Dates in Posts Fixed

Posted by Tyler | Filed under tylerbutler.com

Just made a minor fix to the site… I noticed that dates weren’t showing up for some posts. Took me about 5 minutes to figure out that the Wordpress the_date() function had changed:

When there are multiple posts on a page published under the SAME DAY, the_date() only displays the date for the first post (that is, the first instance of the_date()).

Quick and easy change…

Before: <?php the_date() ?>, <?php the_time() ?>

After: <?php the_time("F j, Y, g:i a") ?>

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Read more | Comments (0) | July 13, 2009, 9:01 pm

Twitter Experiment

Posted by Tyler | Filed under Projects

I am experimenting a little with auto-tweeting from my blog to Twitter. In general, I dislike when people do this, for the following reasons:

  • I get double-exposure to their content. If I am interested enough in someone to follow them on Twitter, and they also have a blog, then 90% of the time I also subscribe to their RSS feed. That means I see their posts in Twitter then also in my feed. That bugs me.
  • Tweets are limited to 140 characters, and typically blog posts are longer. That means I see 100 characters plus a link, possibly less in the tweet itself. That’s useless.

At the same time, I find myself tweeting a lot of links, because Twitter is just a more vibrant community than my blog. I get a lot more comments and replies from people there than on my blog. Twitter is a decent place to broadcast stuff, but I don’t like the fact that I can’t easily find the stuff I’ve posted later. Have you tried using Twitter search to find a link you yourself posted in the past? It’s ridiculously bad. I figure if I can just keep it on my own site at least I have more control over the search experience. Another reason I want to do this is to have a centralized place to write stuff, then choose how it’s syndicated. This will let me do that.

In order to address the two issues I have with common auto-tweet solutions, I’ll only be tweeting some of my posts. I am doing this by feeding only posts tagged “tweet” to Twitter via TwitterFeed. In addition, I grabbed a WordPress plug-in that does character counts of posts in the WordPress web UI. This will help me keep my posts that are auto-tweeted short and completely digestible as a complete tweet.

Hopefully this will all come together and work. Let me know what you think.

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Read more | Comments (0) | June 18, 2009, 1:04 pm

Site Move and Redesign

Posted by Tyler | Filed under Personal, Projects, Work

The server that is currently hosting the SharePoint version of tylerbutler.com is being decommissioned. Unfortunately, I wasn’t given much notice about this so I have not been able to secure an alternative SharePoint-ready location at Microsoft to host the site. In the meantime I’ve used this opportunity to move the site over to WordPress, and I’ve refreshed the look and feel. Hopefully this will be temporary, since I intend to rebuild the site on the new version of SharePoint once it’s publicly available. But in the meantime, WordPress is serving my needs.

The main www address should be redirecting to blog.tylerbutler.com as soon as the DNS changes propogate. The main RSS feed should be switched over, but I have not yet moved the others. Regardless, though, you shouldn’t notice any differences since I’m using FeedBurner.

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Read more | Comments (0) | February 18, 2009, 7:06 pm