Recently in Computer Geek Category

Deb had recently talked about linking to various audio files at the Erie Gay News site. it occurred to me that it was a very similar set up to what we already have with embedding video, although there were some differences. I looked around and decided to go with the Yahoo Media Player for embedding audio files on the site. I had to play around a bit with the tables and coding, but now it is set to go. I added an RSS feed for audio galleries, links to the audio gallery section when it exists in all the articles, created a page for the audio gallery (I figure that since we already have pages that group video and photos by year, why not do the same for audio?) and burned a feed on Feedburner to boot.

There are only a few entries in there now, but it will be very easy to add stuff in the future.

One of the first tests that I did was embedding an interview with the producers of Out in the Silence on the page that announces the screening at the library in Westfield NY next week.

Too funny! The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), consisting basically of Rev. Fred Phelps and his rather mentally askew family protested outside the offices of Twitter in San Francisco.

There were counter-protesters at the ready with some truly delightful signs.  A personal fave: God hates #tags! - a reference to the church’s official site, God Hates Fags and the hash tags used to find info about a particular topic on Twitter. Gay and geeky – gotta love it!

According to the article, one of the younger women from WBC was tweeting WHILE they were protesting Twitter. I am guessing that A) these folks didn’t have their irony detector turned on and B) she must have been chosen by virtue of having opposable thumbs and being able to walk upright, or something.

Kudos to those folks who met with the face of hatred and laughed right back at it!

Westboro Baptist Church Protests, Gets Protested Outside Twitter

Yesterday, the Westboro Baptist Church and their subtly-named picket group, God Hates Fags, brought their dog-and-pony-show to San Francisco. That's right -- the freaky people came to freak out the freaky people.
The religious group, based in Topeka, Kansas, usually pickets soldiers' funerals, reasoning that they died defending a gay-loving country. Thursday, they set their sights on a larger target: the headquarters of the social-media giant Twitter.

Westboro Baptist Church Protests, Gets Protested Outside Twitter - Asylum.com

I woke up feeling geeky this morning. Admittedly, when don’t I? It occurred to me that there is a fair amount of time we have an event at the Erie Gay News web site that has a URL to RSVP/register/buy tickets for, so why not add a field to link for that? That might help organizers better plan and since it is just a URL, I don’t have to fiddle so much with the event when I paste it in.

I made sure to not only add it to the calendar page, but the calendar RSS feed as well, which means that all of the sites carrying our calendar will also get the RSVP/registration URL's when they are filled in.

Hmm, I should probably come up with a page to request submitting an event. Maybe sometime soon. I still need to reset the newsletter.

Don’t tell me I don’t know how to multi-task! I was home for lunch on Monday and was trying to get the envelopes and labels generated and set up for the folding of Erie Gay News this Thursday. (And I got notice earlier today that the order has shipped, so it looks like we are on time. Yay!)

I had run out of a prescription, and we also changed insurance providers. So, while I am printing labels and envelopes and sticking the former onto the latter, I am juggling phone calls to the doctor’s office and the insurance provider, since it seems that the prescription isn’t covered by the new provider. Fortunately, there is an equivalent, so things are cool.

After work, I headed over to the Erie Mondays at Matthew’s at Matthew’s Trattoria. It was okay. I mostly chatted with religious study faculty from Mercyhurst.

After that, I went home to grab some dinner and let the dogs out. Then I popped over to Nelson’s tavern to the going away party for my friends Jo and Josh, who just got married and are relocating to Oregon after stopping off in to visit Florida. (Okay, not the most linear travel path, but sounds like fun.)

I also stopped in at Craze to confirm that we are on for the GLBT Legislation Advocacy meeting on February 18 at 7 PM. I then went home and finished some geek tasks.

Tonight was pretty much a “I think I need to be in a coma for a little bit”, although I did get some geek stuff taken care of.

Tomorrow is the State of the Union Address Watch Party at Matthew’s Trattoria and Thursday is folding at the Zone Dance Club.

I had some problems with the update to Movable Type 5. I think it is dumb stuff that I did. Shortened URLs from old tweets seem to fail, but new ones seem okay. Going to the main blog page and clicking on an entry now seems to work. I am using this as an opportunity to play around with set up. I was up WAY too late last night futzing with this.

I also got the Google AJAX Feed implemented on the Erie Gay News page for News from Other Sites. I have gone back and forth about implementing it for the individual feeds versus grouping them by category.

I also had some last minute futzing for the code that sends tracking emails for contests. I think that is now working.

One of the last major tasks I had set for myself while on vacation was to come up with an RSS feed partners page for Erie Gay News.

About a year ago, I noticed that one of the local bars had pasted in the calendar from our web site onto their site. However, the calendar was out of date. I figured that it would be kind of a pain for them to have to copy and paste new entries and take off old ones every time that I made a change, so I hunted for a script that would consume the RSS feeds that I already had. I found a rather nice one at Landmark Project. Apart from the webmaster initially pasting in the code, there is no further work – we maintain the content, and the other site stays updated.

