2009-07-15 09:21 | Subscribing to comments.

If you are using Wordpress as an installed thing (versus WP.com), and you have the Subscribe To Comments plugin installed, there is a way to let people subscribe without having to comment.

• Navigate to the folder for the theme you're using.
• Edit comments.php.
• Look for </form>.  Immediately after that, paste this:
  <?php show_manual_subscription_form(); ?>

If you want a bit of separation, put <hr /> just above that line.

If you want to edit the text, look for the show_manual_subscription_form() function in /wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments.php.  Look for the first single-quoted item in all php _e items – that'll get you to the explainy text, the text label, and the button label.

Ta-dah!

(I should write the author and ask them to make this a proper setting.)

2009-04-01 07:43 | The r-word, and a campaign. And an announcement.

First, the announcement.  Mild.  I do not participate in April Fool's Day, so you needn't worry about lying bullshit on this blog.

Now then.  Rachel at Feministe posted about the word "retarded".  There is a campaign to end use of that word as a pejorative, at R-Word.org.

I used to use that word, but I gave it up ages ago.  Alas, I work with someone who uses that word every five goddamn minutes, so I have to be a little more vigilant in keeping it out of my daily vocabulary.

I am ridding myself of other terms I don't like, as well.  The way I do it is to think of what the word means and what it connects to and so forth – so when I say "Man, I'm beat!", my first thought is "'Man', eh?".  Links back to my ongoing irritation that men are often the default.  ("Boy, I'm tired!"  "The sweet closeness of brotherhood."  "One giant leap for mankind.")  It is a silly thing, I suppose, but I figure I can take the opportunity to find other ways of expressing what I mean.

I dunno from others, but I do not post this in an effort to control your, the reader's, language.  I post this to encourage others to consider their language.  Linguistic dictates don't work, but maybe more people will consider the words they use, and will cut down on using certain ones.

*finishes coffee*

2009-03-30 18:15 | Meow meow meow &c.

Every so often, I feel embarrassed to post some things here, because I think they're basic and so I should know these things by now.  I post my thoughts on strip clubs or whatever, and it feels like I am still sitting at the kiddie table or something.  Everyone else is talking about advanced feminist theory, where the hell was I?

Fie.  I write to get my thoughts in order.  Even if it's basic stuff, it's still worthwhile to me.

Er, the end.

2009-02-20 22:46 | Spring cleaning, and cetera.

Tonight has been spent, among other things, managing my blog layout.  Primarily, I focused on improving linking to other folk:  I added the Recent Comments item, I moved the "blogroll" up a bit and updated the links, and I installed the CommentLuv plugin.  (I don't know if that last will work yet, but why not?)

I will never entirely know what I'm using this blog for.  I have the occasional idle idea of moving entirely over to here (from my LJ journal), but it will never fly.  I get a sense of community from LJ that I don't get from other blogs.  To torture an analogy, LJ is like a dorm, and individual blogs (e.g., any non-LJ blog in the Linkage sidebar item there) are like houses in a suburb.  The analogy is intended to highlight the casual atmosphere of LJ, versus the slightly more formal nature of non-LJ blogs.

Each have their ups and downs.  I tilt more towards casualness, so I'm more on LJ, the end.

*waves hand*  Regardless, I wanted to improve others-linkage because even though this is a teensy hole-in-the-wall as far as blogs go, I want to… include? acknowledge? others.  Some word that means "Though I'm a small corner of the web, every strand counts".

I still get nervous that I'll say the wrong thing or not do something right or whatever.  I greatly admire a bunch of these well-spoken, successful, amazing women who I've linked to on the sidebar there, and I have the doom-anx, you know.  But I figure that so long as I (a) respond well to constructive criticism and (b) continue improving, any fuck-ups I have will not involve deportation.

Anywho.

• I set the &%*$ tag cloud to not be limited in number but be uniform in size.  I cannot abide mixed-size tag clouds.
• I added a random quote generator.  I think.  I may post my Javascript workaround, since none of the plugins are pleasing me at the moment.
• I created a bingo card page.  Gosh is it ever a work in progress, but I lurv it.
• I updated a few plugins what needed it.
• I streamlined my new post page.  Turns out you can remove modules, which cuts down on page load time, yay!

I'm still inordinately pleased with myself for adding and updating that RSS footer plugin, that advises that I will receive comments through here, not through LJ.  I do not want to discourage input, and I really hope I wasn't rude, but I don't get notifications from comments made on the LJ feed, and I don't want to miss them.

And in conclusion, I've been lying to my girlfriend by saying this game is easy.  It's fun, but after a certain level, I want to break out the graph paper.

Or, uh, go to sleep.  Right.

