All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

Ten months later, my about page is fresh again. You could say it’s more pertinent to my current life, rather than my history. I especially explain more about my photography.

If you’re doing any reading here, I hope you’re not too confused with Talk Like A Pirate Day. (Thanks to the Text Filter Suite WordPress plugin.)

WordPress 2.5 here works just fine. It took a little over 8 minutes, but most of it was backing up the database and site files. I’m still using the The Instant Upgrade plugin by Zirona.

You can try the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin — I’d actually suggest that one over the Zirona plugin because it’s in the plugin directory.

I like the improved dashboard, but I still can’t entirely remove the WordPress Development Blog and WordPress Planet feeds. Sure, I can edit the URLs and load them with another, but I usually stick to my news reader for news updates. Fortunately, with the Fluency Admin theme plugin, those are below the fold. Edit: Dashboard Widget Manager solves this. Yay!

I’m glad the stats widgets is built into the main dashboard page.

I’ve switched back to the visual editor because Matt says it won’t mess with my code anymore. I find that in full screen mode, the insert link pop-up doesn’t display. Update: I’ve found out that this is only an issue with the Fluency Admin theme plugin. So, that’s off. I like blue anyway.

I’m stoked about the few-click plugin upgrades. WordPress.com Stats had to be upgraded and it really took a few clicks. But, plugins need to be in the WordPress Plugin Directory for it to be detected.

Lastly, timestamp publishing is easier to understand.

You can see more details of WordPress 2.5 at the WordPress Development Blog.

Yesterday, I switched to a new WordPress theme because I wanted a better emphasis on my photography. I went from K2 to the DePo Skinny Theme. My latest Flickr photos are at the top now. Very cool.

*** If you’re not seeing this change or things look messed up, do a hard refresh in your browser. I think it’s Ctrl+F5 in Firefox. ***

Plus — or minus, depending on how you look at it — I’m purging extraneous categories. I was using tags a long time ago, but now I’m trying to minimize the number of categories. See the archives now? The category list isn’t as long as it was an hour ago. Yay! If you’re getting pings from old posts, feel free to delete them.

If you’re in the same situation that I’m in, WP-Cats rocks! I love that AJAX-y goodness.

WordPress 2.3 is coming soon and the feature it finally integrates is tags.

I have way too many categories, most of them were formerly tags (when I was using Ultimate Tag Warrior), so I need to dramatically delete most of them. Even if WP 2.3 didn’t have tagging, I’ve been putting this revamp for a long time.

• In my opinion, I have a lot of old posts that aren’t worth having archived. I want them deleted.
• I need to delete a ton of categories.
• I need to analyze my writing style so I know what core categories I need to have.

Eric at Internet Duct Tape wrote, “Climbing Out of Category Hell.” Fascinating article.

If you’ve been reading here for awhile, which categories do you think are relevant to me right now?

For lunch today, I went to Corner Bakery in Pasadena (Hastings Ranch) with Alex and Mystery James.

One of the things we talked about was blogging. James started a new blog to write about his work experiences. But, he was upset because he didn’t receive any comments. Alex complained because he wanted to blog on his Myspace account, but nobody reads it.

Here’s my thoughts about that:

What’s the purpose of your blog?

You need some sort of “About” page about what you or your blog is all about. If people don’t know of its importance, they’re less likely to subscribe. That’s fine if you want to stay somewhat anonymous, but you need to give people a reason to read your content.

What are your strengths?

If people know why you rock, they’ll be more inclined to become longtime readers.

Make people think so they’ll feel obligated to say something.

If you’re not getting comments, your readers don’t feel compelled to add anything. Examine your writing. Are you making statements or open-ended questions?

Does your personality invite other people to voice themselves?

If you’re the type of person that immediately goes into debate-mode, you can’t expect people to want to jump into a discussion with you. Listen, acknowledge and work with them.

Read what you admire.

In regards to the subject of writing, I’m subscribed to Copyblogger. Their purpose is to provide “copywriting tips for online marketing success.” Lots of people learn from trial and error, but if someone else already messed up and learned from it, you don’t have to.

Why do I blog?

I just like writing about anything and everything. I’m not an expert in any single aspect. Chris Brogan saw bryanvillarin.com and described me as the “jack of all trades.” (via Twitter) People know me as a “computer guy,” card magician, and rock star. As much as I like comments, I’ll just write about whatever that interests me.

It’s time to examine yourself. Does your blog have a purpose? What are your strengths? Do you get people thinking? Do you let them speak?

I tried ScribeFire because I saw it at the bottom of a few posts in Rev. Jon Swanson’s blog, Levite Chronicles. I’m dropping it because it doesn’t seem to code in XHTML. That’s all.

I’m utilizing reCAPTCHA to stop comment and/or email spam by “reading books”. (If you don’t know what a CAPTCHA is, their website explains it comprehensively.) Installing the plugin and getting the API keys were simple.

The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

This seems like a win/win situation, right? So why don’t more websites (i.e. blogs) utilize this service?

You know I use Bloglines. However, I still find it a hindrance to subscribe to comments for a specific blog post using RSS.

I tried coComment a long time ago. I didn’t like it. (Is it better now?)

Teach me something. Do you subscribe to comments? What the easiest way?

I love subscribing to comments with e-mail. The WordPress plugin that accomplishes that is Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith. It rocks. As a commenter, it’s the easiest thing to check the box before I submit my comment.

If you like that, Comment Email Responder allows you to respond to a comment in such a way that they know it was specifically intended for them. You click the envelope next to the commenter’s name, fill out your reply, then submit your comment. That’s really simple, too. For one of my posts here, one commenter has replied multiple times — rather than just one and done — and I’m sure it I owe it to that plugin.

I want need to make sure it’s simple for you to keep track where your conversations. Shouldn’t you do the same?

What else can you integrate into your blog to promote more conversation?

I installed Automattic Stats last night. It seems to work just fine. Upload, activate, enter your WordPress.com API key, and you’re done!

What’s odd about it is that I don’t see the smiley its supposed to place at the bottom of each page. It works, so I’m not complaining!

Update 4:26pm 5/7/07: Duh! If you’re logged in, it’s not going to track you!