Blog | I Spit Hot Fire

My Most Popular Posts in 2009

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Image by i-live.gr Greek News magazine via Flickr

Yeah, this info is basically boring to everyone but me: (I’m always surprised on how people find this blog, and what they read) I also have some (not much) pride in saying I finished the year in the top 800,000 in Alexa’s website traffic ranking.

The picture on the right has nothing to do with this post, but I found it with my Zemanta Windows Live Write plugin searching for “2009”.

ISpitHotFire.com’s Top Posts of 2009:

Post/Page Views:

Tags: alexa, Blog

11.01.2010 Blog No Comments

Web Optimizer Plugin [Review]

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Ever since my Wordpress Optimizations – YSlow, PHP Speedy, DB Cache, Hyper Cache, and CSS Sprites post six months ago, I’ve been keeping it pretty simple on the blog.

Not so many adjustments, not constantly trying out new plugins, but here’s an update:

DB Cache: Hasn’t been updated since January, created some conflicts where I couldn’t edit a page. To edit a post (even small things like tags), I’d have to turn off DB Cache, make the changes, and then turn it back on. I decided turn it off completely.
PHP Speedy: Hasn’t been updated since February. It caused some problems for me, for which I went on the author’s blog to ask for some ideas on how to fix it, but I was ignored, and the comment was deleted. It wasn’t perfect for me, but I ran it up until a couple of days ago when I found Web Optimizer (covered later in this post).
cSprites (CSS Sprites): Last updated in June, but doesn’t work with caching plugins. Otherwise it was fine, but that’s a big issue for most. I don’t run this either. Plugin author is nice though and does reply to comments.
Hyper Cache: This I use. In fact, I donated to the author, and he updates the plugin constantly. Not sure what the updates are but updates are usually a good sign.

Web Optimizer: Like I just mentioned above, I’ve replaced with PHP Speedy with Web Optimizer. Web Optimizer does all the things that PHP Speedy does, but also quite a few additional things as well. I don’t think PHP Speedy’s GZIP ever worked right for me, or it had caused some other slowdowns in the process, but Web Optimizer’s seem legit. My YSlow scores are quite good, and the blog loading speed seems good (but that’s hard for me to really measure because I’m in Vietnam trying to access Bluehost, this site’s US host). Web Optimizer even suggests using it with Hyper Cache.

I sent a bug in two days ago to the developers regarding Web Optimizer breaking the Sociable plugin, and I got a report it was fixed for the next version today!

Strangely, the plugin gets average review scores on its Wordpress plugin page, but I can’t see why it’s getting rated so low, even after reading about people’s issues and feedback in the forums. There are two versions of the plugin, a free version, and a $99 full one. See below for the comparison chart:

While $99 is a hefty charge in some ways, if the other benefits are as advertised, and you have a fairly well trafficked blog, I’d suggest spending the $99 and getting it. Otherwise, you can always check out the free version (it’s not a trial version, it’s a fully operating version with less features) and see how you like it. I’ve attached screenshots of my performance on various tests with Web Optimizer, free version, at the bottom of this article. In all, the plugin looks good, and I’m a big fan so far- tons of features, support, and jeez, tons of documentation.

Widget Cache: I’ve also been using Widget Cache, but I’m not sure how good it really is. I can’t tell what it’s caching, but most reviews of it are quite positive so I’m sticking with it until I hear otherwise or run into problems. I do see some comments that suggest it doesn’t work in the newest versions of Wordpress, 2.83+, however.

Also, from the Wordpress Extend page, there’s:

How to know it works?

You can have a look at the source of the web page, and search

and I don’t see that in my source, so maybe that explains why I can’t tell.

My tests with Web Optimizer:

YSlow:

Web Optimizer (1)

Web Optimizer (2)

Is My Blog Working:

IE8 Performance:

IE7 Performance: (oddly enoughIE7 loads faster than IE8 on the initial load)

Tags: Blog, csprites, css sprites, db cache, hyper cache, php speedy, plugins, web optimizer, wordpress, yslow

06.11.2009 Blog 4 Comments

Is WordPress A Thankless Community? | Weblog Tools Collection

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

Image by Mindful One via Flickr

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, donating to plugin authors around the same time when I changed my blog theme, but I ended up not doing it. Who isn’t lazy about spending money when they aren’t forced to? It reminds me a little of Winamp. I wanted to donate to them for so long, but when I finally decided to, they’d been bought by AOL, and didn’t need my money anymore.

