Kontan Jou

I know Annie at A Yank Gone South uses it, but have the rest of you given Pandora a try?  It is AWESOME!  Don’t get me wrong, I love my iTunes, Foxytunes, and my iPod, but I am totally enjoying Pandora.  You choose an artist and it customizes a station around the artist.  Think satellite radio for the net, only better.  I love the thumbs up/thumbs down feature.  If something comes up that you don’t like you can simply thumbs down and Pandora apologizes and promises not to play it again on your station.  Love that.  Free music at your fingertips, customized for you…gotta love it.

for professional purposes only, of course.

My personal laptop can not hit the school network. Since the new laptops were ready I decided to accept the offer and claim one. Now I don’t have to carry mine back and forth. At times there will be inconveniences, but I think the USB thumb drive will take care of any that may come about. Although the same size it is somewhat lighter than my personal laptop. The tech geek in me is loving the opportunity to learn a new computer. Unfortunately, with progressive reports due Monday, I will not be playing much this weekend.

As most have realized, my favorite means of procrastination is to play with the web…more specifically, my blog. I really like my green summer garden theme, but occasionally one just wants a little change. I found several really cute themes that work with the latest version of WP. I also found an admin theme that works for me. I don’t like the layout or colors of the standard WP Admin window so I love it when new tools and themes are available. Fluency has a great layout and allows for drop-down menu compatibility, but I use many plugins so it is not the best option for this blog. However, I use it on several other sites where I have fewer plugins to play with. I am a huge fan of drop down menus. Maybe it is laziness. If so, so be it, but I object to click, click, click to get where I need to go. To solve that issue I use Admin Drop Down from Planet Ohz. As I mentioned, I don’t like the color scheme for WPs Admin page. I’m also not interested in coding a new style sheet myself. I did that once, and it isn’t difficult, but it didn’t turn out exactly as I wanted either. Since I wanted a new color scheme I went in search of a new plugin to do it for me and found Baltic Amber Themes & Schemes. Very nice colors for the admin page and it is as simple as point and click.

That is probably enough time spent procrastinating. I have to prepare for the upcoming week and feel guilty about the time I did not spend grading papers. Is it wrong to want to have weekend time for family and self? Really? Something has to give. I am completely worn out during the week and resent the need to spend all weekend doing what I have spent all week doing. Yes, it is selfish. So sorry.

OK, so maybe not all the time but it is SUPER-UBER cool when you find a long lost friend. Since doing the MySpace deal I have reconnected with several friends from high school. In fact, Knitterboy happens to be one of my long lost high school buddies that I found on MySpace. There are several others that I really enjoy keeping up with. During a time of tragedy when we lost a close friend, read about how wonderful he was here, it was MySpace connections that kept everyone informed.

I have had a Facebook for much longer, but I never used it until recently. MySpace is just a little too teen oriented for me, but I keep it because of the friend factor. Facebook is a little more my social network speed. It is actually Facebook that inspires my title today.

For years and year…and I mean YEARS…I have been searching for a very special friend. We were oh so close our last year of high school, spent senior summer together, and stayed in touch as we went our separate ways in life. With our children only months apart we even shared the ups and downs of pregnancy…both times. It was a friendship that meant so much to me because I felt this person could truly understand that life is not perfect and sometimes it just plain sucks. Through various circumstances that are not mine to share, we lost touch. I searched the net, joined social network sites like Classmates, Reunion, MySpace, and Facebook. When I found a phone lead, I followed it. No luck reconnecting. This past week she found me! ECSTATIC I was. It was just really, really cool. I can not wait until we have the chance to hang out and catch up. Until then, Facebook and email are wonderful things.

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6.

WP has a new release and I must say it has a few features that I like, despite the fact that it has created issues with various themes I like. First, on the site I have linked above there is a quick tutorial (3:29 minutes long) that introduces the new features. I rarely take advantage of the video introductions, but it is certainly helpful to help you get to know what you are working with. It seems WP 2.6 has integrated a scribefire like feature that allows you to add a bookmark or firefox button so you can blog in a new window whenever you find something on the ‘net that you want to talk about. As neat as it is, I still like scribefire which operates within the Firefox browser. If you are still not using FF I have to ask, why? Everyone has their thing I guess. WP 2.6 will also let you know when plug-in updates are available. It is possible other versions did this and I never noticed, but I don’t think so. Many of us like to update our themes frequently. WP 2.6 allows you to preview the new theme in another window before activating it. I like this feature because it lets you see the compatibility of your theme before you agree to use it. The revision feature is really cool. I will not use it often at KontansPlace, but I certainly will be using it with my class websites. You are able to look at revisions, compare them, and choose what works best. Handy tool. If you like gravatars you can assign defaults for those who have not created their universal ‘net image. Cute. There is also a “gear” feature that is supposed to speed things up, but I haven’t tried it yet.

All in all, no major complaints, but then this tech thing is only a hobby, not my life. Like everything else, some like it and some don’t.

I know I’m changing themes like most women change handbags but as wordpress requires upgrade and plugins upgrade I keep finding errors in the themes I choose. Just enjoy the different flavors and forgive me. It’s a hobby, what can I say? Should have seen this place when I tried to put a picture in the last post using the “add media” feature. Yikes.

One of the most bothersome issues with hosting your own site and using WordPress is keeping everything up to date. With recent releases of WP plugins can be automatically updated by a simple click, no download or ftp uploading to be done! Until this plugin it was still necessary to download WP files and transfer to your host if you wanted to avoid bugs and security issues that were fixed in new releases of WP. WP-Automatic-Upgrade is wonderful and makes the WP experience so much easier.

