mochahochabeachside.com

... and better than ever...

Seriously, sorry for the down time, folks. I've moved servers twice, but I'm finally back.  Thanks to <a href="http://www.avehosting.com">avehosting.com</a>, my awesome new hosting provider. If you need web hosting (unlimited disk space and bandwidth, even), check 'em out.  They've also got amazing offers for dedicated servers and reseller accounts. Plus, I used to work with the owner, so I know he - and his team - are knowledgeable.

I'll post within the next few days with a nice long post detailing the past few months so we all get caught up, and then I hope to get to a regular routine of posting.  Until then, however, I'll leave you wondering just what a yowling cat, a small black dog, and a poorly installed ceiling fan have in common.

If you're like me, and you still like to install your WordPress themes from the command line (or you were 3/4 asleep and forgot WordPress now has a nice, easy-to-use auto-installer built into the admin interface), you know it can be a pain.  You have to download the file, unzip it, make sure it's right, delete the archive, chwon the files, etc...  It can be a pain.

So, I created a nice little script to take care of all of that.  wpthemeget will take a download URL from the WordPress Themes directory (in the format of http://(www.)wordpress.org/extend/themes/download/themename.ver.zip (or .tar.gz, or .tgz)), and will download, unarchive, chown, and remove the downloaded file, with no muss or fuss...  The output?:

root@fyre [.../wp-content/themes]# wpthemeget http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/                                        download/motion.1.0.4.zip
Downloading theme motion.1.0.4.zip...
Theme is a zip archive...
Unzipping... [COMPLETE]
...Removing downloaded archive file... removed `motion.1.0.4.zip'
...Chowning files... [COMPLETE]
...Installation Complete!

No muss, no fuss. The only caveat is that you have to be in your themes directory when you run it.  Future versions probably won't have this requirement, but hey, I hacked this out when I was barely awake, on heavy medication, and repeatedly falling asleep at the keyboard.  At one point, I had to delete something like 40 lines of "zzzzzzzzzzz......" because I fell asleep with my finger on the key.  Fortunately, vi treated it as all one paragraph so '<esc> dd' did the job.  The code for this little script is after the break.  Grab it, chmod it to exec, and drop it in /usr/local/bin, and it'll be good to go anywhere on your system, for all your blogs.  Happy blogging!

(continue reading...)

Figured it was time to expand the functionality of the blog.  There's a few new plugins I've enabled.  The most important are "Related ways to take action," which is a plugin that searches for fundraisers, petitions, and so forth, to enable you to - well - take action.  We'll see how well this works with my posts.  I'm not always all that political, so who knows.

I've also added a video embedder.  I've always been a fan of the old-skool blogging.  Low video, few pictures, just my words, your screen.  I figured I'd give the other way a chance, here.

Finally, I've added a post that will automagically tweet my new entries.  If you want to follow my twitter, check out http://twitter.com/fyre.

That's about it.  Vacation post coming soon...