Bruce Keener’s Lifestream

Just watched the 6/19/09 session of Bill Maher, with guests Billy Bob Thornton and Oliver Stone. The discussion with Stone was fascinating. Really mind-opening as to some aspects of our history. I now have a different view of him than the "conspiracy theorist" I had considered him to be. He's really into studying history, something I've never done with any seriousness, and something I now wish I had done.

I know this may seem like a lame subject to talk about on a blog, but my message from it is: take in information from different pathways than you normally do -- you'll get to see things a bit differently, and that's a great way to learn.

I like independent thinkers. I think everyone should be that way, but that is not the way things are. Crowd thinking so often rules.

If you like the YARPP plugin and want to use it with the Thesis theme, the following simple code is all you need:

function custom_promo() {
if ( function_exists('related_posts') && is_single() )  {
?>    
    <h4>Related Posts:</h4>
    <?php related_posts(); ?>
<?php }
}
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'custom_promo');

Just add it to your custom_functions.php file, activate the plugin, and tweak it to your heart's desire. You will probably want to add some styling to it, but the basic code above is all you really need to get it to work.

NOTE: if you copy the above code, you may need to replace the single quote marks in the code with the apostrophe marks from your own machine. Sometimes the apostrophes that are shown within a web page, such as this one, are not the same as the apostrophes on your computer.

A couple of weeks ago, I switched the theme on my Keener Living blog to an open-source one, after having satisfactorily used Thesis for a little over a year. In a post on this blog, I mentioned that the key reason that I was doing this was that I wanted to show support for open-source software in general.

Within the next few days, though, I will be switching back to Thesis. I'll be doing that for a few reasons:

• It is so easy to tweak a design with Thesis, and I can switch to having a wide content area, like Matt Cutts and fellow Georgia Tech graduate Paul Stamatiou use, with just a few mouse clicks. (BTW, I graduated from GT about 35 years before Paul did ... I still remember working my butt off at GT and loving it.) I love the way Matt uses large pictures, instead of scaling down screenshots to the point of being almost unreadable. I want to be able to do that, too.
• The Carrington Theme that I have been using at Keener Living for the past two weeks is well-designed, but its framework is very complicated for a non-developer like me to really tweak. So, to get a few changes made to it that I really wanted, I paid the developers of Carrington (the folks at Crowd Favorite) to make some changes to it for me. That's okay ... I learned from the code that they provided. But, it made me realize: here is this nice, open-source theme, and the community is not really helping Alex King and his team further develop it. At least if they are, it is not apparent through the forums ... I've not seen anyone upload any suggested improvements to it, and that is really what open-source is about. It's more about that than it is about "free." As I thought about this, it occurred to me that this community support seems to be missing from other "open-source" WordPress themes, too. I cannot be sure of this, of course, as only the developers of the open-source products know what sort of community support they are getting in improving their code, but there isn't any obvious helping going on that I can see. If you want to see real community support, go into the Thesis forums and look around ... there is a lot of sharing of code going on there, and a lot of suggestions for improvement, and so on.

The other thing I don't like about all the hoopla going on with the WordPress GPL discussions and the "open-source theme community" is that it seems to have a religious fervor. That has been a turn-off for me for a long while, and continues to be. I prefer rational discussions, without all that "hoorah" and "us versus them" sort of chatter that I've been seeing.

Does this mean I am less in favor of open-source software than I was two weeks ago? Not at all. I support the concept, where it works. And, for it to work, it has to result in continual improvements to the code through community support. WordPress itself appears to have that sort of support, but I don't see the "open-source themes" as having it. Not yet anyway, and I am not convinced they will have.

Update: I went back to using Carrington. Simple reason: when I use Thesis, I mess around with it too much, tweaking this and tweaking that, and often screwing things up. I don't do that with Carrington (fortunately I don't understand the framework well enough to abuse it), so using it keeps from screwing things up. This also has the advantage of freeing up the time that I otherwise waste on unneeded tweaks. Being an engineer, even a retired one, does have its downsides: it makes you want to tweak things too much, even when they are best left alone. So, I am learning (re-learning) a lesson.

Today I began a rather large project of updating my Time Management e-book to have considerable additional content, and to make it available in ePub format as well as PDF and Kindle formats (mobi). Since publishing in ePub format is a new experience for me, I wanted to ensure that I have a handle on how to do it before undertaking the massive update. In particular, I wanted to see how well it handled images and how good/bad they looked on an iPhone (using the Stanza iPhone app), so I would know what sort of challenges lay ahead for me in dealing with images. Good images can help make a good reading experience, and bad ones can ruin it.