2009-02-12 13:30 | One part post, one part test.

karnythia has a post up about domestic abuse, with regards to the recent Chris Brown/Rihanna news.  Please read the comments as well, they are fantastic.  Also check out hotcoffeems's comment on domestic abuse:

And every single damn time someone tries to come up with some Special Circumstance that makes the situation under discussion possibly different. Well, guess what? 999 times out of 1000, it is not different, in any way shape or form. It's like idiots who tell you not to wear a seat belt because someone they know would have been killed if they'd been wearing one. Well, gee, guess that means we should never wear one, right? Every time people seek to make some kind of exception, in the interest of "fairness," they give just a little bit of license to this mess, make it likely that yet another abuser is going to go to the woman's friends in the interest of drumming up sympathy for himself in dealing with this "unbalanced" woman, because he knows people will go for it.

Pass it on.

[eta] And if you have a Facebook account, please log in and report this group.  When you go to that page, go all the way to the bottom and click Report Group.

(The test is to see if this RSSupplement plugin works.  I want to add "Please comment on the entry over here" to posts that've been RSSified.)

2008-10-23 08:56 | Gratefultwo, and things.

Me being me, naturally I spaced on writing anything yesterday. *amused*

Yesterday, I was grateful for my therapist. Yesterday was my last session with him, by my request – I've been doing fine, plus we could both use the money (I was paying less because I'm broke more, so). He is absolutely the wonderful, and I would clone him if I could.

---

- I've added a plug-in that allows you, the reader, to subscribe to comments. I approve.

- I need to kick the font sizing around a bit. I don't like that it's teeny. I also want that "font size smaller/larger" thing, yes I do. (Why? Because.)

---

Ballot Return Statistics for 2008 General Election – Daily

*pleased*

*hits "refresh" a lot*

2008-10-20 20:16 | Random.

Random things on my mind.

• I could never see stupid name-calling from either side of the political divide and it would still be too goddamn soon.  For serious.  Grown people are doing this, and I do not just refer to Republicans here.
• I 100% like this interface better.
• I swear, the more I read about marriage and divorce, the less likely I am to ever, ever get married.  Jesus, I will deal with the paperwork hassle of domestic partnership instead.

I think I had more, but my brain's been replaced with Skittles, so I am going to go play The Sims some more, instead.

2008-10-20 14:09 | Whee, I've relocated!

I copied nearly all my data from the old URL (at blogspot) to here, including all Haloscan comments.  Next is to get links over here, but that should be easy enough.

A couple of notes, in case I ever do this WP thing again.

• The Meta section is found in sidebar.php.  Remove it.
• Go to Manage > Link Categories page to rename Blogroll to anything else.
• Go to /wp-includes/widgets.php, and look for the wp_widget_tag_cloud function.  Within this, look for "wp_tag_cloud();".  Comment that out, and replace it with wp_tag_cloud('smallest=10&largest=10&number=45&orderby=name&format=flat');
• Nrr.  Go to Settings and make sure the timezone is accurate.  If it is not <i>and</i> posts have been made, update the mysql table wp_posts – set the post_date to post_date_gmt minus (whatever).
• To add "[no subject]"-ness, go to /wp-includes/post-template.php.  In the get_the_title function, add below the $title= line: if ( !$title ) { $title = ']no subject]'; }

The last things to do here are (1) redo categories to categories + tags and (2) move the sitetracker dealiebopper over.

Whee!

2008-08-27 14:49 | Still ISO a good blogging thing.

This is the last worthless blog post that you'll ever see…

I may be lying about this.

2008-07-17 09:52 |

2008-07-17 08:37 | Oh yeah.

2008-01-13 02:05 | Naturally, I'm listening to that song right now.

First story.

When I was 21-or-22, my boyfriend-at-the-time, his wife, her boyfriend, and I went to a concert in the woods – World Concert, or something like that.  It had all manner of flavours of bands – Irish folk music, bluegrass, something with African drums, something with almost more instruments than band members, and so forth.  (I can't recall them all.  Though I can recall that it was in/near a forest, as I got splinters in my feet.)

One band was the Nigerian Brothers, and they did amazing things with drums and vocals.  I was there in a black top and some blue wrap as a skirt-like thing.  I wanted to dance, but I saw people towards the front of the crowd doing Real Dance Maneuvers, and I wasn't that good, so I didn't.  But then I noticed that a lot of people were just doing the two-step dance – not really a dance, more like "I'm moving back and forth, hurrah".

I want to note that I don't mock them for this.  Hell, I was doing that.  But I thought, "I'm not as good as the group up front, but I can maybe move better than these folk around me."  So, I closed my eyes and stomped along.  It was fantastic.  Later, I got a couple of people asking me where I learned to dance like that, in admiring tones.  "From the people at the front."

Second story.

I was at this club in Boston, years ago.  It's located on Lansdowne street, and it has a downstairs that's open and an upstairs that's more like a bar with a dance space, and that's all I remember about it.  The downstairs was playing house music, and the upstairs was playing rock music, mostly from the 80s.  I was, as you can imagine, upstairs.  And no one was dancing.  No one.

