Connor, playing Ōkamiden on his Nintendo DSi:
“This is the most Japanese game I’ve ever played.”
Category Archives: geekspeak
site-related techspeak, computer crap, other technical garble not of interest to the general populace.
Nerding Out In My Free Time
I mentioned in a recent post that I rediscovered my camera collection when I was looking for a film camera to bring to Hocking Hills. That morphed into a side project to create a new version of the Cameras page I had in a previous iteration of my blog.
Thing is, my WordPress installation uses PHP as its programming language. I haven’t touched PHP since the last time I tried to customize my blog, which was many years ago. Granted, my job as a data nerd has meant I’ve gained some experience in other programming languages, but PHP is not one of them. Also, I haven’t had to touch CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for a Very Long Time, so I needed to refresh my knowledge of the possibilities there.
I managed to break my project into a bunch of bite-sized tasks that felt very Agile-esque.
- Create a custom tag page in WordPress.
- Retrieve the tag information.
(Shoutout to Mobilize Cloud for their helpful post from 2016.) - Display the tags as tiles, using an unordered list and some basic CSS.
- Link to each tag page.
- Display the number of posts for each tag.
- Display a photo of each camera (tag).
- Retrieve the date range a given tag was used.
(This was the hard part, and required doing some research and flexing my SQL skillz.) - Enter descriptions for each camera/tag in WordPress.
Next up is making sure my new page works as expected on mobile, uploading photos of all the cameras, and writing up descriptions. After that, I’m sure I’ll come up with some other bells and whistles I’d like to add….
2023 Tomato Harvest: SunSugar Cherry Tomato
This is the kind of rabbit hole I fall down when interests collide: data analysis of last year’s tomato harvest, written by hand in a notebook I bound myself, as a reminder to stop procrastinating and get this year’s seeds started and planted out in time to enjoy a proper harvest this year.
In Lieu of a Review: 2022
I never did get around to writing a Year In Review last year.
I still collected all the data, still had things to say… just never managed to sit down and do it. For various reasons.
As I sat down to recap 2023, I felt (as I’d known I would) that I couldn’t summarize 2023 without at least acknowledging 2022. So, in lieu of a review, here are some screenshots from my 2022 roundup on Exist.io, where I aggregate all the things.
Sneaky IFTTT
I’ve been grandfathered into a reduced monthly subscription price of IFTTT Pro for years now. This morning, I learned that the feature I use the most, the one I keep my subscription active for, now requires a Pro+ account.
IFTTT stands for If This Then That; it’s basically a lo-code/no-code solution that lets users connect their apps with each other. I used it a lot more often before I started using iOS Shortcuts, and I’ve only continued to use it for things I haven’t been able to convert to a Shortcut — mainly involving my WordPress blog.
Sometimes I have a quick thought that I want to post to my blog. Once upon a time, I created an IFTTT Applet that would take anything I posted to Twitter and import it as a blog entry. You know, in case Twitter ever went belly up or deleted my old tweets (as unlikely as that seemed at the time).
Over time, I started backing off of Twitter and decided to see if I could easily post quick updates directly to my blog using IFTTT. The iOS WordPress app at the time was bloated and clunky — at least, in connection with my webhost at the time — and I refused to even install it on my phone. So I created a “Quickblog” applet in IFTTT that would bring up a simple notes field and a button. Type the note, push the button, and the post was published.
Even after I switched webhosts, even after the WordPress iOS app became something quite usable, my Quickblog button was still so quick and handy that I kept it around.
Fast-forward to this morning, when I noticed something minor but still worth posting about. Swipe to my page o’ widgets, tap Quickblog, type my note, hit the button.
But when I launched up WordPress an hour or so later to add a more descriptive title and maybe another category, I couldn’t find my post anywhere. Not in Published, not in Drafts… so I checked to make sure my IFTTT applet was still connected. Yep… but it last ran in June? I hit the button that would manually run the app. Nothing.
I opened up the applet configuration settings… and there it was, nestled in the WordPress action. I need a Pro+ account to use the WordPress connector now.
Well, shit. How many random thoughts did I think I posted to my blog since June, but that actually went nowhere?
Guess I should have paid more attention when Rob O’Hara aired his IFTTT subscription woes on his own blog. Here I thought I was good to go with my discounted Pro account, when he was complaining about his now-hobbled free account.
Well, IFTTT, it’s been real. You won’t miss my $1.99 per month, and I won’t miss my Quickblog widget.