ryanduff.net

Today is February 1st. Where are you as far as your New Years resolutions?

I’m not one to make a whole list of resolutions, but I have one major thing I wanted to accomplish this year. Form my consultancy and make it profitable by the end of the year. I’m still working on the website, but I have gotten my business cards done and handed some out. In return, I do have some clients and potential clients. I hoped to have my website done weeks ago, but due to other circumstances, that has been delayed. So, I am making progress, just not at the rate I would like.

With a baby on the way… April 1st if she decides to stay in until full term, I do need to get working on getting things done now. I also need to finish the nursery– sooner rather than later.

How have you been doing with your New Years resolutions? Are you on schedule, ahead of schedule, or behind schedule one month into 2010?

Ryan Personal Baby, life, new years, resolutions

In celebration of the release of Aaron Brazell’s WordPress Bible, I made a LOLCat style badge that you can post on your website to display that you too, are a proud owner of the WordPress Bible.

You can download the image for yourself from http://karmacs.com/temp/wpbiblebadge.jpg

Ryan Wordpress Aaron Brazell, badge, bible, meme, technosailor, Wordpress

I just noticed that Mailman stopped working about 6 weeks ago. I have a (dv) server at MediaTemple and it runs Plesk 9.x. This has been an issue for a while now, where it randomly stops working. If you have the same issues with Mailman under Plesk, here’s a fix for you. Run the following command:

$ /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/mailman_conf_init  /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py  qmail

This will force a reconfiguration of Mailman for qmail. After that, restart qmail and Mailman

$ service restart qmail

$ service restart mailman

Found and modified via Plesk forums

Ryan Plesk Email, linux, mailman, Plesk

Recently my girlfriend got a notice regarding a change in terms to her Victoria’s Secret credit card agreement. Victoria’s Secret store cards are held by World Financial Network National Bank. In reading these terms, I found some oddly worded sentences, that made it seem almost as if they were trying to slide changes past their women card holders. It mainly pertained to finance charges. (Emphasis mine).

14. FINANCE CHARGES

D. The Daily Periodic Rate of FINANCE CHARGE applicable to your Account will be computed by adding 21.74% to the value of an “Index,” and dividing by 365 (The corresponding ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE will be the Index plus 21.74%). The Index in effect for each Billing Period shall be the highest “Prime Rate” of interest as published in the “Money Rates” section of The Wall Street Journal for the calendar month preceding the month in which the Billing Period begins, rounded upward, if necessary, to the nearest .001% (“Index”). The corresponding ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE will not decrease below 24.99% nor increase above 24.99%. An increase or decrease in the Annual Percentage Rate will result in a corresponding increase or decrease in the amount of Finance Charge.

Effective July 1, 2010. The 24.99% maximum Annual Percentage Rate will be removed from your account. This means that the Annual Percentage Rate on your account can increase above the 24.99%, upon an increase in the Prime Rate.

In plain English, the APR on your Victoria’s Secret card will be 24.99%. That is, until the rate cap is removed on July 1, 2010 and it can be further increased. Better pay off that card each month unless you like paying 24.99% interest on all those fancy bras and underwear.

Oh, and you better opt out of receiving monthly paper statements or they’ll charge you $1 for each of those you want to receive.

Ryan Economy credit card, finance, Victorias Secret, WFNNB

I run all my WordPress installs as Subversion checkouts. This makes it easier to upgrade since there’s no FTP involved and I can choose when to upgrade as well as to what version. Since I have multiple blogs, I created a script to facilitate an easy upgrade all of them at once when a new version is released.

As a Christmas present to the WordPress community I’m making my script available to the public.

The only requirement is that you’re using subversion to manage your WordPress installs already. Other than that, the script is pretty simple to use, there’s just one line of paths that needs to be updated.

To use this script, start by creating a new bash script on your server:

vi wpupdate.sh

Press “I” to turn insert mode in vim and paste in the following:

#! /bin/bash
# Copyright (c) 2009 Ryan Duff <http://ryanduff.net>
# This script is licensed under GNU GPL version 2.0 or above
#
# This script upgrades (switches) a subversion copy of WordPress to a tagged version of your choice
# List of Current WordPress tag versions can be found at <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags>

# Set your paths
paths=(/path/to/install/1/ /path/to/install/2/)

clear

echo WordPress Update Script
echo ------------------------
echo
echo -n "Please enter version number and press [ENTER]: "
read version

for path in ${paths[@]}
do
cd $path
svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/$version/ .
done

Move your cursor up to the paths line and change to match the full paths to your WordPress installs.

