Godwin’s Law

Posted on November 8, 2007 by Reverend

I discovered Godwin’s Law after reading this thread on the WPMu Forum. Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia article:

Godwin’s law is often cited in online discussions as a caution against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons, especially fallacious arguments of the reductio ad Hitlerum form.

The rule does not make any statement as to whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that one arising is increasingly probable. It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued[4] that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact. Although in one of its early forms Godwin’s law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions,[5] the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion: electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, and more recently blog comment threads and wiki talk pages.

Genius!

Posted in fun | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Miracle Mile

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Reverend

Image of Miracle Mile Movie Poster Given the state of the world that Brian Lamb describes with such profound eloquence in this post, I think it’s time to reach into the movie vault and pull out Miracle Mile, a surreal, end-of-the-world love story the whole family can enjoy. To echo something Roger Ebert says in his review of the film back in 1989 here (he is so right on about this film!) it is in many ways the West Coast’s answer to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (a classic in its own right). Both are typical boy-meets-girl boy-loses-girl up to a specific point in the narrative, after which a surreal landscape of utterly bizarre events ensues.

Image of After Hours movie posterMiracle Mile in many ways tops After Hours for me in that it takes on far more than it can handle and pushes the bizarre events to their logical extreme, by cobbling on the prospect of complete annihilation of civilization as we know it. The perfect feel-good love story meets the 1980s nuclear holocaust narrative. All the more poignant given it was made on the very cusp of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the dissolution of all our fear of the Red Commies.

The movie’s action all takes place in the area of Los Angeles known as the Miracle Mile. And, in fact, I lived in that neighborhood during the mid-90s and was a huge fan. Image of Johnie's Coffee ShopThe film does an awesome job of featuring the La Brea Tar Pits (twice), LACMA, the Pan-Pacific Park (former home of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium) and last, but not least, America’s most photogenic diner: Johnie’s Coffee Shop–an added treat for Big Lebowski fans given it’s where Walter assures the Dude he can get him a toe by 3:00 –amateurs! This film is very much a tribute to a great area of an amazing town (much like After Hours is an homage to NYC’s SOHO–back when it was worth celebrating mind you) which features very few of the pretensions that for which this metropolis often gets maligned.

Finally, this movie is tied to an entertaining anecdote from my life. After dropping out of George Mason University I decided to head west in the Summer of 1990. I landed in Long Beach, California and worked as a busboy. I had no friends in the beginning and I got to talking to a seemingly normal bag boy at the local Ralph’s Supermarket (another Lebowski landmark!). He invited me to watch a movie at his apartment with a few friends and I jumped at the opportunity. Turns out the movie we watched was Miracle Mile, which I had already seen the year before but I liked it and thought it reflected well on this friendly grocery bagger. Well, long story short, as the movie reached its apocalyptic climax he and his two other friends all said stridently in unified rapture, “Thank God I’m saved!”

I was pretty tripped out, all my assumptions proved about as wrong as they possibly could have been. I often come back to this moment because it continually teaches me so much about context, appropriation, and re-using content. I mean who knew Miracle Mile could be understood as propaganda for converting wayward souls by fundamentalist Christians. Can’t say it worked in this instance, but it goes a long way to illustrate the hermeneutic minefield that is contemporary culture.

Finally, as an added bonus that will certainly seal the deal if you are still wavering (which I can’t possibly imagine you are), Tangerine Dream did the soundtrack. So you certainly won’t be let down musically –nothing like a little New Age Krautrock to set the mood for the imminent nuclear apocalypse. As an aside, did you realize Tangerine Dream did the Soundtrack to such 80s classics as Sorcerer, Thief, The Keep, Risky Business, Firestarter, Legend, and Near Dark? I didn’t either until I read their Wikipedia entry. Risky Business I was aware of because it is readily apparent (even from the trailer) that Tangerine Dream basically re-purposed that entire soundtrack for Miracle Mile. However, the other films in that list were a pleasant surprise because several of the films are personal favorites, particularly Firestarter, Near Dark, Risky Business, Thief, and Legend. I mean come on, what film critiques the entrepreneurial spirit during the 80s better than Risky Business? Also, I think Near Dark may be the most innovative and unique re-framing of a vampire tale for over a decade up and until Blade.

Posted in bavapick, film, films, movies, video, YouTube | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

They’re here!!!

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Reverend

Image of Jesus Bumper Stickers

That’s right ladies and gentleman, all ten of these wryly irreverent bumper stickers have arrived, and as per this post seven of them are going out in the mail sometime today or tomorrow (just need to shore up a few more addresses). That said, there are still three two more that are fair game, don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity!

