A screen grab from Facebook’s recommendations:
August 22, 2010
January 2, 2010
Blogging platforms
Has anyone else noticed a large amount of ping backs to link farms from Planet Ubuntu feeds over the last few days? I’m getting a fair few. I’d give an example but if I link to a site that takes my posts from a syndicated site and creates posts that are syndicated on other sites I might create some sort of perpetual motion blog post and consume the Internet (it might seem far fetched but what if Robert Morris had stopped to think).
I find these objectionable though – they appear to be WordPress and I guess are using a plugin to pull feeds in and publish as articles. They’re not as bad as flat out plagiarism – which I’ve experienced. Mind you even that isn’t the worst, I once wrote a howto which was CC licensed and I realised it had been ripped off when someone posted a comment on it suggesting (quite strongly) that I had taken it from the thief!
So it occurs to me that maybe this is a WordPress thing. Then again maybe not. Like so many of us I get stuck in my ways and WordPress is like a pair of comfy shoes. Maybe I should try a new platform, so I wondered what was popular out there in Ubuntu-land.
I’ve tried Drupal (I don’t like it, sorry Emma), Serendipity and Pixie (I quite liked that but baulked at the theming system). Mind you I also have quite a lot of time to myself over the next four months, maybe I should roll my own, I’ve hacked around in PHP but have never developed a large project using it.
So let me know, suggestions on a postcard. Maybe just a comment here will suffice.
Ubuntu spot the difference
After writing documentation for many years, once in a while I come across a post on the Internet that makes me wonder why I bother. So I thought we could turn it into a game.
Basically it’s like spot the difference, see how many things you can spot that are wrong with it and post them here.
Here is the post in question and it is a cracker. I can think of several things that are wrong with it but see what you can come up with. Here’s a starting hint – man visudo.
November 22, 2009
A Windows post (gasp)
Windows software tends to abstract any kind of technicality from the user, except when it comes to ripping. For some reason, this requires a myriad dropdowns. I’m computer literate and I struggle.
November 21, 2009
Vim
I’ve been away from Ubuntu for a while and just installed Xubuntu 9.10 on an Acer Aspire One. While editing some of the files, I remembered that pressing the cursor keys in insert mode inserts characters.
This is because of vi compatible mode and is easily redressed by adding “set nocompatible” in “~/.vimrc”. I understood from this page that this was the default but I might be misreading. It seems to be a peculiarity of Ubuntu, I didn’t notice this in RHEL, Arch or Fedora (three distributions I use fairly regularly).
Is this an indicator that vim is not perhaps as popular in Ubuntu? I notice that most times I see a guide online it will suggest using gedit, even if invoked from the terminal. Perhaps, as I’m not au fait with Debian, our lineage prefers the compatible mode.
I’m sure its not important and we all have our preferences for editors but I do like vim and wish that this behavior was default. One of the paradoxes with OSS, GNU/Linux in particular, is the freedom afforded allowing us to configure our environments in whatever fashion we prefer creates a diversity that is difficult to train new users, especially between distributions.