Monthly Archives: June 2004

Return of the IE development team?

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I know I said I wasn’t going to blog much today, but oh well ;)

Several blogs and now Slashdot are starting to buzz around the Internet about the possible resurrection of the Internet Explorer development team.

Are the “Browser Wars” truly back? There hasn’t been two heavyweight browsers that are being improved at the same time since the late 1990s. Only time will tell (and several versions, since Microsoft never gets things right the first time).

This can only be good news for those in the standards crowd (which includes me). More browsers that are standards-complaint = more cooler things you can do with web browsers. Competition is always good.

The only thing left to do is to actually have a new version of IE released. Right now, any thought of a new version is vaporware.

Support our troops – send them Gmail invites

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Wil Wheaton (most known as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: TNG) has posted on his blog a request for fellow nerds to donate their Gmail invites to troops who are serving overseas. Actually makes a lot of sense. The 1 GB of space that Gmail offers is perfect for photos, movies, sound files, and lots of e-mails from family and friends of the soldiers.

Right now it looks like the best way to donate your invites is to go onto Gmail Swap, although it appears there are people who are trying to organize a dedicated web site for this task. Good luck to them and donate your invites!

Getting WordPress to prompt you for the "title" of a link

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In my quest to slowly customize WordPress to fit my needs, I have been looking for an easy way to create links with the “title” attribute when creating a post. Out of the box, when you click the link button when writing a post you are prompted just for the http address, not for the title.

Luckly, someone on the WordPress Support forum also wanted this feature and wrote a very simple piece of JavaScript so anyone using WordPress can do it. This little hack will make WordPress prompt for a title as well.

In your wp-admin directory, you want to open quicktags.js (a JavaScript file). Look for a function that starts off like this:

function edInsertLink(myField, i, defaultValue) {
if (!defaultValue) {
defaultValue = ‘http://’;
}

Make sure you delete that entire function, then go to the post on the WordPress Support forum to get the exact code (sorry, for some reason posting it on my blog breaks it badly).

Then save and upload the file back to where you got it from on the server. Then go to the write page in WordPress (make sure you refresh the window, sometimes web browsers use a cached copy instead of downloading the latest). Instant title attributes in WordPress.

Barry Bonds is wrong

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I haven’t had a chance to write about this even though the story has been out there for a few days. Barry Bonds’ comments about racism in Boston have struck a raw nerve for me and I can’t hold them back.

I will be free to admit. Boston hasn’t exactly been innocent of racism in the past half century. It is very embarrising to say the least. The last team in Major League Baseball to have a black player on its roster. Bill Russell’s constant struggle while playing for the Celtics and so on. It is very sad.

However, in the past 20 years or so, Boston has been one of the most caring cities when it comes to race. The people of Boston these days love those who do their work and try their best, regardless of race. The Boston Celtics, Red Sox, New England Patriots, and even Bruins have had many beloved athletes who happened to be of a minority race. Countless minority fans show up at the ballparks, arenas, and stadiums to watch these teams.

Barry based his comments not on personal experience, but on what his dad’s experience was during his career. His dad lived in a different era and the Boston of then is completely different from the Boston of today. If Barry ever played as a Red Sox, he would be as loved as any other athlete in Boston sports history (unless this BALCO stuff turns out to be true). Right now, a guy with a .307 OBP (Pokey Reese) but as gold of a glove as you can get is 3rd in jersey sales this season, no small feat considering that Pedro, Manny, Nomar, Curt, etc. are on the team.

Barry, if you are going to be a jerk, at least get your facts straight. Your way off base here. It is improving. Maybe if you weren’t such a jerk you could realize that. Very sad.

Listing categories in alphebetical order

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One of my little pet peeves with WordPress is the fact that it didn’t list post categories in alphebetical order. I finally posted a question on the WordPress Support Forums and I had an answer in about 15 minutes.

This simple line of PHP allows you to list your post categories (like mine on the right column) in alphebetical order. Just replace the old categories command line in your index.php with this one:

< ?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>

I love WordPress!