Posted in fun | Tagged | 2 Comments

OneClick Installer Plugin Screencast Tutorial

Posted on November 5, 2007 by Reverend

I recently posted about the OneClick Installer plugin for WordPress and how easy it makes installing themes or plugins right from your browser. This plugin will be extremely useful for the folks in the Teaching & Learning Technology Fellowship we are currently conducting with six faculty here at UMW. They all have their own Bluehost account and have setup their blogs using Fantastico. But installing themes and plugins is not something we have covered yet.

I thought the following tutorial might kill two birds with one stone. It demonstrates how to use the File Manager in Bluehost to upload and extract plugins, but the plugin they will install will actually allow them to install plugins and/or themes right from their browser with one click–pretty sneaky sis!

The tutorial is pretty rough, I mis-speak on several occasions (just like in real life) and I uploaded the screencast to YouTube which is not particularly high resolution after the compression. Nonetheless, I think it gets the job done, and if nothing else can serve as a resource should the TLT Fellows (or anyone else on the web) need a quick how-to.

For those of you who are video resolution snobs, here is the flash version of the camtasia recording. Just click on the image below and you will be taken to the higher-resolution version.

One-Click Installer Screencast

Posted in plugins, WordPress, YouTube | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

WPMu: Sitewide Tags, Search, and Archive

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Reverend

Sitewide tags is a feature of UMW Blogs I spent a bit of time working on this past Summer. In fact, one particular workaround allows you to have a sitewide tag cloud as well as sitewide searching of blog posts and a dynamic archive of posts–all without any hacks to the core files of your WordPress Multi-User installation.

Image of UMW Blogs tag cloud

Keep in mind, however, that this is a hack and will be deprecated sometime soon with the recent introduction of tags (as opposed to categories which this hack is utilizing) with the WPMu 1.3 release. That said, given it enables a tag cloud, a centralized search for posts, and a dynamic archive might make it valuable while the WordPress Multi-User community gradually ramps up to the full potential of the new tagging feature.

Site-Wide Tags & Search
Creating site-wide tags using categories is a really intelligent work-around which–as an additional bonus–also allows for a centralized search of blog posts and a dynamic archive.

The basic concept of this hack is made possible through a very unintuitive move. That move is to create a separate, single installation of WordPress in a subdirectory (named “tags”–if you like) where your WordPress Multi-User installation lives. Once you’ve done this upload the same theme you are using on the main page for your WPMu installation and you have basically faked another part of your main site. After that use the “fixed” WP-Autoblog plugin (which pulls post feeds and their categories–the secret sauce!!!–from your WPMu install) and the Sitewide Tags Permalink Replace plugin (which redirects the permalinks in the single WP installation back to the WPMu posts) in the single WP installation to feed all the posts from your WPMu install into this single blog. You do this by placing the feed for all the posts on the WPMu install (this feed is made possible by ITDamager’s awesome WPMu Sitewide Feed plugin) into the settings for the WP-Autoblog plugin under the options tab.

Image of WP-Autoblog plugn settings
A look at the WP-Autoblog settings–really straightforward!

List of Plugins on single installation WP
Plugins on the single installation “tags” blog. Click for larger version

I am keeping this overview rather simple because the complex details for creating this sitewide tags hack were originally worked out in this thread on the Multi-User forums (peruse that for more granular information and alternative strategies). Even better, the hack is documented in a step-by-step tutorial on the WPMu Codex by mrjcleaver here.

These instructions are thorough, the only thing I would recommend different is to use the “full post” option in the WP-Autoblog settings rather than “excerpt” so that you can use the single installation as a way to search all posts (that’s right, sitewide tags enables a sitewide search–pretty sneaky sis).

As for the tagcloud, just pick your favorite plugin to display WP categories as a tagcloud. UMW Blogs is using the WordPress Heatmap Plugin that displays your categories on a page by including a PHP call in the page template that the plugin will provide you with. Parenthetical note here: I titled this page view so it wouldn’t be repetitive in the URL -so instead of http://umwblogs.org/tags/tags you have http://umwblogs.org/tags/view–I stole this idea from edublogs which is using this same workaround.

Finally, if you include the minor hack to your page template for the WP Heat Map plugin on a page within the single installation blog you have a tag cloud (well, technically a category cloud) on your WPMu site. You can see this in action here.

Sitewide Archive

It follows from such a hack that you would be able to create a more dynamic archive of all the posts in the single installation. So not only can you use the single installation to search all the blog posts, but also organize them for browsing by month or even show the last X number of posts. You can see an example of such an archive on UMW Blogs here. This was done by simply using a gently hacked archive template that comes stock with the MistyLook theme.

Image of UMW Blogs Archive Page

I guess this “tutorial” has been more a series of links to other cohesive How-Tos and innumerable plugins, but I felt it was necessary because I was somewhat thwarted this Summer by the lack of any organized approach to explaining and integrating such a key feature for tagging, searching, and organizing the content of a WPMu instance.

Please ask me questions about anything that is unclear, for I’d hate to see you waste the same amount of time I did 🙂

Posted in tags, UMW Blogs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

People like us…

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Reverend

“We don’t want freedom!
We don’t want justice!
We just want someone to love.”

