Dan Masters

AT&T Comes Out with Their U-Verse iPhone App

Dan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:45:14 +0000

I have loved AT&T U-verse from day one. I I have loved my 3 iPhones. Today the two have come together in a match made in heaven via the U-Verse TV iPhone app.

The U-verse TV iPhone app allows you to control your U-Verse DVR from your iPhone from anywhere. You can see your scheduled recordings, set new recordings, browse the TV listings, and search for shows and/or channels. Basically it has all the functionality that you have via your TV for your DVR on your iPhone. Pretty cool.

This will really come in handy when remembering that I want to see a particular show but am not near my TV to schedule it. In my opinion AT&T is doing a great job of bringing all of their services together. From having the integration between my DVR and iPhone along with free Wifi at any Starbucks it really is a great value.

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Why I Really Like WordPress 2.8

Dan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:42:04 +0000

I have been slowly updating the sites that run WordPress over the last week or so and have started to really love WordPress 2.8. The reason for this sudden burst of affection are a couple of new features that version 2.8 introduced.

The first feature that I really like is the ability to upload themes and plugins via the WordPress interface. This has eliminated the need to break out Dreamweaver or another FTP program to get something uploaded to a site. That is significant because I usually download plugins and/or themes to my desktop. If I have to upload either of them with FTP I have to put them in a particular folder and hopefully I already have the FTP info entered into my program. If not then I need to go through those steps. With the web based upload feature I can quickly upload in a few steps.

The other feature that I like is the built in code editing for themes and plugins. I know this feature has been around for a while but 2.8 added code highlighting. This makes it much easier to find and edit small items without having to break out an FTP program and code editor.

These two features have reduced the time that it takes me to do small edits and I am truly gratefully for them.

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iPhone 3GS – I Got MY New Baby

Dan — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:42:30 +0000

I was going to wait until my birthday in July but the wife gave the go ahead to get my new Iphone 3GS this morning – so I did. I was fortunate to get to the AT&T store near me when I did because the place had a constant stream of people and there were only around 10 iPhones left when I got mine. I had called all the nearby Best Buy’s but they were all out.

The main reason for getting the new iPhone 3GS was the video camera. A while back I had Jailbroken my iPhone 3G and installed the iPhone Video Recorder on it but at 15 frames per second it was not that usable. I really wanted something that I could keep in my pocket so I could capture cool things that the kids were doing. I had considered getting a Flip camera but that was just another thing I would have to lug around with me.

One thing that pushed me to buy today was that I took a look at some of the videos that people had uploaded from their 3GS phones this morning. The quality was better then I expected especially for outdoor videos. Indoor quality still leaves something to be desired but it does on every camera.

I ended up with the 32GB version since the 16GB ones were sold out. What I feel that I get for $100 is the ability to put my entire 10GB+ iPhone library on my phone which I think is pretty cool. That leaves room for a ton of apps and several movies.

I will be playing with the video camera over the next few days and post some videos.

iPhone Firmware 3.0 Installed and I’m Liking It

Dan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:45:39 +0000

It took a few hours but I finally got through to the authentication servers to update my iPhone to the 3.0 firmware. The process took about 15 minutes total and went without a hitch.

The first thing that I noticed when starting up was the new Voice Memos icon on my home screen. I have been using Evernote for text and voice memos for a while now so I am not quite sure how useable this will be for me. The only advantage I can see that it has over Evernote is that Evernote limits you to a 5 minutes for your voice notes while the new native app seems to have no limit. You can pause your voice note and then email it when you are done where I suppose you could add text notes to it as well. We will have to see if it gets used.

The next thing that I checked out was the app store to see if there were any updates for any of my apps. I know that the WordPress iPhone app version 3.0 has been submitted to the app store but unfortunately did not show up. What did show up were updates to Evernote, Showtimes, and Enigmo. I selected to update them all and they seemed to get stuck on my menu page with all three apps saying “Installing”. After several minutes of waiting for this to clear itself I went back into the app store and then was presented with a message that I had to agree to the new Terms of Service for the app store. That took another couple minutes and then my apps were updating. Note – The Evernote update is awesome – lots of cool new stuff.

From there I decided to check out how the camera was doing since I heard that there were updates there. Sure enough my camera started up much quicker and when I pressed the shutter button it actually took the picture right then as opposed to waiting a second or two! Also the pictures seems to be clearer but the true test will be when I try to snap some pics of the kids later on (Kids are true test of any camera!).

I then decided to see how Safari was doing with its updates. It seemed to be snapper which was nice. While browsing a page I remembered that copy and past was available and decided to try it out. It was actually much easier to use then I had anticipated. I easily selected a paragraph of text and then brought it over to my notepad and pasted it. After that I went back to Safari and coped a URL and successfully pasted inside on my WordPress app. It wasn’t even their new version and it worked! Awesome.

Finally I checked out the Spotlight search function but could not think of anything to search for. I am sure it will come in handy down the road.

All-in-all I would say that the iPhone 3.0 firmware is great, especially for being free. I am still planning on upgrading to the 3GS in the next month or so though. The main reason is for the video camera. I will be checking it out at the Apple store when it comes out to make sure that it is good quality and then hopefully scoop one up for my birthday.

Great job Apple! Just buy a new activation server though please…

Fail: iPhone 3.0 Activation Servers Down :-(

Dan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:01:32 +0000

I was super excited to see that the iPhone 3.0 software was out so I ran home to update my phone. The download happened nice and fast which was cool but when I actually tried to install the update this is what I got:

Bum deal.

I guess this is the message that a lot of people were seeing with the 2.0 update except for the fact that when it happened back then that it bricked the phone. I guess I am fortunate enough that 2.0 did not brick mine.

I want my iPhone 3.0!

FeedWordPress – One Step Closer to Fixing My Problem

Dan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:11:01 +0000

So I posted the issue that I am having about the automatic update not pulling in the meta data for each post over on the official FeedWordPress site. I haven’t received a reply yet but in all fairness it is a free plugin so I would not necessarily expect to get an answer.

With that I setup another site really quick with a fresh install of WordPress 2.8 and the 2009.0613 version of FeedWordPress. I then setup my Twitter RSS feed to populate it and low and behold the automatic update pulled in all of the necessary meta data and linked back to the original source. This means that there must be something screwy with my install of the plugin but I am not quite sure what it is.

My options at this point are:

Uninstall the plugin and hopefully it will delete itself completely from my WordPress db and then reinstall it.
Kill the whole WordPress DB , delete the plugin, reinstall WordPress and the Plugin, re-import all my posts, and reconfigure FeedWordPress.

I am really hoping that option 1 will work. I guess I will find out in the next day or so. I will update when I find out what it took to fix it.

FeedWordPress Problems – It’s Got to Be Me, Not You

FeedWordPress Problems – It’s Got to Be Me, Not You

Dan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:20:09 +0000

I have been using the plugin FeedWordPress for quite a while now to aggregate all of the feeds for all on my sites together into a single feed. From there I take that feed and then repost it back on each site. This way I get some cool cross-pollination between all on my sites.

You can see the aggregated site at network.idano.net.

A while back the links on this main feed started to link back to itself as opposed to the original site that the post came from. I figured out after a while that if I manually updated the network site that the links would be OK. While this was a work around it wasn’t very cool because it was completely manual.

A couple of days ago the developer of FeedWordPress came out with an update and I was optimistic that it would solve my problem.

Unfortunately it did not.

So here I am now trying to figure out why these links work correctly when I manually update but do not when they update themselves automatically.

One thing that I noticed is that when I update automatically several custom fields are created for the individual post. They are not for the automatic posts. These custom fields are:

syndication_feed
syndication_feed_id
syndication_item_hash
syndication_permalink
syndication_source
syndication_source_uri

In that list the syndication_permalink is the items that links directly to the original post on the original site.

In reading throw the documentation on the FeedWordPress site there is a built in filter that is supposed to change the_permalink() to the_syndication_permalink(). There are only two reasons why I can think that this is not happening.

The meta data is not being collected for each post when done automatically so if the fields are empty then it just uses the default the_permalink().
The theme is somehow causing issues. Again, the data looks like it is not being collected so that may not be the issues.

In the mean time I have switched to the default Kubrick theme to see if that makes a difference.

FeedWordPress – One Step Closer to Fixing My Problem

WordPress 2.8 Release – Looking Good

Dan — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:11:05 +0000

Last night WordPress 2.8 was released and I updated the idano.net website to check it out.

The installation went without a hitch through the automatic upgrade process and from what I can tell nothing broke on my site. WordPress.org notes that the new items that were apart of this release were:

New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

It looks like most of the changes in this release have to do with the setup and administration of a WordPress site so things that you do day-to-day should not be impacted.

Here is a quick video WordPress released in regard to version 2.8:

In Other WordPress News…

I am excited to hear that WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi User) are set to be merged. This has the potential to be very cool especially for folks like me that have several blogs but have them all in separate installs. We will have to see when the merged version comes out whether it will be worth it (or even possible) to consolidate all of my blogs together.

Cograts to the WordPress team on another great release!

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Fessing Up and Building My Own WordPress Themes

Dan — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:09:48 +0000

For client work I always work on a custom website design and layout and then transform that into WordPress template for the client’s website. For my personal sites I will admit that I generally rely on the work of others to get something up quickly and have even resorted to purchasing some memberships to theme sites and outright purchased themes. It is the same adage of a chef that does not cook at home, you do it all day as work so the last thing you want to do is do it at home.

Recently I decided to take the easy way out on a couple of personal sites by purchasing a few themes for them. The main reason that I purchased these themes is that out of the box they seemed to do exactly what I wanted and even seemed to be a step up from what I usually produce myself. Unfortunately with both of these themes I spent more time fixing theme to run properly then I would have if I would have built them from scratch myself. In both cases I could tell that the people building them while excellent Web Designers were not that well versed with WordPress.

I supposed this is just a testament to the fact that the easy way out is not always the best way to go.

Back to Photoshop & Dreamweaver I go to make my own themes!

/Rant over.

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Playing With the WordPress iPhone 1.2 App

Dan — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:02:09 +0000

WordPress has released their 1.2 version of their iPhone app. Noteable items that this update includes are:

- Landscape Mode
- New/editing pages
- Comment moderation
- Image resizing
- Password protect posts

I am using it to do this post and it seems to be working pretty well.

Good job WordPress iPhone App Dev team!

Now I just need to get used to tying in Landscape mode with my thumbs.

- Post from my iPhone, please excuse any typos .