The Story of Abe

What is my online presence, why is that, and what do I want it to be?

What is my online presence?

I spend a lot of time cruising the internet.  Much of it is spent on a small number of websites.  I check ESPN.com at least once per day, I try to check out nytimes.com and haaretz.com also every now and again.  I usually have gmail open in the background.  The site I spend the most time on, though, is google reader.  I have a large number of subscriptions there.  From Chicago sports news to tech updates to web comics to torrent feeds to culture web magazines to really random stuff.

While I may read a lot, I subscribe to very few websites, and comment on even fewer.  [A few months ago, I got really excited about something I found, and commented about it on a website.  Seconds later someone pointed out how very wrong I was…]  There is something about logging in to sites that doesn’t click with me.  Even more so, commenting is a strangely public thing that I just don’t feel comfortable with. » Read the rest of this entry «

A while back, when I was just starting out this WordPress site, I posted about some of the adventures in setting this up.  Specifically, I wanted a widget that would show some random images from the media database.  My thinking was that I want people to be able to see some of the pictures that I’ve included in my posts without making the pictures the center of the blog.  This way, on every page there are four (but that’s a setting you can change) random pictures from across all my posts.  Pretty, but it needs to be able to link to the corresponding post to actually be useful.

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I’ve had a bit of a hiatus from this blog for the past couple of months.  Not that I was ever much of a prolific writer over here.

Somethings that I have written about that have advanced, changed, regressed, or remained static since I last saw them:

• Advanced, if only a little: I am now certain that I need ACL replacement surgery and I even know who’s going to do it.  » Read the rest of this entry «

Part of starting a new business is marketing and sales.  Up until recently, building websites and  programing were hobbies.  They didn’t demand time commitments or financial considerations.  I could start working on something because it seemed interesting.  I could offer to help a friend build something just for the fun of it.  In addition to family related sites (chiswick.net) I also built a site for a catering business among others. » Read the rest of this entry «

Well, I’ve just uploaded my second plugin to this site.  It’s not much, as it leans heavily on the built in link widget.  I wanted to list the links of the rest of my families websites in a specific order.  I could have hard coded it in, but that seems silly if there is a links function already built into WordPress.  But I couldn’t find anywhere to make a simple sorted list of a category.  Also, I am trying my hardest to avoid touching the core.  I don’t want to change something in a core file and then have an update erase it because that would be a nightmare to debug.  I can deal with a plugin I wrote using a depreciated function, that’s no big deal. » Read the rest of this entry «