Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

RSS Feed and MailChimp

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Over the past few months I’ve noticed more and more bloggers abandoning Google’s Feedburner service fearing the inevitable shutdown and lingering service problems. I decided this week to take the plunge myself and leave Feedburner behind. I was never really that interested in the statistics that the Feedburner provided but I know quite a few folks enjoyed the e-mail notifications provided by the service. As of this morning Feedburner says I have 549 subscribers, a number which varies wildly daily between 400-800.

FeedburnerCountIn any event if you stop receiving RSS updates after this post you should re-subscribe to the following URL;

http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/feed

You can also subscribe to the comments feed, which is often more entertaining and educational than the main RSS feed ;)

http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/comments/feed

While I have over 500 posts on this blog there are over 4,000 comments and quite a few posts with more than 50 comments in each.

MailChimpLogoWhile the Internet’s elite rely heavily on RSS to help filter and sort their content, I know the vast majority of new visitors have no idea what RSS even does. It’s funny but I just had to look up what RSS stands for, Rich Site Summary. If you are familiar with the shutdown of Google’s Reader then you probably have a good idea of what an RSS feed is. In order to provide the e-mail subscription that so many people have asked for I’ve created an account with MailChimp. You’ll find the subscription form in the sidebar to the right of this post.

Technical Stuff

If you are interested here’s how I plan to execute the migration. I’m going to rely on the RSS features built into WordPress itself so I won’t be going to another service. I’ve download the list of email subscribers from Feedburner and imported them into MailChimp. I’ve setup an RSS campaign at MailChimp that will notify people of new posts via e-mail. I’ve disabled the HTTP redirect that was setup within Nginx for the domain blog.michaelfmcnamara.com. In about 7 days I’ll set the permanent redirection from Feedburner to the URLs listed above by deleting the Feedburner feeds.

Please feel free to let me know if you come across any problems or issues.

Cheers!

 

WordPress Themes and Frameworks

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It was time for a change… perhaps not a completely fresh look but something a little tidier than what I already had up and running. A few months back I stumbled across a problem with the Mystique theme I had been using for the past 24-36 months. While responding to some comments I discovered that some replies were missing.  The replies and content was in the actual HTML source but was being hidden from display probably from some obsecure DIV element or CSS property. In any case I quickly threw up a copy of Twenty Twelve and hacked together a few quick changes to a child theme to get everything running. That kludge did the trick and restored visibility to all the comments.

Professional

While Twenty Twelve worked, it didn’t look very professional and that was completely my fault. As a budding web developer I hadn’t spent the appropriate amount of time digging into the code and discerning all relationship between all the different HTML elements and the CSS properties.

A few of my stalwart colleagues would probably suggest I let someone else design me a theme. Well I enjoy learning, really I do, and there’s no better way to learn in my opinion other than just picking up the brush and putting some ink up on the canvas. In this case trying to understand the interaction of the HTML elements and the CSS properties.

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about the Genesis Framework for sometime now and was considering have a look at it. However, I realized that I had purchased a developer copy of the Thesis Framework about 2-3 years ago so I decided to spend sometime messing around with Thesis 2.1 before trying yet another framework. What you see today (August 2013) is the result of me making one a few different changes. Thanks to the tutorials on Build Your Own Business Website I was quickly able to grasp the functionality of Thesis.

I won’t comment which is better or worse… because I haven’t tried Genesis yet, I’m still trying to learn and understand all the features behind Thesis. If I ever get a chance to test drive Genesis, then I’ll be sure to add my $0.02 to that conversation. Right now, I’ll probably continue to play with the CSS styling, not really exited about Georgia although I’m not sure I want to take the performance penalty of relying on a Google font.

I’m also curious what impact Thesis will have on the speed of my site and the content generation times, might need to run some benchmarks there just for later comparison. I know Twenty Twelve included some Google fonts which tended to slow things down a little, don’t believe that’s the case with the default Classic Responsive theme in Thesis although I believe you can add those fonts through the API.

Feel free to let me know what you think…

Cheers!

It’s the networks fault #11

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Here we go again… it was a bit of a crazy week for me personally. I have to present this week on Data Loss Prevention to a general IT audience. In my research I found the numbers and statistics almost tell the entire story themselves (I’m obviously focused on healthcare). I might publish the slides after the presentation this week.

Articles

Arse First Method of Technical Blogging by Greg Ferro. Greg has published a short book providing some insights into how he publishes so many blog posts. I had an opportunity to meet Greg at Networking Field Day 4 in October 2012 and was impressed with his description of his workflow and organization. I was so impressed it lead me to find Evernote which I use today to help collect all my thoughts and better organize myself (I’m the worst for hand written notes all over my desk).

The Tech Interview: Your Resource For Finding and Keeping Meaningful Work in Tech by Paul Stewart & John Harrington. Paul and John have started a new website and blog dedicated to the career aspects of working in the technology field. They just literally started the site but the content (and advice) that they are offering is very good.

This Job Isn’t For Everyone by Matthew Norwood. Matthew describes the ups and downs of working for a value added reseller in the technology field. I might need to reply with the musings of a 15+ year corporate employee, there are quite a few similarities and differences.

Other Stories

Google Reader Powering Down – It’s amazing how fast time moves these days, July 1st is nearly upon us and like many I’ve yet to find an alternative to Google Reader. There’s been quite a few new product announcements and feature upgrades to existing products from companies trying to fill the void being left behind by Google. I’m personally interested in Digg’s solution which promises to be unveiled next week. There’s also AOL Reader which promises to launch next week as well. Feedly is another strong contender and released Feedly Cloud this past week. What did you decide to use?

Tech Field Day 9 – Stephen Foskett and the folks at Gestalt IT held another Tech Field Day event this past week.  You’ll find the recorded sessions with Commvault, Dell, Infinio, Neverfail, Nutanix, Solarwinds and Veeam on the Tech Field Day website. I really enjoyed Solarwinds product announcement concerning “Software Defined Backup”. :)

WordPress 3.5.2 Security and Maintenance Release – The team behind WordPress has released a new version of WordPress which addresses some significant security vulnerabilities. Sucuri has some additional details behind the forking of SWFUpload.

Cheers!

Humpty Dumpty

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It appears there is an issue with the Mystique theme I’m using on my WordPress blog that is literally “hiding” a large number of the comments and replies to almost every post with more than 10 comments or replies.

I’ve spent a few hours looking into this problem but I’ve been unable to locate the culprit (theme, plugin, update, Nginx, etc). In order to quickly address this problem I’ve decided to switch to the default Twenty Twelve theme that ships with WordPress. While this theme doesn’t have that much bling it doesn’t hide the content from the user or visitor.

I’ll probably need to dig into the HTML and JavaScript to try and figure out what’s going on but right now I don’t have the time or energy to make that happen in short order so this workaround will need to suffice.

Cheers!

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