Jay Versluis

Jay is a medical miracle known as Super Survivor. He runs several YouTube channels and websites, and he's also live on Twitch sometimes. To support him on his mission to make the world a better place, you can support him on Patreon or buy him a coffee.

What exactly is a Blog?

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I’ve written this in response to a question on The 30 Day Challenge, in which I will be answering web related question throughout October. The question was “what exactly is a blog” in particular as a possible starting point to write a book – I hope you find this useful 😉

Blogging is an awful term I find, and it really doesn’t explain very well what it actually is and how useful it can be to oneself. Let me see if I can explain this.

The word blog is short for weblog and has started as an online journal many years ago. All you could do was write up a diary entries and share them with the world. Many people still do it just for that, but of course you can share any writing / picture / video combination nowadays.

What made blogging popular was the addition of a comment field at the bottom, so other people could interact with your particular entry.

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Which blogging platform should I go with?

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There are so many content management systems (or blogging platforms) on the market, many of them offer a free service. Some of them that spring to mind are these:

  • Blogger (by Google)
  • WordPress
  • Live Spaces (by Microsoft, now defunct)
  • Movable Type
  • Type Pad
  • Joomla
  • Drupal

The choice is endless and the list could go on – but only two are serious candidates, at least for me. This comes down to personal preference and I encourage you to try them all… but who has the time to do that?

Let me explain the differences.

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Snapshot Backup 2.0.1 Update: Let’s try this again, folks…

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I’ve just released Snapshot Backup 2.0.1 – the exact same version as 2.0, however this time it includes all the files it actually needs…

Let me explain what happened earlier:

So there I was, having tested the latest version of Snapshot Backup 2.0 for several weeks, all is well at my end, and I decided to release it to the public. After over 11.000 downloads it gets the long awaited automation feature, revamped menu structure and gets its own branding. How exciting! You should all finally have it, it’s been a long wait.

I uploaded the changes using Subversion, and thanks to Tortoise SVN I can do this with a right click from my Windows 7 machine. It’s all so much easier than hacking away on my development server via SSH. Ever so pleased I decided to treat myself with a Mac Book at the Apple Store in Covent Garden – let the iOS Development begin!

Shortly after I had arrived in town all your kind comments kept flooding in: some files were missing in 2.0 which Tortoise SVN didn’t import properly, and hence 2.0 was only 80% of what it should have been (read: 100% unusable).

Thank you to everyone who broght this to my attention, I’m really sorry I couldn’t rectify this before tonight when I got back home.

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Disk Space Pie Chart – Version 0.4

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I’ve committed a new version of Disk Space Pie Chart today. This maintenance release fixes a display bug in the Dashbaord Widget in WordPress 3.2. Thanks to Dan from IFSA Butler for bringing this to my attention. While I was at it I’ve also fixed some of the internal workings of this plugin: Fixed dashboard … Read more

Snapshot Backup 2.0 RC1 – Ready for Testing

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I’ve been slaving away at the keyboard again. It’s been too long, and you’ve all been patiently waiting for your favourtive backup plugin to do something while you sleep. Say hello to Snapshot Backup 2.0 which can now create backups while you sleep. Here’s a list of new features: Automation: create backups every hour, every … Read more

How to make Get The Image only use embedded images

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If you’re a Theme Developer you probably heard of Justin Tadlocks incredible plugin already – for those of you who don’t, let me introduce Get The Image to you.

It’s THE way to extract images from your posts and insert them any way you like in your custom made theme. It does this by checking (in this order)

  • if you have a featured image inserted, or any other custom field defined
  • if not, it’ll see if one is attached to the post
  • if not then it will scan your content for an image embed
  • and if that fails you can display a default image you select

Get The Image will also provide a link to the post when you display the image, or alternatively give you the URL if you want to use it some other way.

I needed an application that displayed only an image that’s embedded in the post.

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How to find a user’s Twitter RSS Feed

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Twitter recently made some changes to their API. One of them has an impact if you’re trying to access someone’s Twitter RSS Feed.

This used to work extremely well: on every user’s Twitter page there was an RSS Icon in your browser bar. We sued click on it and saw the feed. Well not anymore 🙁

But help is at hand – thanks to The Sociable who have kindly explained how to access it post May 2011.

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