the Girls’ High-Tech Invitational at Technique Gymnastics on Sept 17-18, 2005. Caitlin is in session 5B, so she’ll be competing on Sunday, 2005-09-18 from about 12:30-17:00 (12:30-5:00 PM).

She also has an “away” meet October 29-30, 2005 in Vallejo at North Bay Athletic Association, but we don’t have details on that yet.

Caitlin’s hand is healed up, unlike her first meet, and hopefully she’ll get over her competition jitters. If nothing else, I think she’ll be more comfortable tomorrow competing in “her” gym.

Good luck, Caitlin!
Love, Dad.

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Viking Hobby has no web page

Posted on 2005-09-09 by Jim Vanderveen

I can’t find a website for Viking Hobby, only a few listings in online phone “books” and such. I give out their business cards all the time, but I need an online listing that’s easy to find and uncluttered by a bunch of advertisements. So here it is!

Viking Hobby
916-483-6885
4713 El Camino Ave.
Carmichael, Ca 95608
[ Yahoo! Map ]

They’re open Monday-Friday 10:30-6:00 PM and Saturday-Sunday 11:00-5:00 PM.

If you’ve coming east on El Camino, be advised that you cannot make a left into their parking lot–the road is divided right there, so you’ll have to continue down to Greenfield Way and make a U-turn. Alternately, you can go north on Mission past El Camino, and go around the block: right on Hazelwood, right on Greenfield, right on El Camino, then into the parking lot. It sounds like a pain in the ass, but if traffic on El Camino is heavy, it’s much easier than a U-turn!

They stock boardgames,
wall of boardgames
miniatures,
racks of miniatures
models,
wall of models
historical reference material, paints and painting supplies,
historical references, paint and supplies
all kinds of good stuff!

I’ve been patronizing this store for about 25 years (!), introduced my kids to boardgaming, miniature painting, and model building here. If they don’t have what you’re looking for, they can usually order it for you reasonably quickly. Tell Jess or Mark that Jim from the Boardgames Meetup says “Hi!”

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OBCZ bookshelf nicely stocked, enjoy!

Posted on 2005-09-08 by Jim Vanderveen

I was just over at Java City in Modoc Hall, home of our official BookCrossing zone here at Modoc Hall. The top shelf is full to overflowing with BC books! Come by, get a cuppa and enjoy a new book or drop off an old one.

Update 2005-09-08 21:29:14: Ah, so that’s what happened! We received a box of books from siriradha yesterday, and the staff at Java City helpfully put them on the bookshelf! I’ve gone through the shelf and journaled 8 books to indicate that they have arrived. Hopefully that’s how many were sent!

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