A Fool's Wisdom » Northern Voice

Saying Yes to Myself

Lloyd — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:34:22 +0000

Here is an excerpt from West End Girl Ariane’s “Practicing yes.” which she shared at the Northern Voice Tiki party open mic. Julia and I didn’t attend.

Her words really touch me, as my shyness (fears) sometimes stands in my way, and other times I’m too focused on other’s needs to take care of mine and Julia’s.

And so, in the spirit of simplifying my life and cutting myself some slack, I am only choosing one area of constant improvement: practicing yes.
I have wasted so much time and energy on needless worry and anxiety, and it has not served me well. It has not enriched my life, and it has not helped me on my journey through this life. Note though, that I am also working on taking care of myself, so I don’t mean to say that I will be saying yes indiscriminately by any means. My intention (note, not a resolution!) is to practice saying yes to those things that challenge me and I believe will help free me from the fear and self-judgement that have held me back so many times.
…
I used to feel pressure or obligation to do things and pushed myself too hard. I know it is good to push myself some days, but others I have to take care of myself and I am the only one who knows the difference. So I am going to take better care of myself not only because I have to, but because I want to. When I say “not today”, or ask for a raincheck, it is not because I am saying no to you, it is because I am saying yes to myself.

Embedding YouTube in WordPress Bug

Lloyd — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:14:16 +0000

Nancy White is the first person to add a specific problems for tomorrow’s WordPress and your Problems. Her problem is:

embedding youtube – I know to turn off WYSIWYG but is there an easier way?

First, you can’t do embeds, JavaScript, etc if you are don’t have unfiltered_html, which only the Admin and Editor roles have.

Nancy, describe it works in “code” mode so she has sufficient permissions. So this is a big clue that the problem is how we integrated TinyMCE (the WYSIWYG or visual editor) into WordPress.

Although, if I had waited until tomorrow I would have gotten additional important details. I was about to confirm there is a bug in the latest release (2.3.3).

And it is fixed in the next major release (WordPress 2.5), further in 2.5 it will remember whether you were last using Visual or HTML editor mode, so even if the bug still existed, which it doesn’t, it would be worked around.

The bug is #5336 TinyMCE Mangles tag’s and DD32 verified that it is fixed:

WordPress 2.4/2.5′s TinyMCE has a built-in flash functionality.

Heres the HTML it generates: (as seen on the published page, i’m pretty sure its identical in the edit window)
Appears to be fixed.

So Nancy, it sounds like you have the best work around until WordPress 2.5 which will fix the problem.

WordPress and your Problems at MooseCamp!

Lloyd — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:06:26 +0000

Bloggers and problems enter, only bloggers exit!

Friday, Feb 22, day 1 of the 4th annual Northern Voice including an “internet bootcamp” for people new to blogging, Facebook, podcasting, wikis, and more. It is an awesome logging conference being held again at the Forestry Sciences Centre at UBC! It’s Tim Bray’s “favorite little blogger conclave.” This conclave is really for everyone, but if you don’t already have a ticket, see you next year.

The other part of day 1 will be the MooseCamp Unconference, the third year of this self-organizing, community from chaos event. The moose are loose and they converge to converse again! Organic and from the hip and with food this year!

Like any good participant in creations from chaos, I’m late in organizing a session — or maybe early because many sessions will be unveiled right at the event. Anyway, over the last week, I’ve been making some virtual calls to WordPress aficionados attending Northern Voice, very modest ones at that, and the result is a dynamic session where we will work together to solve our WordPress problems, WordPress and your Problems.

The plan — plan to change — is for the first half to be spent discussing problems and experiences in small groups and then us all coming together to discuss the groups’ discoveries and some of the problems that still taught us with the whole group.

Hopefully, in the small groups, you will also swap blogging stories and 411.

Some of the small groups could be solving problems related to:

Getting going on WordPress.com – Richard Eriksson (sightings) also doing the Blogging 101 session of Internet Bootcamp (Podcast of his 2007 session of the same title)
Setting up WordPress (+ using it for CMS) – Jim Groom (sightings) (notes) brings all his experience on using WordPress MU for the campus-wide blogging initiative at the University of Mary Washington and running WordPress on his personal blog. Saturday with D’Arcy, he is presenting Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform (NV 2007: with D’Arcy More than just a Blog)
Beautiful prose and pictures – Rebecca Bollwitt (miss604) (sightings) is a Vancouver blogger, who loves WordPress, and is amoug the best I know for putting together prose and pictures into a tasty post. Or maybe you need some technical help with live blogging. She is a Northern Voice volunteer, and Saturday will be leading the panel Sports Blogging and Podcasting.
Themes & CSS – you? Could really use a themer or designer to lay down some cascading flavor .
Plugins – Duane Storey (sightings) author of numerous awesome WordPress plugins including Crossroads Flickr Plugin, CoolExcerpts, WordTwit Twitter, and he is currently working on Viper Cache.
Messing up the code and contributing to WordPress – me, I guess.

Additional experts on hands:

Chris “WordPress code is messy” Lott (sightings) and he still likes it! Saturday presenting The Blog is Dead! Long live bloggers (NV 2007: with Darcy Mashups for Non-Programmers and Social Software for Learning Environments [podcast])
D’Arcy Norman from WordPress to Drupal and back again. (sightings) Saturday with Jim doing, Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform (NV 2007: with Jim More than just a Blog, with Chris Mashups for Non-Programmers and Social Software for Learning Environments [podcast])
David Peralty (sightings) Head of Marketing at Splashpress Media, he is a pro blogger, has published over 4000 articles, and contributes to many blogging news. He has also been know to hack up a theme, make multiple loops, and streamline upgrading.
Lorraine Murphy (sightings) as well as her famous pop culture blog raincoaster.com, she regularly runs Blogging for Beginners course with titles like “From zero to Technorati in 7 hours”. She is also volunteering at Northern Voice. (NV 2007 Stats: The Forbidden Love)
Joshua McKenty (sightings), founder of BountyUp.com. serial entrepreneur, long-term technologist and amateur WordPress
hacker, he’s had good luck glueing WP and BBpress into other sites,
from Smarty integration to Single-Sign-On (using cookie hacks and SQL
views).

The groups will be formed around your problems. What problem do you need help with? Post a comment here or add to the wiki page.

As I mentioned each of these aficionados is modest — some I had to trick to volunteer — and I bet you are modest too. WordPress is a rich environment, and by sharing your insights with us, you will surprise yourself with your own expertise . You will also be surprised that we have the same problems. Is there an interesting problem that you have solved and can help others solve to?

Depending on where the interest is we will reconfigure the session on the fly.

It won’t be scheduled during Blogging 101 or Photocamp. Any other sessions to avoid butting heads with? I won’t be arriving until Friday morning, because I’m still through mid-April at the Pregnancy Conference and after that I will be at the First Baby Conference for at least a few months. If there is interest some of us can get together later in the day and take a look at WordPress 2.5 which is still in development, but nearing beta quality, but I want this to be focused on solving people’s problems today.

Welcome to the Thunderdome! Bloggers and problems enter, only bloggers exit!

Matt Mullenweg Keynoting at Northern Voice!

Lloyd — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:19:07 +0000

My boss, the Ma.tt in Matt is keynoting Northern Voice in Vancouver, Saturday February 23th! The title of his talk is “Blogging & Social Media: Where do we go from here?”

I can’t wait! Please tell me you have your ticket? Travis Smith, warned us that tickets are going, going, …! Darren Barefoot said a few days ago that there were only 45 spots left. Run!

Looking forward to WordPressers representing!