Trying out a darker, more neutral version of my old theme.  Inspiration taken from the NYT Lens Blog and a new version of Oulipo which is available for WordPress.com users (not self-hosted WordPress.org’ers like me.)

The majority of blogs have few comments but, as with all things Internet, that doesn’t mean they are not receiving lots of messages. The bulk of them are coming in the form of spam.

I have spam filters for my blog and they catch most everything. Occasionally, some will slip through and get deposited in comment purgatory, awaiting my judgment, approved or spam.

Many are not legible, most are just annoying and do not warrant a second thought, but it is the rare one which can be funny or elicit a smile.

Must be a fan of Kevin Nealon’s Subliminal Man.

For the past few weeks I had a ShareThis button on the blog. First on posts viewed singly and then on all posts displayed on the home page. ShareThis allows readers to forward content to other services (email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) I went with ShareThis because visually it was the least noxious of similar services.

How’d it work it? Neither here nor there. It saw a bit of use by readers but not enough to justify keeping it on the site. Overall, having looked at number of these services, I think they all suffer from overkill. Most don’t let you edit the number of links provided. So, it’s common for them to present 30-50 links, the majority of them being too obscure to warrant inclusion. I also think that many in the heavy social media user crowd will already have plug-ins for their web browsers negating the need for sharing buttons.

In other blog news, I’ve made some updates this morning:

• The sidebar links and information now appear on every page.
• The sidebar now scrolls with the page (this allows it to be visible via scrolling if the browser window is shorter than the sidebar column and it means the sidebar will not overlap the blog footer.)
• Posts viewed singly now have navigation at the bottom allowing for easy movement to the next or to the previous post.
• I got rid of that pesky, tiny, smiley face which was showing up in the footer. Turns out it appears when you use the WordPress.com Stats widget. The smiley face is seen by everyone except the admin (IOW, for the admin to see it the admin must view the blog when logged out.) There’s an easy way to get rid of it – the WordPress.com Stats Smiley Remover widget.

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12/5/09 – Already going back on my word.  Trying a Share/Save button (different service from ShareThis.)

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12/6/09 – The flirtation continues… I tried the AddToAny Share/Save button. It’s nice and configurable, it can be anything from text or just an icon to a large horizontal button. I was impressed that it learns which services a person uses and puts those front and center. I also had some questions and its author sent me two emails this weekend. Impressive but the button wouldn’t play nice with my WordPress theme when viewed in Safari. This is a fault of Safari’s not the AddToAny code.

So, in one of those weekend sidetrack projects I’m known for – I made my own links that get added automatically on Learning to See’s home page and when individual posts are viewed. The code was cobbled together from suggestions on two sites (Anidandesign.com and MichaelMerrell.com) along with some reverse engineering of sites I’ve seen online. It’s very simple as you can see below, just text based links, but the advantage of doing it this way is that it can fit within the style of your WordPress theme. It won’t call undue attention to itself (a problem with the rows of colored icons many folks use.)

I’m not big on social media myself beyond having a blog but I can see the usefulness in helping those that are and in giving this a longer test run.  Since, ’tis the season, here’s Jon’s make-your-own text based social media bar:

ShareLink: <br> <a href=”mailto:?subject=<?php the_title(); ?>&body=Check out this post:%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”Email a link to: <?php the_title(); ?>”>Email</a> • <a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”Tweet This” target=”_blank”>Twitter</a> • <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>” title=”Share on Facebook” target=”_blank”>Facebook</a> • <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?> &title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Bookmark on Delicious” target=”_blank”>del.icio.us</a> • <a href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Stumble This” target=”_blank”>StumbleUpon</a> • <a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Digg This” target=”_blank”>Digg</a> • <a href=”http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Share on Linkedin” target=”_blank”>Linkedin</a>

I’ve dubbed it ShareLink but you should feel free to call it anything you want. A title may not be needed at all. If you want it in your single posts then add it to the single.php file, if you want it on your index page then add it to your index.php file.

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1/26/10 – It’s been just over seven weeks since adding the ShareLink links mentioned above. In that time my site and blog had over 10,000 pageviews. With all those views ShareLink was used only ten times (1/10 of 1 Percent of pageviews.) Five times for Facebook, four times for email, and one time for Twitter. Given that, I’ve deleted the links for Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Linkedin.

I’m not sure when TypePad decided it would be best served by becoming a cult.

I signed up with TypePad about two years ago to host my blog. At the time it was a good decision. WordPress being open source, not well documented, and something of a free for all with a big learning curve, scared me off. I wanted to get my blog up and running quickly and a survey of blogging platforms led me to TypePad.