Save the file. (Press Esc to exit insert mode. Type :wq and press Enter to save the file and quit vim)

Make the file executable:

chmod +x wpupdate.sh

To run the script type:

./wpupdate.sh

When prompted, enter the version tag you want to update to and press Enter. Current WordPress version tags can be found here.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Ryan Wordpress bash, linux, script, subversion, Wordpress

Just spent a few hours updating my GeekTool scripts and added some new ones to my desktop. Also snagged a new wallpaper from InterfaceLIFT Here’s the finished product (click for full size):

Ryan Personal desktop, geektool, wallpaper

At the November Harrisburg Tweetup, a discussion started regarding cell phone carriers. As usual, it became an all out war. Why do people defend their phone carrier like its a religion and fight anybody that’s on a different carrier? Seriously!

People seem to have no problem spending hours defending their cell phone carrier. For what reason? Just because it works for you, why does it have to work for everybody else? I’m tired of people trying to shove their opinions down everybody else’s throat. I choose what works best for me, you choose what works best for you. If I have an issue with my phone carrier, I’ll change to a different one. If you have an issue with my phone carrier, bite your tongue and keep it to yourself. I’m tired of hearing about it.

Of course, the whole Verizon/AT&T dispute only makes things worse for everybody.

Ryan Personal att, phone, rant, religion, sprint, tmobile, verizon, Wireless

After reading an article on Weblog Tools Collection in regards to the WordPress trademark, and reviewing the information on WordPress.org, I got to thinking about how this affects the open source community.

In the commercial realm, it is very important for a company to protect their trademark. If they fail to do so, somebody might sell a similar product using the same name which could confuse consumers. In the open source realm, the software and code base is community based. Because of the community involvement, other related websites crop up to extend the original software.

In the case of WordPress, the code is maintained by a commercial entity, Automattic. As a commercial company, Automattic has an interest in protecting the name “WordPress,” especially since they run a hosted service at WordPress.com. At the same time, there are also plugins and themes developed for the software, as well as meetups and “WordCamps” which are a WordPress un-conference.

Naturally, people extending WordPress, would use “WordPress” in the name of their project or website, but unfortunately, this is a no-no based on the information on WordPress.org. Because of their legal advice, they recommend that you use “wp” instead of “WordPress” in the domain name of any related project– unless, of course, you want to be sued for trademark infringement. On the flip side of this, the WordPress logo, which has also been trademarked, is allowed to be used, as long as you use the “official” logo. They’re granting full use to the logo trademark, but not the name trademark.

The problem arises with making money off WordPress in a way that Automattic and/or WordPress already gains income from. In essence, you would be taking from profits not rightfully yours since you’re not the trademark owner. But what if you are just contributing to the community? Giving back, as in charity to the community with nothing to gain? Shouldn’t you be allowed to use “WordPress” in the clear? Common sense would agree.

This puts everybody– Automattic and the WordPress community in a catch-22. How can you effectively use WordPress in a domain name without degrading to “wp” or facing legal action. Is it just an issue with US Trademark law, or is there a better way to handle the issue and allow the use of “WordPress” in a domain name while keeping the trademark protected?

There may be a fix. Mozilla has allowed the use of their trademarked names in domains, as long as you have permission. They have a fairly straightforward application that you can fill out and send along to the Mozilla Foundation. Pending approval, you can use the trademark as long as you don’t do anything to confuse your website and the trademarked product. Something similar out of the Automattic/WordPress camp would allow common sense, non infringing uses of “WordPress” without worrying somebody might steal their business. And since it’s permission based, it can be denied if things start to go awry.

Since I’m not a lawyer, this is just my opinion. What are your thoughts on the whole situation?

Ryan Wordpress domain, law, open source, trademark, Wordpress

I had the privilege of attending WordCamp NYC this past weekend. It was an amazing event with over 700 attendees. I’d like to thank @janeforshort and @sbruner for putting on an awesome event.

Saturday consisted of conference sessions with a set schedule. Due to the awesome session topics, the unconference sessions were pushed back to Sunday morning. Following the unconference sessions, we gathered at Mason Hall at Baruch College to check out the plugin and theme competition. We continued on with three rounds of 5 ignite-style presentations, an overview of Wordpress 2.9 features by Mark Jaquith, and a town-hall with Matt Mullenweg.

It was sweet to be back in New York again and meet up with some old friends, as well as meet plenty of new people. I actually met so many people, I can’t even list them all off here. So after a long weekend of excitement, it took me a few days to process everything so I could even post this!

Ryan Wordpress new york, wcnyc, WordCamp, Wordpress

In case you haven’t heard yet, or don’t follow me on Twitter @ryancduff (Which you should be doing!), Crystal and I are having a baby girl. She’s due around April 1st, 2010. I’ll have more details as we get closer.

Ryan Baby Baby, life