Timberline Employee Blog

For more than two decades I have been convinced that IBM PC clone based personal computers were the most cost effective way to compute. Fifteen years ago I operated a small local BBS on DOS and OS/2 operating systems. On that BBS we featured Fidonet messages and its accompanying Filebone freeware and shareware files.

One day I noticed a set of floppy images in my in folder. I found out that day that Linux was born. I tried it and discarded it. Almost a decade later, I now have Linux on 95% of the servers I build. The turning point for Linux was when easy CDROM based distributions started coming complete with GUI interfaces. GUI, while unnecessary for servers, is entirely necessary for self taught knowledge if only for multiple windows. Multiple windows can be opened and viewed at the same time. A help window and an application window or terminal window open at the same time can do wonders over a plain terminal or DOS window with ‘help’ or ‘man’. Sure you can swap to different screens but reading cryptic help messages and remembering after swapping screens can sometimes be problematic.

About this point I’ve used Macs for school and only very minimally for work. The online community has had a lot of OS Snobs. I never took Apple seriously, guilty of reverse snobbery. As far as I knew the added monetary cost of Mac equipment has either caused these people to be snobs because they spent too much and it had to get out of thier systems -or- they were already rich snobs. Either way, not for me at this time. Most of the applications I could find were all for purchase and expensive.

Windows from the ground up has been great as a single user multitasking operating system. It truly wasn’t good until WFW 3.11 when networking was introduced as part of the Windows package. And it truly hasn’t been great afterwords. Windows 98 is the closest thing to great that Microsoft has had since. I’m basing that in time to install, patch, load helper programs and plug-ins, and secure. Windows ME flopped. Windows XP added a lot of eye candy. Everybody likes eye candy and the Games. Windows XP does do better at the gaming experience except for Dungeon Keeper 2 which must be played on Windows 98 (I’m still looking to see if Leopard and Wine can do it.).

So lets go jump to 2004. Linux is great for file, web, and email servers. If you are not locked into vendor browsers and readers, Linux also makes for a good desktop. Windows XP is great at a user ‘experience’ but is poor on time invested on up-keep.  What is this OSX people have been talking about? Is it really built up on a Linux/Unix type foundation? It sounds interesting. Let me look up online what I can find out… Hmm still too much OS Snobbery clouding out the people who want to help.

Jump back to 2007. Vista. Before Microsoft it was singular. You could only look at one vista. Now Microsoft has pluralized Vista into too many options. The parties involved at Microsoft who pluralized Vista into more than three platforms probably work at Apple or even for somebody that Microsoft stomped upon to get to where it is at. I had a notebook with Vista on it. I returned it to the store I bought it. I have a PC with a free Vista upgrade. The upgrade is still sitting on my desk unopened. Vista has more eye candy and dashboard plug-ins than XP, but nobody can convince me of its main selling point, security. Microsoft as a business is built on upgrading, how do you convince people must upgrade unless what they have is unsecure? The face of computing has evolved since Microsoft incorporated but the business model in this arena has not. Driver support and corporate lock-in aside, ultimately for me it came down to the number of versions of Vista that turned me away. Vista caused me to to not buy a notebook, or rather Vista caused me to return the notebook I purchased. This must cost the manufacturer even more. Not only a lost sale, but a return to process.

What now? I finally need to replace some old equipment. Boot camp? What is Boot camp? This is starting to sound promising in the computing world. There is a notebook designed to run Windows XP and is being actively marketed and it is called Mac.

I picked up a MacBook Pro, upgraded to Leopard (OSX 10.5), ran the Boot Camp install, and installed XP from my own disks. All the necessary XP drivers are included on the Leopard disks. I found out later I needed the non Leopard restore disks to install iLife 08.

I’m quite happy now. Windows XP games and business apps work. My new notebook has Wireless N and bluetooth. If I install VMware Fusion, I can even run Dungeon Keeper 2. If I wanted to, I could even skip boot camp and run everything in VMware Fusion. I have found a lot of freeware ported from the same free software movements that are propelling Linux.

Here is a how to showing how to add RSS Feed Aggregation to Wordpress 2.2.

Required: Wp-o-matic, Wordpress-2.2

First, let us not find out what kind of fun it is to replace work without a backup.

About the wp-o-matic 0.2 beta archive. It was made on a mac and I had to use a program other than the built in Windows XP Zip Folders to extract the archive entirely. WinRar extracted without difficulty but I still had to erase the extra .DS_Store files and __MACOSX directory.

Wp-o-matic version 0.2 beta had a problem in the mysql field description. This was my first stumbling block. Fix this first even if your tables use the default wp_ prefix.

On line 334 of wpomatic.php version 0.2 beta, replace the hardcoded “wp_rssfeeds” with {$this->dbfeeds} .

Now locate the directory your theme is stored in and open index.php. Somewhere in index.php you should find <?php the permalink() ?> next to ‘read more’, depending on the theme you use. Change this to say:

<?php $a_wprss_link=get_post_custom_values(”wprss_link”); if(!empty($a_wprss_link)){echo $a_wprss_link[0];}else{the_permalink();} ?>

This uses the get_post_custom_values() to pull the link data from the post created by Wp-o-matic. If there is nothing in this field then the regular permalink is used.

Good. If you haven’t already uploaded the wpomatic folder to your plugin directory do that now.

Turn on the plugin. If your database tables do not start with wp_ and you get an error here reguarding the database, read the part above that you skipped over a little to fast. Other errors are likely directory permission settings. Try chmodding to 777.

Then go to Options/wp-o-matic and enter in a feed to test. If all goes well you have a working RSS Aggregation system.

Now the interface does not let you enter complicated urls like http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss;_ylt=A9j8eu.hUnlGwfcAtRfQtDMD; ylu=X3oDMTA3MTBsZGZsBHNlYwNhZG0-?ei=UTF-8&p=chrysler &c=&eo=UTF-8, so if you have phpMyAdmin installed use it to load the url. Wp-o-matic will then be able to pull feeds where it wasn’t before.

If you want would like to add a target=_blank for outside links only then enter the following inside the <a href> defination next to the code we entered above. Note the code we entered above will be sourounded by quotes so you need to paste this outside of those quotes so this doesn’t become part of the link.

<?php $a_wprss_link=get_post_custom_values(”wprss_link”); if(!empty($a_wprss_link)){echo ‘target=_blank’;} ?>

The idea here is to always open rss links in a seperate window and open internal links in the same window.

Let me know if this helps.