Seeing this article this morning finally got me going for Wordpress, and I decided to leave a “thank you” comment, wherever possible, or donate to the plugins I’m using right now. Ended up donating to 6 authors, and I’d definitely like to donate to more in the future, perhaps with Kiva certificates or something.

I encourage others to do the same, even if it’s just a little- donate, say thank you, or contribute your own code.

Is WordPress A Thankless Community?

Jeff Chandler on July 10th, 2009

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Many of the plugin authors I have spoken with throughout the community tell me that very rarely do they ever get a donation let alone a Thank You for releasing their work to the public. Based on the plugin authors feedback, end users demand more features, demand better support, and in the end, have this feeling of entitlement even if the plugin is available without a price tag. The reality is, that for a freely available plugin, you’re not entitled to anything. I don’t know about you, but I certainly would not like to be part of a community that is known as thankless.

Before I list a few ways of curbing this attitude, I must say that not EVERYONE in the community acts in the ways I described above. I know many of us have donated to plugin authors, have written reviews of plugins to give them exposure, have said thank you, etc. This post is not geared towards you but towards those who seemingly want to have their cake and eat it too.

Saying Thanks – I believe saying thank you is underrated these days. Saying thanks can go a long way in making a plugin author feel good about themselves for their contribution to the community.

Donate – It’s pretty clear to me by now through asking plugin authors and other posts on the subject that there is no way to pay the bills through donations alone. However, donations are often seen as one part of the income generating strategy so whatever comes through is seen as a benefit. I’ve donated over $100.00 so far in my time spent with WordPress which I know is small compared to what these plugins have enabled my sites to achieve but I’m astonished at the amount of people who have not donated any cash at all.

Exposure – What plugin author does not like exposure? This can be done any number of ways such as a written review, a podcast dedicated to plugins, links to new plugin releases as WeblogToolsCollection.com is known for and overall, just spreading the word about the plugins you enjoy using.

Contribute Back – To support a plugin authors initial contribution to the community, we as end users can return the favor by beta testing new versions, submitting bug reports, helping out with translations, and helping to provide support.

Wrapping Up:

At this stage of the game, I think it’s unfair to provide a blanket statement covering the entire WordPress community as thankless. However, I know many plugin authors who are holding back from releasing their work to the community because they know they will be inundated with support, demands, etc, all for no price.

I think we sometimes have to sit back and remember that WordPress is a piece of great software but it doesn’t have every feature under the sun, that is where plugins come in. These plugins are generally patches, feature enhancements, or ways of providing functionality that are better than the core offering. Plugins are one of the thriving aspects of WordPress that bring people to the platform because if you can’t do something with WordPress, there is at least 1-3 plugins that will. I would really hate to see plugin authors jump ship from the platform simply because of the way the community treats them.

The WordPress platform and its end users have nothing to gain from having this happen so please, lets all do our part to show plugin authors the same love we show for WordPress.

*note* If you know of any other ways to help the situation, I’m all ears.

Is WordPress A Thankless Community? | Weblog Tools Collection

Tags: Blog, donations, plugins, Tech, wordpress

11.07.2009 Blog, Tech No Comments

More Wordpress Plugins to Live By

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

There’s a fantastic number of plugins available for Wordpress. It’s truly an amazing platform, and for the two years I’ve been using the self-hosted version, there’s been an incredible amount of support added, new (good) features that have been implemented, and a dizzying amount of customization plugins created. You can find the official directory for plugins here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

I’ve covered some of the speed plugins that I like few posts ago, and I realize everyone already knows and uses All in One SEO Pack (SEO Optimization), Akismet (comment spam) and Google XML Sitemaps, so here are 10 great plugins that you may not know about:

(I’ve limited this to 10 so this post doesn’t get too out of hand, and in no particular order)

WPtouch iPhone Theme: This plug-in makes your site optimized (readability) for the Apple iPhone, Apple iPod Touch, Google Android and Blackberry Storm. I don’t have any of those phones, so I can’t testify on how good it is, but I think it’s always nice to be able to reach an extended audience.
MobilePress: Another useful plug-in to get your blog ready for mobile access.
WP-PageNavi: Wordpress blogs by default show next and previous to go backwards and forwards in the blog. Change this so it’s paginated as you would see in a forum, like the below at the bottom of my blog home page.