Then, the DJ played "Dancing With Myself" by Billy Idol.  "Well there's nothing to lose / And there's nothing to prove / I'll be dancing with myself"

So, I went up on the dance floor, by myself, and I danced.  By myself.  Oh man.  By the end of the song, a couple of other people had come up to dance – I assume they were emboldened by my willingness to, you know, dance with myself.

And now, the point.

I keep saying I want to write more here, but I keep not doing it.  Instead, I fill this blog with links to other people's words.  And part of it is because these words and links are amazing, but part of that is anxiety – what if I write something that annoys someone?  What if I write something and I'm wrong, or I get something wrong?  Aiee!

Well, if I annoy someone, then they have every opportunity to not read what I write.  And if I'm wrong about something, or if I'm ignorant about something, then that's an opportunity to learn.  It's possible that I will anger someone that I respect, but all I can do is be willing to learn if I'm wrong or ignorant, and be determined to be myself, whoever that is, regardless.

So.

Hello, world.

2007-09-19 09:22 | Three things.

1) I want to revamp my tags a bit.  There was no point to this point.

2) Jill at Feministe takes on the "Why doesn't she leave?" question.  If you want the best comment in the world, see bbrugger's response.

3) Carnival of Feminists #45 is up at Feminist Philosophers, which means I'll be reading for forever today.

2007-04-24 08:43 | I am a corporate whore.

I have no reason to believe that I generate So Much Traffic that using AdSense will make any of either.  Still, why not, hey?

I made it so it looks a bit different from the rest of the sidebar nonsense down there, so that it's not confused with stuff I'm writing.  Which is less about worry that yall won't catch on, and more about me not startling myself in the future.  Ah, the dangers of being a skimmer.

It would be nice if yall'd clicky, on occasion, but I'd much rather you be interested in what you're clicking first.  I haven't totally sold out.

2007-04-23 16:39 | Masculine/Feminine Quiz

Elsewhere, I found a link to The Gender Genie.  I plugged in the text of my most recent blog posts (only my text, not quoted text), which is precisely what happens when I'm waiting for data to be imported into SQL.

The results of copy-pasting all text that wasn't a quote or a bit of geek code or a bit of knitting instructions are:

Words: 4258
Female Score: 5411
Male Score: 6726
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

*snickersnort*

2006-12-29 09:48 | A filler post.

This is a filler post, made primarily because I have this RSSed into LiveJournal, and I know that for whatever reason, if I go too long without posting, LJ will pull the last n posts.  Frustrating but true.

One day, I'll figure out the value for "too long", and will set up a reminder to post something every x days.  Until then, filler posts and annoyances.

(I also do this because I'll be posting a huge thing soon, and I don't want my friends list to collapse under the strain.)

2006-10-26 19:22 | Blogging sites.

This journal is a new attempt to find a space for my less personal and more substantive posts.  My LJ is for my personal and community-type posts.  I've tried Vox, and their value system did not mesh with mine.  When I say I value usefulness somewhat over style, I mean that I value both, but the former more.  When they suggest that they value style over usefulness, they appear to mean one or the other, and not both.  V. frustrating.

(I may be exaggerating out of a sense of infinite frustration.  I'm okay with that.)

Three things that make Blogger.com awesome already:

1. It has tags.  "Labels", really.  Not that every other blogging system doesn't, but it's still awesome.
2. I – I – can choose to compose posts in HTML format or RTF.  LJ has this, I think; I don't care for WYSIWYG typing, so I don't pay attention unless I'm forced to use it.
3. The tags labels management page is the ideal page.  All others should copy it.  I'd take a screenshot, but my keyboard is a trifle bolloxed at the moment.  So.  There's a column on the left that lists all the labels I've ever used, and a column on the right that displays the last n posts I've made (where n is a number between 5 and 300).  When I click on a label link, it displays only posts with that label attached.  I can search for posts.  I can select all posts with a certain label, remove it (thus removing the label entirely), and, since the check marks aren't removed, add a new or used label to the posts.If I decide that I want the label "Stuffware" to be lowercase", I click the "Stuffware" link, check all boxes (using a handy "Select All" link), remove the label, and add a new label called "stuffware".  If I want all of my -isms posts to be combined into the label "Isms", I go through each label group, remove the label, and add "Isms".

   It is beautiful.  It is almost perfect.  (What would be absolutely perfect would be a way to just straight rename a label, but hey, it's new.)  If I was a totalitarian dictator, I'd force all blogging sites to use that format for their $tags pages.

It's still kind of slow when compared to a site that doesn't depend on all the non-HTML webpage stuff in the world (JavaScript mostly), but given the awesome, I'm prepared to accept that.  The only way it could be more awesome is if it had some Windows-based posting client.

… You know, I honestly expected that I'd find something when searching through Help.  And I did, kind of.  I found out about posting using MS Word.  *slow blink*

2006-10-26 17:36 | More with the tests.

Now I'm checking out labels (tags, categories, monkeys), and whether pigs can fly.

Mmm… flying tagged pig-monkeys…

2006-10-26 15:45 | Test.