Is anyone else having the newest Pidgin regularly crash on you?

I can’t go an hour without it crashing.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/why-were-failing-in-math-and-science.html

Wow, its been a long time since something I read hit me as hard as this.

I think this gets to the very crux of the problem. We are talking about kids here. If you build an interest in science now, you will get them interested for the rest of their life. Instead though, we interest our kids with Barbies and American Idol. Is it of little wonder that Reality shows now are more popular than say Jeapardy?

These little things are exactly what gets ingrained into a culture. It is exactly how cultures are built. We can’t see it as well as we exist in the gradually changing culture, but it is there none-the-less.

http://valleywag.com/5034675/when-the-going-gets-tough-aol-makes-its-ads-huger

The fun part is the quote.

Sadly, it would’ve made sense too, if they said 300×250 (well closer).

Instead, 150×300 means they are now 4x the size instead of “double the size”.

For those using the beta QuickAds client, it is a hit or miss proposition in many cases. If Scribefire can make edits to your website, the whole experience is completely seamless. You just click “add site” and you can easily start dragging and dropping ads onto your page. There is no delay, and everything is happening in real time.

On the other boat though, is those whom Scribefire can’t make edits. If you get asked to copy and paste code after the </body> tag, this would be you. In this case, your experience is significantly worse. Dragging and dropping ads gets delayed by up to 15 minutes. You have to go into your file manager and speficially edit a file. It is even hard to figure out exactly which file and where to make the edit.

Well, this post is for all those in that second boat. In order to jump ships (and become one of those who are using the easy Scribefire), all you have to do in your wordpress install is to change the permissioning of a single file. If you go into your file manager, and edit the permission of the footer.php file of your theme (which can be found in wp-content/themes/yourtheme/footer.php). The permission can be set to 777 then you can join the masses in having a pleasureable experience. If you change all the files permissions, in the future, you can edit your themes directly from wordpress!

As I have been doing a lot of what can be considered “Support” issues, I get a number of common issues.

One of the most common is definitely the “I can’t log in using Scribefire, but I can log in fine from the web page”.

In this case, the two most prevalent reasons are:

1. When entering a blog, instead of just clicking the “Next >” button, the person would click “Configure Manually”. Then, from the list, the most common choice is “Wordpress.com”. Since they are actually using their own install of wordpress, they actually aren’t on wordpress.com and so get invalid login/password.

For this case, adding the blog without clicking “Configure Manually” fixes the problem.

2. The second complaint is one I just figured out, and is the impetus of this post. It seems, for whatever reason, a blog may not have the xmlrpc publishing option checked and this is causing problems. In order to turn on xmlrpc publishing, the user should go under Settings -> Writing, and check the checkbox next to “XML RPC Publishing”.