Page 1 of 94 1 2 3 4 5 » … Last »

WP Security Scan: “Perform security scan of WordPress installation.” Yeah.
Secure WordPress: Another good security-related plug-in to have. Remove common methods hackers use to analyze your Wordpress installation and find weaknesses that can be secured.
Twitter Tools: Let’s you set up your Blog with Twitter. I use it to update Twitter every time I write a new blog post, but you can also use it to add a widget to show your newest updates, update Twitter from your blog, and post daily/weekly compilation posts of your Tweets during that time. (This plug-in is not being used for Twitter update in the upper right of my blog, however, that one is part of the Imagination theme.)
Search Unleashed: You ever the search option (Ctrl-F) in Firefox 2 or 3, and you can highlight the search query on the page so you can find the text easier? Search Unleashed can do that for people who search directly on your blog automatically as well as for those who come to your blog after searching on Google.
Photo Sidebar Widget: There are plenty of Flickr plugins for Wordpress, but not many Smugmug ones. This is the one I use to preview new content from my Smugmug account.
Global Translator: As you can see below or in my right sidebar, you can translate my blog into different languages. Global Translator is a great plug-in in that it caches the translations so that when a user access them, they stay on your blog rather than be taken to a different website showing your site in a frame. This is also great for Search Engines because each new cached page in a different language is considered a real page and can be found by users searching in that language. To simplify what that means, imagine you write the blog post “More Wordpress Plugins to Live By” in English. That’s one page you’ve written now indexed. Now, you enable 10 (in the plug-in settings, you can pick exactly which/how many languages you want to support. I’ve picked the ten most common languages in the world in addition to SE Asian languages) translation languages in Global Translator. Through the plug-in, you will have effectively written 11 posts- the one in English, and the additional 10 in other languages. Users searching in their native language will find your post.

Comment Relish: This emails users who leave a comment for you automatically. Think of it as a follow-up “thank you” to those who comment. You can create a custom message to let users know how to subscribe to your blog or whatever else you’d like.

I’ve talked about this before, but I really recommend Windows Live Writer for composing your blogs.It’s like Microsoft Word for blogs- it’s easy to use, it’s free, and it has a lot of great features- spell check, drafts, image handling, blog preview within your theme, etc. I also recommend getting the Zemanta Plug-in for it- it will automatically find copyright-free photos for you to use in your new blog post, as well as suggest recent articles and links related to whatever you’re writing about in the post.

Download Links:

Windows Live Writer: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/
Zemanta for WLW: http://www.zemanta.com/download/livewriter/

Enjoy!

Tags: Blog, plugins, Tech, wordpress

31.05.2009 Blog, Tech No Comments

Wordpress Optimizations – YSlow, PHP Speedy, DB Cache, Hyper Cache, and CSS Sprites

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

I’ve been researching and learning about speed optimizations for Wordpress for the last couple of months. Bluehost has always been slow for me in Vietnam, and while I didn’t think I could change that in the end (I am not so sure it is their fault really), why not try to do some enhancements?

In the end, after spending many hours reading and trying out different things, here are my suggestions. I won’t go into too much detail on everything, if you’re hard core, you’ll be able to read up by yourself, but let’s assume you just want to do some quick and easy things to noticeably help your blog site out.

That’s what this guide is for.

First, look into installing Firebug and YSlow (the screenshot above is YSlow running for my site) for Firefix: Firebug and YSlow (you need Firebug in order to run YSlow) are Firefox extensions from Yahoo that helps you understand how your site is slow. Oftentimes, it’s not just purely the max download size of your site that causes slowdown, it’s how the files are processed by your browser- the best comparison I can think of, though not entirely accurate, is traffic on a freeway. Let’s say you have 100 cars. If you have 5 lanes, 20 cars per lane may not be so bad. But if you put all 100 cars into just one lane, there will be major slowdown. Using tools like YSlow can help you see if you’re really using all 5 lanes for your web site. When running YSlow, remember to choose “Small Site or Blog” under “Rulesets" in the upper middle area of the interface. YSlow (Why Slow?) will give you a numeric grade based on how well optimized your site is (I got 100%!). Again, it doesn’t guarantee that your site is fast, it’s more about finding big issues that you may be able to fix and YSlow has great documentation to explain what each of their scores mean.