It occurred to me that there were other relevant sites that could also carry the same code, which meant that the original research and development for the code paid off. I saw it as a mutually cooperative and beneficial arrangement: the more sites that carried the RSS feeds, the more likely that folks would be to find news and events. If I am looking at this correctly, everyone wins! And since it is an automatic thing, no one has to do any additional work past the one time pasting in of the JavaScript snippet.

I wanted to give the sites that carry our RSS feed some extra love, and I also wanted to get the code out there to make it easier for other sites to paste in. I did some database design and coding, and added it on to the existing resource section of the database and also created the new RSS feed partners page. I added a drop down to the page so that I folks could easily jump to the other feed. I have only pushed the calendar and news RSS feeds, but there are others as well.

Hmm, just realized that I should add some kind of indicator about RSS stuff to the resource page. Oh well, that should be pretty quick to do. I should also try to write some kind of article for the web site to let folks know about the new feature.

I have some social stuff for tomorrow, which is good since I should balance out. But I do feel pretty good about getting this done.

Around 11:20 PM last night, it occurred to me that I had pretty much spent that I had pretty much spent most of the day doing computer stuff, so I figured that it would be good to go out and actually socialize with other human beings. (Yeah, I know: “Thanks, Captain Obvious!”)

So, I headed off to the Zone and had a pretty good time. I bumped into a co-worker, who was out with her parents. Just after midnight, I mentioned that when folks were talking about this being the new decade, it was not exactly accurate. (Although, obviously any date/time could be used as the start of an arbitrary decade – October 7, 1982 was the end of a decade that began 10 years earlier.)

When co-worker and I were talking, I mentioned about another co-worker who referred to January 1, 2000 as the start of the new century/millennium. I pointed out that since the years would have been denoted with Roman numerals, and since there is no Roman numeral for zero, therefore, the first year would have been the equivalent of a 1, not a 0, so 2000 was therefore the last year of the 20th century. (Assuming that when folks switched from Roman numerals to Arabic, they didn’t take into account that they were also changing what the lowest possible starting integer could be.)

The co-worker I was talking with went from talking about I (the Roman numeral) to i (as in the imaginary number representing the square root of –1.) I instantly knew what she was referring to.

Who says we geeks don’t know how to cut loose and be all wild and crazy?? I had a fairly good time chatting and dancing, so it was pretty good.

Who says that I am not an irrepressible madcap? The next big geek project that I wanted to get done over vacation was a secure contest tracking web site for Erie Gay News. We have been averaging about a contest or 2 every week, and I wanted to have a way for the contest sponsors to be able to login and see some elementary statistics for the contests that we run for them (contest article page views, total number of entrants, summary totals for state and zip code, etc.) I also wanted to be sure to preserve privacy for entrants, and so I figured that out as well. (Duh, just figure out what recordsets to show.)

The contest administration has grown and changed a lot over the years. I used to just manually create a form on a page, and copy/paste the resulting emails into a database. It is much more automated now, so I can set stuff up fairly quickly and painlessly, and notification is pretty much a breeze.

It makes me feel good that we can help artists and others spread the word about their work, and reward people who visit the Erie Gay News site with an occasional freebie now and then. This also helps us to make connections with more people, which helps us mobilize the community when we need to.

Hopefully, I will be able to get the next project done as well.

I had resolved that I would try to get a few things done whilst I am off on vacation. Yesterday, I did a fair amount of cleaning (the refrigerator – which badly needed it), and I even vacuumed the corners of the rooms, which I couldn’t help but think of as “domestic detailing”, like auto detailing.)

I wasn’t sure how much of a difference that putting the plastic film over the windows helps, but went ahead. My inner sarcastic voice said “Oh yeah. Put up something like Saran Wrap, and you’ll be toasty warm. Whatever.”

Every year, work gives us a gift certificate for a local butcher shop, so I generally stock up and try to freeze in single serving sizes. I got that out of the way, and then used the vacuum food sealer, so I ended up with oodles of bags of stuff. Apparently the domestic theme is “shrink wrapping for the holidays!”

One of the projects that I wanted to work on for the Erie Gay News web site for the calendar page was adding a field for events to tie in the venue resource, as opposed to the resource for contact. In the sort of home grown content management system that I wrote for the newsletter, I had previously added a selection when adding a new event to pick a resource and then fill in the location and contact info. I also had it link back to the resource entry from the calendar page and the calendar RSS feed.

The problem occurs when when a resource has an event at another resource. I typically had chosen the venue resource and then rekeyed other stuff, but that was a small amount of work.

As an example, the LBT Women meet at Presque Isle Gallery Coffeehouse every month. I previously had keyed these in. So, when I added the field for venue resource, I was then able to link to the venue’s phone and web site, as well as for the group. Less keying for me! I thought that might also be useful in that someone might want to call before the event for info, but might also need to know the venue phone if they got lost or there was another crisis.

I also added a field for meeting text, since some of the groups that meet regularly tend to have fairly standard text for their meetings, or at least have something. Copy and paste may be our friend, but having something fill in automatically is better yet.

Yeah, I am a big geeky nerd, but getting this accomplished made me feel pretty good. And since I upgraded the code for the calendar RSS feed, that means that the extra info for venue stuff now appears not only on our site, but the 10 or so sites that carry our calendar RSS feed. (I also fixed the annoying display format for when an event spans more than 1 day.)