Programming Coffee

Another way to get your blog noticed (the first way being to submit to the blog directories… aka the blog mafia), is to get out and have your RSS feed syndicated. Here are some more places to have your RSS feed syndicated and your blog linked.

syndic8.com
feedster.com

2rss.com

Today is the day that the Paniris Web Development paperwork gets filed (i swear… no more foot dragging). This means that hopefully by the week’s end, I can start making some purchases in the businesses name. My first project Online Christmas Gift List will be receiving a MAJOR overhaul. I’m talking about new graphic design, new programming, and even a new domain (I’ll announce that AFTER I actually purchase it). And all of this of course needs to be completed within a month’s time (My birthday is my personal deadline.. Aug. 22nd). This aint no joke folks… A full site redesigned and programmed, not to mention some good link building really needs to happen to get my PR up (I’d LOVE to get a PR5 for this site…). I’m trying to stay with the low-cost link directories & plain old link trading, but I might actually have to purchase some text links (on good PR sites of course) until the end of the year. And then of course you have google adwords. I will be using google adwords to find out the *sweet spot* for the price on the Christmas List. Can’t charge too much, or people won’t buy. It’s all a learning process though, so If no one buys I will be dissapointed, but not completely crushed.

Oh yeah, If anyone out there is interested in putting up a text link on their site, let me know and we’ll talk about how I might be able to compensate you. (Leave comment!)

- Kyle

I decided to ignore my awstats for a while, and try out ShortStat by Shaun Inman. And then use the ShortStat Widget to moniter my stats from my dashboard. I’ve heard that its a good simple stats program… Only time will tell.

WordPress, in conjunction with a couple Ecto testers have worked together to create a patch to the WordPress 1.5.1.3 release that allows WordPress to play nicely with its XML-RPC counterparts. Now WordPressDash, and other XML-RPC clients of WordPress can resume daily activities. Thanks to WordPress and the Ecto testers for addressing this quicly. The patch can be downloaded on the Ecto site.

Thanks to Cory Cooper (if you want me to link, let me know), I have been alerted to the fact that WordPress version 1.5.1.3 breaks WordPressDash. Ok, so it really doesn’t break it, it just injured it a little. Something changed in the way posts are handled (i’m not sure if it’s an xml-rpc thing or not), but when you post to a blog the xmlhttprequest receives a 404 “Page not found”. Its the weirdest thing too, because the post actually goes through, but the categories won’t set. To make things more confusing, the 404 is generated on the xmlhttprequest to actually make the post, not to set the categories…
I’ve got a support thread started to try and get to the bottom of this. And I’m crossing my fingers that the solution will be backwards compatible.

So rumor has it that Steve Jobs is just as heartless as Bill Gates. While that may be true, you have to give credit to Jobs. He personally called the father of the teen who was killed for his iPod to give his condolences. So today my hat goes off for Steve Jobs.

I have had a lot of good feedback for WordPressDash. The community wanted to post to multiple categories, so I gave them that support. The community had trouble configuring their widget, so I enhanced error reporting. Now the community wants UTF-8 support and QuickTags. Well, I will do my best to make WordPressDash UTF-8 compliant. QuickTags? Maybe not. Due to Safari’s inferior cursor position handling in textarea’s, Quicktags were actually turned off for Safari users in Wordpress 1.5. And According to another post about quicktags in safari.

..until they allow you to get and set cursor position and selection in a TEXTAREA, the Quicktags will suck on Safari.
Alex King

And for those wondering what quicktags in safari has to do with quicktags in my WordPressDash widget, dashboard widgets use the same engine as safari

According to Daring Fireball, Dashboard widgets stemmed from an old apple application called Desk Accessories and not the cross-platform Konfabulator. Daring Fireball goes on to state that had Konfabulator fit the needs that apple was looking for, then Apple would have either bought Konfabulator, or hired the development team to work on Dashboard. However, Apple wanted something that was more tightly integrated with the OS, and that had better resource consumption and smaller footprints.
Either way, Im glad I don’t need to write custom XML and custom Javascript in order to write software for a platform that I have to pay for (granted, I do have to pay for Tiger, but I’m getting a lot more than just a widget runtime environment…).

I just submitted Programming Coffee to a few blog directories on the web. Maybe there are other people out there who share my interests?

• Blog Catalog 
• Blogdex 
• Blog Rankings
• Blog Hub
• All About Blog

Are there any other blog directories that I am missing?

According to the Adsense Support docs:

Can I display more than one set of Google ads on a web page?

Currently, AdSense publishers may place up to three ad units on one web page. Our system will detect the multiple ad units and will display unique ads to each ad unit. This system is optimized for pages with highly targeted Google ads - some pages may not show ads in the second or third ad unit. In this case, the ad unit will show as a transparent box, or will contain any alternate ad or color specified in the ad code.

But I have tried adding multiple ads to one page, and I can only get 1 ad per page! Is there some sort of trick involved for showing additional ads? Would this trick be a setting in my adsense account, or part of the javascript code they send?