Of course, how to actually improve the scores is the hard part, so let’s identify some ways that can help with the common problems identified by YSlow.

PHP Speedy. PHP sites often use PHP Speedy in order to help quicken things, and guy who wrote it has done a Wordpress-specific version as well. I’ve compared it to other plugins or sets of plugins that do similar things, but PHP Speedy seems to to the best choice. Be wary of running multiple plugins that do the same thing, as that could could slower speeds. PHP Speedy by default loads JavaScript files at the top of your CSS, but you can hack it so it will load at the bottom (your site will feel like it’s loading faster). You can also let Speedy gzip and minimy (basically makes your files smaller) your site for smaller downloading size, though you should let your server handle that if possible, like in your .htacess file….
Your .htaccess is another big way to not only make your site more secure but also improve its speed. If you’re not sure what this is, basically look for this file in your root directory. Here are some optimizations in mine, which include Zlib compression, .htaccess file protection from outside access, some basic DOS-attack prevention, cache optimization, and ETags settings. If you get any errors, you may want to check with your Hosting Service to make sure they support all the settings below; it took me a long time to figure out which compression settings would work on Bluehost. Just paste this in your root .htaccess file:

# php_flag zlib.output_compression On

# protect the htaccess file
<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

# disable the server signature
ServerSignature Off

# limit file uploads to 10mb
LimitRequestBody 10240000

#ETAGS/CACHE

FileETag MTime Size
<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
<filesmatch "\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)$">
       ExpiresActive on
       ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
   </filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

# disable directory browsing
Options All -Indexes
FastCGI: Ask your hosting service about it.
cSprites: cSprites uses a technique called CSS Sprites to eliminate multiple loading of images. Let’s say you have 10 different images on your post. Instead of making the browser download 10 images (browser has to ask the server 10 times, back and forth), you can combine all those images into 1 larger image. The user can’t tell the difference in terms of the images, but on the system, it’s usually faster overall this way. One problem I noticed, however, is that it may not work with caching plugins well…, which I discuss next.
Caching Plugins: Most people probably know about WP Super Cache. WP Super Cache is a super popular caching plugin, but I’ve been using DB Cache and Hyper Cache. Some people, including me, have tried using both together, and like the results. I have been using both for a couple of months and I like what I see so far. Like I said though, cSprites isn’t quite 100% compatible with caching plugins yet, but the author has said he’s working on a version that will be.

So there you go. If you don’t know how to install plugins or have a friend who can help, then I suggest not tampering with anything as if something goes wrong, you won’t know how to get the site back up.

As for I Spit Hot Fire, with these new changes you should hopefully feel that the site is fairly quick (especially if you’re from the US), but if you don’t let me know!

With the caching settings enabled in my .htaccess file, you should also notice that your browser downloads virtually nothing each time you come back to the site (see screenshot), really making things quick.

By the way, here are some sites that go into more detail about if your site code is validated (follows standards, is clean and causes no problems) and how fast your site really is:

Techhive.Net / Xinu – Check your site’s PageRank, backlinks, feed subscribers, xhtml/css validation and more.
Web Page Analyzer
Is My Blog Working? – let you know the general loading speed of your site, if your site supports gzip and caching, etc.
Web Page Performance Test
Cache Testing – make sure your site lets your browser cache properly- critical for fast loading speeds on the second and following visits

Next: I’ll tackle some common plugins I like a lot, including security tools.

Tags: Blog, bluehost, optimization, plugins, speed, wordpress

20.05.2009 Blog 25 Comments

My New Theme!

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

My new theme is finally done! You can see it all around you now, like the Matrix. I really liked my old theme and I’d been using it for about 1.5 years before the change, but I had feedback Chung and [[Trench]] saying white text on black background wasn’t such an ideal reading environment. In this new theme, I still get my blackish (granite) background, well, I guess it’s still white font on a dark background.

But hopefully you like it, or I’ll have to customize this theme, which is actually quite easy.

This current theme is Imagination by CSS Jockey, Mohi Aneja. He’s basically built a layout which you can then customize in terms of colors to your heart’s content right from the Wordpress Admin, no CSS knowledge necessary. Well documented for idiots like me as well. He gives a number of color themes to the layout, so if you like a more blue theme, or more white theme, he already has it pre-built in.

He’s simply done an amazing job, and the theme is free.

Before deciding to go with this theme for good, I had hired Jai from http://www.blogohblog.com/ to finish out the Blamatic theme for me. Ah…that didn’t work out. I liked Blamatic a ton, but just ended up loving Imagination before finding someone in Vietnam to finish Blamatic for me. Pat, Blamatic’s designer, did tell me that another developer is working to finish it soon, so that’s another theme I recommend.

Some of the major differences between the new and old look are:

Versus the old three column theme, I think this theme feels simplified but more focused and still with a strong aesthetic.
This theme’s not fluid width, so if you’re on super high resolution, then you’re seeing the text take up a very small part of the screen.
Moving from two widget columns to one, I had to drop my Last.FM widget and reduce the number of pictures for my SmugMug Widget to 1. At first I wanted to show everything about me, widgets galore, but once I accepted the one widget column, I realize it helps me focus more.
I’ve now added widgets for Most Recent Posts and Most Popular Posts and News From Vietnam, which is an RSS feed of Chao Vietnam on BlogSpot. I’d rather show articles from Intellasia, but it’s banned on some ISPs in Vietnam, including mine. If you go to the Chao Vietnam, you start to question where these stories are coming from, but I’ve looked up enough articles to know they’re coming from real newspapers- don’t just the site on how it looks. Last weekend, I saw that a bunch of articles on the website were from the English version of Thanh Nien daily, so I think it’s fairly safe to read in the sense it’s not made up gossip garbage.
I really liked to show one blog at a time the way my last theme did. I don’t think it made so much sense to go with one again in the new one, but I’ve limited the default view to latest 3 blogs rather than the 5 or even 10 other bloggers use. I don’t feel that the blog home page should be so long, and I also know the 30 people who come here each day aren’t reading this site like they would Kotaku. People are mostly coming here from searching and just reading a specific article.
I’ve added a new favicon! If you see a star, you may need to hit Ctrl-F5 to refresh your cache, but you should see a smaller version of this half US and half Vietnamese flag. My old favicon was probably unrecognizable unless you knew my old dinosaur toy logo, so I wanted something a little more immediately understandable. I just took two pictures of the respective flags, cropped them in Powerpoint (that’s right, I edit photos in Powerpoint), combined and resized them to square dimensions. I like it, it’s Vietnamese-American, and I hope no one else has done it yet.

In the change for a new theme, I’ve been reading and researching a lot about Wordpress, including speed optimizations. I’ll be posting about my experiences and lessons to share over the next week or so. Hopefully, you feel that the site is reasonably quick now, especially if you’re in Vietnam. I’ve also decided to become more visible online, so I have some ideas on how to build a bigger audience for this site, even though I talk about nothing interesting or even focus on one particular subject. And I’m not a hot girl.

But I believe and more on that later as well too.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look, and feel free to give your thoughts!

And… here’s one last look at the old theme:

Tags: Blog, blogohblog, css jockey, theme, wordpress

12.05.2009 Blog, Tech 7 Comments

Avoid www.blogohblog.com for Theme Design Work [FAIL]

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Image by locusolus via Flickr

(What a simple blog title I’ve chosen today)

Unfortunately, I had a bad experience with BlogOhBlog recently, and its owner Jai Nischal Verma, and that’s why my new theme is taking a bit longer than I was expecting. For now, I’m using the Wordpress default, which is quite nice and error free.

The Story:

Originally, I was randomly checking out different themes for the site. I really liked the Blamatic theme, but it had a number of big errors, so I wanted to find someone who could help fix it. Stumbling upon BlogOhBlog.com, I contacted Jai Nischal Verma, who quoted me a price of $75 for my requirements. A few days later, I had some additional requirements, for which he then quoted me a new price of $100.

In the end, he finished perhaps less than half the work; it looked great on FireFox and Opera, but was trash on every version of Internet Explorer, which is still over 70% of the world.

Here was the last round of emails:

Jai,
Regarding the widgets issue in Firefox, the issue is not caused by the widgets. If you looked at the screenshot, you would understand what I mean.

My requirements were clear, and I was upfront about them. For example, the requirement clearly asks for fixing of all bugs and standards compliance. If there were any issues about how difficult the tasks were, you should have brought that up when you issued the quote, or perhaps even midway, when you realized the requirements were difficult. What happened, however, was that you turned in the work twice, saying you had completed all the tasks, but in fact had not. And then when I asked about the tasks that had not been completed, you said they were too difficult or impossible and that you were done with the project.