This musical interlude featuring the inimitable John Goodman in a scene from David Bryne’s True Stories brought to you with very special thanks to Carole Garmon’s Video Art class blog.

Posted in movies, UMW Blogs, video, YouTube | 3 Comments

The Era of a One-Click WordPress

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Reverend

We have been talking for a while about how easy the installation of WordPress (and many other apps) is made by the one-click magic of script installers like Fantastico. However, this didn’t solve the problem of uploading themes and plugins to your server (via FTP or CPanel) to augment its functionality. That’s why, if you haven’t already, give the OneClick plugin for WordPress (which works in tandem with this Firefox extension) a go. It is pretty amazing, and beautifully frames how two awesome open source applications working together can make your life that much easier than they already do separately.

One-Click Installer

This plugin/add-on has been around for a little while now (since August 2007), and it won the grand prize for best plugin in the WordPress Plugin Competition. I just got around to installing it, and I have to say that this is a really amazing solution for anyone who is not all that comfortable with FTP, or just wants their plugins and themes uploaded as they browse.

The installation is simple, and once you use FTP to install this plugin you may rarely if ever have to use it afterwards, especially useful if you are not so crazy about (or comfortable with) FTP or CPanel’s file manager. And even if you are comfortable with these tools, this makes installing plugins and themes a million times easier than an already streamlined process. I found only one “bug report” on the forums which has more to do with a consistent approach to packaging plugins and themes than an actual problem with the OneClick plugin.

This is where I can segue way a bit into one feature of WP 2.3.x that I am really finding helpful: update notifications for new versions of plugins that provide a link to the latest version. This is unbelievably useful for keeping your life simple and your site safe, just quickly scan through your plugins and see which ones need to be updated and hit the link to download the new version.

OK, now marry this idea to the oneclick install discussed above, and you have the One Click Plugin Updater plugin, it is very new and there may be a bug or two yet (I had some trouble running it correctly on a Bluehost server), but it allows you to automatically update each plugin with just one-click.

Update Plugin

The work the WordPress community has done to centralize these plugins in one repository is really paying off for the community at large by making more and more of these options a one-click process. What’s more, the organization and loose integration of essential “peripherals” like plugins and themes in such a seamless manner speaks to this communities remarkable vitality and forethought.

Case in point, I spent part of this morning looking for MediaWiki extensions, and let me tell you the two communities are like night and day. MediaWiki Meta is an absolute jungle compared to the topiary garden that is WordPress.org.

Posted in plugins, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Explaining Japanese Internment

Posted on October 31, 2007 by Reverend

The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon blog is at it again with this post that includes a propaganda video about the “Japanese Relocation” in the US during WW II. For a little context, this is a post for an Asian American Literature class being taught by Professor Scanlon at UMW. Have I failed to mention how much I learn from all of the unbelievable stuff linked to in the tubular community of UMW Blogs?

Watch this video, then tell me if you know of a better primary source to frame the complex issues surrounding a nationalized rhetoric of freedom and its problematic relationship to democracy, citizenship, and homeland security –not only in regards to the defining event of the “Greatest Generation,” but more importantly to our national embroilment today? Moreover, if you know of such a resource, let me know if it can be as easily and freely accessed as this one.

Posted in UMW Blogs, YouTube | Tagged | 3 Comments

God isn’t my co-pilot…

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Reverend

…but after my impulse purchase at the Onion Store, Jesus is now officially my car insurance. The Reverend rides in the Bible Belt!

jesus is my car insuranceImage credit: D’Arcy Norman’s “jesus is my car insurance”

I actually bought two extras because the shipping & handling costs were more than the actual bumper sticker. So to fully engage recent accusations of my being shameless, I will gladly send out a free bumper sticker to the two ten commentators who can most eloquently describe why this bumper sticker would represent “a symbol of [their] individuality and [their] belief… in personal freedom.”

Update: I just bought eight more, people, so don’t lose faith!

Posted in fun | Tagged , | 27 Comments

The D’Arcy Norman Effect

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Reverend

Image of a WP Fanboy

From Alex Ragone’s post Not Drupal, WordPress MU (emphasis mine):

So a few weeks ago I blogged about the Drupal installation I was going to create. I had a plan and began to implement it. I had installed Drupal in a Multi-Site configuration but as I worked on the server, I realized that it was too much…At about the same time, I saw D’Arcy Norman post a tweet about his new WordPress MU installation and how great it was to install and how easy it was to use… I realized that what we needed was an intranet type site and that building it with WordPress MU would be much easier than Drupal. If eventually we needed the functionality of Drupal, our teachers and students would be used to a web based Content Management System and the switch would not be so difficult…With that said, I built our new intranet in WordPress MU.

The most powerful WP Fanboy going!

Paging Bill Fitzgerald…paging Bill Fitzgerald…

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments