Blogging beyond borders
The latest issue on the stands
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The drew3ooo Modicus Remix theme for WordPress
Get under the hood and see how this blog works.
In honor of the Obama election and Guy Fawkes Day, I’m releasing the theme and associated plugins that make my website function. Download it here.
Download d3.zip from my drop.io drop box.
The design for this blog is an alteration of an alteration. The Modicus Remix theme for WordPress is proving to be quite popular for an unsupported piece of open source brik-a-brak. Modicus Remix by Art Culture is a redesign of the theme Modicus by Upstart Blogger. I use a stripped down version of Modicus-Remix here, sexed up with a number of plugins, and slightly recoded to work better with WordPress 2.5 – 2.6.
I’m now averaging about one question a week regarding the sidebar, which it seems a lot of people aren’t getting to work in their copies of Modicus-Remix. Mine didn’t work out of the box and I literally just hacked it until it did. No, I didn’t document this process and don’t quite remember everything I changed. So goes the fun process of home blog creation. The theme in its present incarnation requires a couple of plugins for it to work. Disable those plugins and your sidebar goes wonky.
Get your blog blocked by the Chinese government
Blog for human rights.
Amnesty International’s latest gimmick calls on bloggers to hold an Interweb flash mob on May 15 against government thuggies around the globe:
“On May 15 join tens of thousands of bloggers worldwide in writing about human rights and drawing attention to issues often overlooked by mainstream media.
Human Rights are universally agreed upon ideas – that all people are born with basic rights and freedoms that include life, liberty and justice.
“Bloggers Unite for Human Rights” challenges bloggers to draw attention to urgent human rights issues facing our world today and encourage their readers to take simple actions through Amnesty International’s online action center.”
- link
del.icio.us is.nt wor.k.ing
Del.icio.us re.mai.ns o.ne o.f m.y m.o.st pr.iz.ed on.li.ne blo.ggi.ng sla.sh so.ci.al net.wo.rki.ng too.ls.
It’s just too damned easy to add stuff via del.icio.us. But it’s not working today for some reason, so I may just go and twitter something instead. Weird how the InterWeb is responsible for so many goofy verbs or gives new meaning to otherwise normal ones: google, twitter, blog, ping, poke, skype, m.s., rip.
Update: And now it is.
My bookmarks: del.icio.us.drew.3ooo
More people would listen to Howard Zinn if his content was online and available to share
The word “accommodation” brings to mind the Democratic Party, which was voted into power in Congress in 2006 and which has shown us a pitiful example of what an opposition party should be, accommodating itself basically to the Bush and Republican agenda, accommodating itself to the sort of orthodox political notion that you must be timid and quiet and not speak the truth.
— Howard Zinn speaking on DemocracyNow friday morning
Just listened to Howard Zinn on Democracy Now’s Friday podcast (the vile in “service” provider Virgin Broadband was down most of Friday and Saturday in London’s lovely SE15 area), discussing a stage version of his book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” called Rebel Voices. The only reason, of course, that I could get this dose of Zinn is because Democracy Now chooses to share its content online for anyone to download. Zinn’s online tech handlers could take a cue from this. So could many others who have their flags planted in the progressive camp, for that matter.
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As soon as you think of it someone else has made a WordPress plugin out of it
I always enjoy when a decent plugin comes with an equally inspired dose of Open Source anti-copyright agitprop, so this find of the Multiple Authors plugin by MCIncubus made me giddy.
Sitting her working on the RCF.org site, editing a blog entry for the group blog, Three Triscuits and Some Spinach, I was thinking to myself, boy it would be neat if there were some way WordPress could add multiple authors to a post. And then I remembered my own InterWeb Doctrine: “As soon as you think it should exist, it does.” And thus, one google query containing the words multiple authors and plugin led me to this find at boakes dot org. Not only did it lead to the plugin that I thught already should exist, it also included this line from, Boakes who was also thinking the exact same thing I was while I was looking for it:
This, in a nutshell is why open source software works. You don’t necessarily need to be able to code to make the system better, you just have to have the ideas and the community can pick them up, run with them, and often release code enhancements within 24 hours. Compare this to the slow world of single-vendor software where upgrades come around once per year if you’re lucky, and then you have to pay for them.
This is thinking aloud, and having your thoughts made reality, instantly.
Preach it from the mount, brother.
It’s absolutely deplorable that this country treats ideology and intellectual debate the way it does. But: we owe to this its ironies. Its tolerance. Its decision not to take too seriously what in other countries have proved fatal challenges. It is my conviction that had the infinite rhetorical genius of Adolf Hitler been tested on Hyde Park Corner, people would have said, ‘Ah, come off it,’ and walked away.