What you have left me, then, is an unusable theme. I am certainly not going to use a theme that only works for 20% of the world. Now, I will need to find someone else to start over on the project.

If you are not going to finish this project, then I expect my money back, as an incomplete project has absolutely no value to me. I have switched the theme for the site.

Sincerely,

Michael

From: Jai Nischal Verma
Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2009 10:20 PM
To: Me
Subject: Re: Custom Order from BOB

Hi,
I am sorry to say but the theme blamatic has too many issues. It uses sifr library to render your header titles in flash (try and right click on your header titles and you will know or your blog title) which can cause rendering errors in IE so I cannot really help it. According to my advise, you should just trash the theme or should have done it by now. Your choice.
I will not make any more changes as I have done enough fixing for $100. Plus you keep ranting about widgets issues. Dude, I am not responsible for fixing your widgets as you can install 100 other plugins and complain about their widgets.
Jai.

Right after I received his email, I noticed he had gone in my site (he had FPT and Admin access) and started deleting things from my site, (think about how scary that is), including his work, so I had to cancel his accounts.

I don’t doubt that Jai is a very skilled and intelligent guy- I tried to look up negative feedback on him before I contracted him, and nothing came up, so that had made me feel confident going with him originally. His website is nice and you can learn a lot about design and Wordpress from him. Overall, he seemed trustworthy. Unfortunately, at least for my situation, he was not. I paid him $35 of the $100 up front, with the rest due at completion.

The big issue was not so much that he didn’t complete the project, but that he lied about it. He twice said all the requirements (that he had accepted and were laid out for him clearly- he could have asked for more detail if they were not) had been completed, and I had to basically call him out and show examples of the errors still left. Am I supposed to believe that he didn’t know about the errors? That he didn’t know it was completely broken in IE, among numerous other errors and incomplete tasks, yet still asked for the full $100 both times?

When I called him out on the incomplete work, he started to say how X requirement was too difficult or Y requirement was creating the problems, that my “unprofessionalism” was to blame, and he refused to do any more. Some of the things he did finish, were things I could have done myself (and have in other themes), but that’s why I had asked for a quote on the full package of fixes, so I could let a professional do his magic and so I wouldn’t have to worry and spend my own time.

Incidentally, in the e-mail above, Jai blames the sIFR library for his inability to fix the theme, but sIFR themselves claim otherwise (see left for IE6+ compatibility): “Of course sIFR degrades gracefully when used in an non-supported browser: the default HTML text will be shown."; “sIFR is supported by the following browsers: IE6 and above.”

Perhaps after he started, he learned my requirements were too difficult for him, or he had underestimated them. He tried to lie about it and blame me instead of being upfront and saying, “I made a mistake in the quotation, can we renegotiate this?” or “This is causing some issues, can we do it this way so that I can make it fit your requirements? I would have listened and found a compromise with him.

But he didn’t. Now I have an unusable theme and lost time (anyone who’s had to audit someone else’s work knows how time consuming it is) and $35 in the process.

This really sucks and some other words not fit for this blog.

If I’ve learned anything from working the last few years is that you have to be really careful when working on projects with outside partners, regardless if you’re the client or the contractor. I’m really glad I only paid $35 up front. Normally, I’m used to paying in full with Internet transactions, like on EBay, but I thought I should ask for a tiered payment just because I knew how projects can go. Trying to imagine if I had paid the full $100 and had this happen, I would have gone absolutely berserk.

Some people think that if you do some work, you should automatically get credit for it. For example, you ordered Pho at my restaurant, but I was out, so I decided to give you Bun Bo Hue without asking you and letting you know that I was out. I gave you something, it may not be what you ordered, but you got something. So now you should pay me the price of the Pho. Right?

No.

Avoid BlogOhBlog and Jai Nischal Verma. He may be capable of doing good work, but as I learned unfortunately, it’s a gamble to see if he will take responsibility for his work commitment.

If you’re considering him and you’d like to learn more about what happened, feel free to comment or ask me. I’m more than happy to forward the email thread and let you judge for yourself.

Time for me to look for another coder.

Tags: Blog, blogohblog, fail, Tech, theme, wordpress

18.04.2009 Blog, Tech 9 Comments

April Fool’s FAIL

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

I’m submitting this to Fail, but I doubt it’s anywhere near great enough to make it.