Fast forward two years. I’ve moved to a new web site, one that includes a WordPress blog. WordPress now has better documentation (online videos, etc.) so I’ve switched my blog to WordPress. Initially, I expected to leave my TypePad blog online until the account runs out in March, 2010, but seeing how quickly my new blog has been indexed online and seeing how the TypePad blog just confuses matters on web search results – yesterday, I decided to pull the plug and cancel my TypePad account. Thus, the odyssey begins…

I had a paid TypePad account. This kept it ad-free and supposedly provided me with better customer service. It’s easy enough to find out how to cancel a paid TypePad account. You go within your account and delete it. The problems start at that point. With TypePad’s policies, just by having a paid TypePad account they’ve created a profile for you without your consent. Additionally, when you delete your paid account TypePad gives you a free Micro account. Again, without your consent.

There is no information on TypePad’s site on how to delete a Profile or a Micro account. Given this, I submitted a help ticket to TypePad support only to find that the help ticket would not go through. It led me to an error page, which also had a form. Filling out the error page’s form led nowhere – it took me to the same error page. I then found a generic TypePad contact page on their site and filled out my request there.

With no reply from TypePad’s contact page and via some googling, I found a third-party site, getsatisfaction.com, where Six Apart (TypePad’s parent company) has a support page.  I entered my request there along with information about what I had just gone through. Fairly, quickly I heard back from a Six Apart employee – one who has said she will delete the account and confirm that it has been done.

Hours later, I also heard back from TypePad’s contact page:

Thanks so much for reaching out, and we’re sorry to hear that you’re experiencing some frustration – we’re also really sorry that you received errors! Essentially, the free profile accounts can’t generally be deleted, but you’ll never be charged, and those do come in handy when commenting on other blogs. There is a possibility that we may be able to have it removed for you entirely, so if you would like for us to do that for you, and you’ve decided that having the free profile wouldn’t be useful for you, please let us know.

Can you tell us why you’ve decided to leave TypePad?

This reply is problematic on a couple of levels.

It counters what the Six Apart employee told me.

It uncovers policies at TypePad which are never directly stated on their web site. Create a paid account on TypePad and you are given a profile without your consent. Cancel the paid account at TypePad and you are also given a free Micro blog account at TypePad without your consent. Neither the profile nor the free Micro account can “generally” be deleted.

I’ll update this post when I get confirmation from the Six Apart employee that my account has been fully deleted. It’ll be interesting to see why TypePad’s corporate response differs from theirs.

Until then if you are a TypePad paid account user be forewarned that you are also roped into their free services whether you like it or not. If you are a TypePad free account user either by having a profile on their site, a free Micro account, or both, be forewarned that there is nothing setup to delete these services if you decide you no longer want them. This makes your TypePad presence permanent, as in forever, and it also gives Typepad of a method of following you if you make comments on other blogs.

I see an iPhone enabled site looking at me.

One change with new web site and blog is the ability for both to format themselves on the iPhone and on other touch-type smart phones. This makes for quicker loading and painless viewing of both sites when seen by those on the go.

JonRoemer.com on the iPhone:

Learning to See on the iPhone:

For JonRoemer.com this is a feature built into the web site’s structure. It replaces my hand built, hand maintained, iPhone site which ran concurrent with the old JonRoemer.com.

For the blog, being on a WordPress platform, flexibility is the name of the game. I tried three mobile versions of the blog, each promised a simple design, but only one delivered on design, ease of use, and worked out of the box. The mobile theme I’m using is WPtouch iPhone Theme. It has many options built-in, all accessed via WordPress’ settings menu, it couldn’t be easier. If I had to change one thing with WPtouch iPhone Theme, I’d want the ability to not have the calendar month and day as an icon with each post on the homepage. That’s it. This WordPress Plug-in is incredibly well made and well documented.

The two other iPhone mobile themes I tried were Carrington Mobile and Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin. The former looked to be even simpler in feel than WPtouch but it did not reformat blog photos for smaller phone screens leading to half of each image being cropped out. The latter promised to automatically create a site that mimicked Learning to See but other than orange links it looked nothing like Learning to See and it too had image problems. It dropped many images when viewed on the phone leaving placeholder icons instead.

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Apologies to Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr. of children’s book fame. If you have kids or grandkids, if you ever babysat kids who are in the board-book stage, you know their work. Hopefully, I won’t have an angry author and illustrator looking at me.

This afternoon I changed the way the blog’s permalinks work.  Shifting them from WordPress’s default format (“?”+ post number) to an easier to read, more logical address (year/month/post-title).

End Result:  This will be much better in the long run but there is a change to the blog’s RSS feed address.

The new RSS Feed: feed://www.jonroemer.com/blog/feed/atom/ .

If you subscribed to the blog prior to this afternoon (11/07/09, 2:45pm), please use this new link.  Thanks!