Sneak Peak of WordPress 2.5 so I thought I would give it a try. It isn’t up for official release yet. Not all plugins work. One that I loved with 2.3, Advanced-Admin-Menus, messed up the whole thing. The manage features were gone. Once deactivated everything started looking normal again.

A great comparison of 2.5 and 2.3 can be found here. A few features I find cool:

In the “Write Post” menu you can add media directly from the post page. Pictures, video, music, media.

Uploading from computer still has issues, but the from url feature seems to work fine.

One of the things I dislike about wordpress is keeping up with plugin updates. I sometimes let them slide if it isn’t something essential. With 2.5 you have an auto update feature. You simply click, enter your ftp info, which will be saved for later use, and there ya go. Beats downloading, ftp to the site, and activating.

The look is different, the navigation is different. I think it is going to work out just fine.

I’m also using Firefox 3 Beta 4. None of my add-ons work so I’m not thrilled with it. It will be great when the add-ons catch up.

This post was inspired by Dawn who commented that I had great plugins. I love my widgets, plugins, addons, and extensions…

I spent yesterday afternoon wiping the old laptop and reinstalling the OS. In December we gave my old Inspiron 600m to the girls. It’s battery life was pathetic, but they didn’t care. It was theirs and they didn’t have to use the old PC for games, they could sit in the den with us and enjoy the relaxation room. Before long a couple of lights were blinking red. It still worked, but I couldn’t figure out why the thing was blinking. I determined it had to do with the battery and they should just be certain to plug in for each use. Late January it stopped working altogether. I just knew the motherboard was toast. Big ‘bit received a Bratz doll for her birthday and wanted to use the Be-bratz deal that came with it. Guess what, not compatible with Vista. All computers that were Internet capable would not allow the Be-bratz to install. I was inspired to attempt Inspiron 600 repair. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least try a reinstall. After gathering the disks I set off to wipe it clean. This is a scary thing to do. Even though the laptop was unusable it would be more useless if I deleted the OS and couldn’t get it reinstalled. The decision was made to take the plunge and it worked. The OS was reinstalled and things seem to be working smoothly. After the reinstall I had to download AVG for virus protection, Firefox for web browsing, and the necessary add-ons for Firefox.

What is Firefox? You must know. It is what IE7 wants to be and modeled itself after. I love it. You can customize the look and add all sorts of great tools. My favorite part is the button bar. All of my favorite sites are a button click away. No dropping down the bookmark tab and searching for the right site. Just click, and go as fast as your connection will allow. How much? FREE! Where do you get it? Mozilla.com is the place. Here’s what happened. Netscape and IE were in competition. IE became the top browser and was packaged with all new PCs. Netscape sold out to AOL and the guys of Netscape started to create and open-source system. Mozilla Firefox was born. A community of users and developers help to make it the best browser available. Yes, that is jmho, but I think I’m right. If you are familiar with Netscape you will recognize similarities, but it is so much better.

I mention FF because I went to download one of my favorite add-ons for the girls. The Firefox filter made us feel much better about them browsing the WWW. Instead of finding the Foxy-filter I found a new add-on called Glubble. From their site:

Glubbles are bubbles of web content you trust for your child to see online. Discover a wide selection of Glubbles we’ve prepared for you, then modify them to suit your personal family values to build the web you want.

It includes Disney, Nick, and all the usual kid sites along with MANY more. You can add any site you want to their available sites. If they try to go to a site that is not included in Glubbles it will block it. They can send a request to have it allowed. I installed the add-on to my computer so that I can see where they are going on the net and allow/deny requests for other sites. There is a family messaging feature in Glubbles. The girls like to leave comments to each other on “the wall.” The Google searches are modified to block content that may be inappropriate. I have been struggling with the Google search within the Glubble kids window, but haven’t found this to be a problem because I do not allow the girls to search the net for whatever they want. If they have a research assignment we sit down and search together. Glubble is still in development, but I believe it is a great tool for those who have children on the ‘net. You do have to be a Firefox user, but it works with any OS.

Other tools…

I love my Foxytunes. It allows you to control your music player (for me iTunes) from within the Firefox window. There are also search features incorporated, but I do not use these often. Foxytunes will also include your current music into a blog post or email. Just a button click. Example:

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Relaxing to the sounds of: Steely Dan – Josie
via FoxyTunes

If you do a good bit of research you might find Zotero helpful. One-note is an office product that allows cut/paste for notetaking while you browse and it saves the URL for documentation. I like One-note and I use it to stay organized at school, but I do not like it for note-taking while web-browsing. Zotero works within the browser and allows you to add screen shots for later reference. I can not describe it and do the program justice, but they have a great video tutorial here.

Those are my favorite Firefox extensions and it took up a good bit of posting space so I will keep my WordPress favs short.

First, the new versions of WordPress allow widget use which makes life so much easier. Less dealings with code and tags. My favorite WP plugin is one that no one sees. Advanced Admin Menus turns your admin page into drop down menus instead of buttons. Yes, I’m lazy. I don’t want to click button after button to get where I need to go. It’s something like clicking 1 for English, 1 for current customer, 1 for billing, 2 for repair, 3 for fed up with automated systems… I also like comment-luv which links to a commenters last blog post. Bad Behavior and Spam Karma do a great job keeping spam off the blog, but I would love to have an anti-troll plugin. Bannage is OK, but really a troll is called a troll for a reason.

Lastly, I found two new programs that have made You Tube use in PPT easier. TubeDownload and Free FLV converter. I think the FLV converter will do the same as the download but I’m still playing with both of these.

That’s it for now…thanks for stopping by.

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Relaxing to the sounds of: Aerosmith – I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing
via FoxyTunes