Tags: Blog, fail, Random, Tech, wordpress

03.04.2009 Blog, Random, Tech No Comments

What Your Blog Says About You

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

(Link: What Your Blog Says About You – BusinessWeek)

What Your Blog Says About You

Posted by: Rachael King on March 22

What is your blog’s personality type? A new Web site called Typealyzer will analyze your blog and tell you what it says about you. Typealyzer is a research project that looks at how language reflects a person’s psychological type and his or her motivations and interests. The site was created by Mattias Östmar of PRfekt, a Swedish research and development company focused on media analysis.

For the past two years, Östmar has been collecting sample texts from blogs, based on research about personality type and writing style. The site uses a tool to run a statistical analysis of the text to come up with a word frequency algorithm for different personality types. After the blog is scanned, Typealyzer comes up with personality types derived from the Myers-Briggs model for looking at how people perceive the world and make decisions. You can find out your personality type by taking a short quiz here.

In some cases a blog’s personality does not match the writer’s personality type. Peter Yared, CEO of iWidgets says Typealyzer characterized his blog as introverted while he is an extrovert. I decided to check out some other CEO blogs on Typealyzer to see what they revealed.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems.
Blog personality type: The Scientist
The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it – often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring but might be physically hesitant to try new things. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples.

Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International.
Blog personality type: The Doer
This type is active and playful, often full of energy. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and engage in physical outdoor activities. They might be impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through.

Mike Critelli, Retired Executive Chairman of Pitney Bowes.
Blog personality type: The Duty Fulfiller
This type is responsible and hardworking. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature, they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

Does your blog match your personality type? Let me know.

- So what did my blog say about me? PRFekt actually has 3 types of tests, one for personality, then love, then sport.

1) For Personality, from http://typealyzer.com/

ESTP – The Doers

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

2) For Love, from http://love.typealyzer.com/

ESTP – The Doers

They are gregarious and action-loving and will probably make your date into a thrill. In relationships they often feel tremendously commited, but want that commitment to be renewed day by day. They tend to get bored easily, and may be prone to switching relationships frequently unless they find an outlet for their boredom elsewhere. Sexually they are more into enjoying the moment sensually than verbally.

Best matches: ISFJ or ISTJ

3) For Sports, from http://sport.typealyzer.com/

Artisan

“Get your kicks while you can!”

The Artisans loves real-life events that can be experienced here and now. Standing in the shouting crowd at a game is almost as fun as actually taking part in it! Personally they love action and will go boldly down roads that others consider risky or impossible. That´s why they will probably gravitate towards sports with tuff independent sportsmen and women. They´re always on the look-out for fun and playful ways to enjoy themselves together with friends.

Sports of preference:
Motor sports, Football, Boxing and other sports that gets the adrenaline pumping.

———-

My Commentary:

Ah well, hard to say. I think if you know me reasonably well, you probably wouldn’t agree with much of this for me. At the same time, I do like going to athletic events, and I do love to be part of the cheers. “1st and 10, do it again, go! Bears!” and “Take off that red shirt!”

I am playful, but I wouldn’t say I’m active. I’m not so thrilling, but I do get bored, and have a serious reluctance to do anything I do not want to do.

Tags: Blog, personality, Random

28.03.2009 Blog No Comments

My Site, Now in Vietnamese!

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

I really like this site. After all, I’m spending money on it, and only a few people occasionally read it, so it must have some value to me. Wordpress is really fantastic, and if I were in the US, it would be so much better (because of how slow my US-based host is from here).

Now, with the newest version of the Global Translator plugin for WP, the developers have just included Vietnamese as one of the translations (you can click on the flag above, or click http://www.ispithotfire.com/vi/)

I haven’t gone through it super in detail, but from the examples I saw, it looks pretty good. As in I, with my lousy Vietnamese, could read the translation of my English and understand what I was saying….in the translated Vietnamese!

So I could basically learn Vietnamese….from myself.

This also means more Vietnamese people can reach this blog, which could be troublesome in the future (note to self: don’t talk trash about Vietnam anymore)

PS. I just noticed that “Home” as in “Home Page” gets translated as “Family”. So your home really is your family.

I learn something every day!

Tags: Blog, plugin. language, Tech, Vietnam, wordpress

28.10.2008 Blog, Tech, Vietnam No Comments

Location:	Viet Nam, Bac Ninh
Activity:	Livestock

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