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Humpday Hilarities
July 20, 2011 by Nicki
Today’s funnies start off with this one from Cookie:
Fable of the porcupine
It was the coldest winter ever. Many animals died because of the cold. The porcupines, realizing the situation, decided to group together to keep warm. This way they covered and protected themselves; but the quills of each one wounded their closest companions. After awhile, they decided to distance themselves one from the other and they began to die, alone and frozen. So they had to make a choice: either accept the quills of their companions or disappear from the Earth. Wisely, they decided to go back to being together. They learned to live with the little wounds caused by the close relationship with their companions in order to receive the heat that came from the others. This way they were able to survive.
The best relationship is not the one that brings together perfect people, but when each individual learns to live with the imperfections of others and can admire the other person’s good qualities.
The moral of the story is: Just learn to live with the pricks in your life!
Courtesy of Google+, this is what’s really going on during a power outage:
And last but not least, this is from I Has a Hotdog:
Humpday Hilarities
March 2, 2011 by Nicki
Howdy y’all! Let’s get started with this week’s edition with this one from Kristi:
The leaders of the big beer companies meet for a drink. The president of Budweiser orders a Bud, the CEO of Miller gets a Miller, the head of Coors orders a Coors, and so on. Until it’s Arthur Guinness’s turn. He orders a soda.
“Why didn’t you order a Guinness?” everyone asks.
Guinness replies, “Well, if you guys aren’t having beer, then neither will I.”
This next one is the latest edition of Simon’s Cat:
This next one is from Adam:
Humpday Hilarities
February 2, 2011 by Nicki
Today’s funnies start off with these courtesy of Cookie:
The Italian Virginity Test
Mario is planning to marry and asks his family doctor how he could tell if his bride-to-be is still a virgin. She says she is.
His doctor says, “Mario, all the Italian men I know use three things for what we call a Do-It-Yourself Virginity Test Kit – A small can of red paint, a small can of blue paint and a shovel.”
Mario asks, “And what do I do with these things, doc?”
The doctor replies, “Before you climb into bed on your wedding night, you paint one of your balls red and the other ball blue. If she says, ‘That’s the strangest pair of balls I’ve ever seen!’, you hit her with the shovel — then bury her with it!”
My Favorite Animal
Our teacher asked us what our favorite animal was, and I said, “Fried chicken.” She said I wasn’t funny, but she couldn’t have been right, because everyone else in the class laughed.
My parents told me to always be truthful and honest, and I am. Fried chicken is my favorite animal. I told my dad what happened, and he said my teacher was probably a member of PETA. He said they love animals very much.
I do, too. Especially chicken, pork and beef. Anyway, my teacher sent me to the principal’s office. I told him what happened, and he laughed, too. Then he told me not to do it again.
The next day in class my teacher asked me what my favorite live animal was. I told her it was chicken. She asked me why, just like she’d asked the other children. So I told her it was because you could make them into fried chicken.
She sent me back to the principal’s office again. He laughed, and told me not to do it again. I don’t understand. My parents taught me to be honest, but my teacher doesn’t like it when I am.
Today, my teacher asked us to tell her what famous person we admire most. I told her, “Colonel Sanders.”
Guess where I am now!???
These next tidbits are from Dan Lewis‘ daily “Now I Know” newsletter. Today’s edition contains some amusing Google easter eggs, which I thought some of y’all might enjoy. 
Today is Groundhog Day, and if you’re familiar with the movie of the same name (you should be!), your initial reaction to today’s holiday may be a single word: recursion. The movie, starring Bill Murray as meteorologist Phil Connors, focuses on a day in Connors’ life — a day which repeats over and over and over again, in a seemingly infinitely repetitive loop. Recursion.
To see what he’s talking about, all you have to do is Google the term “recursion”. Pay particular attention to the “Did you mean” line.
Go ahead, click it …
See? 
He goes on to list a few others, such as
- Ask Google what is the “answer to life, the universe, and everything” — which is 42, of course! (a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
- If you ask Google what is the loneliest number, it of course replies “1.”
There’s tons of fun to be had with Google search including: using it to “translate to beatbox; search the Web in Klingon, Pirate, or as Elmer Fudd.”
Yep, I am so not getting anything done during lunch today. 
Did you get my Wave?
December 2, 2009 by Nicki
The “almighty Google” has blessed me with Google Wave invites, yay! 
So … any of y’all who need or would like an invite, please let me know. 
New iToy: Pogo stylus
May 14, 2009 by Nicki
Last week I had discovered something: I can’t type worth a flip on a touch screen when I’m mad!
Jessie had suggested getting a stylus — well, in a round-about way, after discovering that her Nintendo DS stylus would not work with my iPhone. LOL! I thought it was a great idea though and began scouring the net for possibilities. And let me tell you, there are TONS out there. I finally popped back onto the Apple site and looked through their online store. One immediately caught my eye, so I ordered it: the Pogo Stylus.
I got the red one!
It came in the mail yesterday, so I spent a good deal of time last night and this morning playing with it. I don’t think I’ll use it every day, but there will be times when I’ll need to take lengthy notes or maybe post to my blog, and this will come in VERY handy!
New WordPress Theme: Black Hat
March 17, 2009 by Nicki
My newest theme for WordPress 2.7. I think this one has been my biggest challenge due to all the features I had wanted to incorporate. As I had previously highlighted in my post the other day, this theme includes a detailed “read me” file covering its various features and a couple of FAQs/frequently requested modifications:
- Theme option for changing sidebar location
- Sitemap template
- Printer-friendly stylesheet
- Favicon
- Additional feeds
- Additional/SEO meta tags — including Google’s new canonical tag for paginated post pages. (Rumor has it this tag will be added to the core code in a future WordPress release. Nice!)
While I don’t think it’s my best work visually-speaking, I think its functionality and user-oriented details make it one of my better themes overall.
As time permits, I will be updating previous releases to meet the standard that I’ve set for myself with this release. 
Details
Black Hat is a dark minimalist theme based on Adrian Diaconescu‘s Corporate Sandbox. It is has been built specifically with WordPress 2.7 in mind, but is backwards compatible down to version 2.5. Stickers icons courtesy of DryIcons. Favicon by Brian Brasher.
Availability
The Con is on!
February 17, 2009 by Nicki
Remember last year when we attended OmegaCon? We had a blast, and considering it was the con’s first year, I’d have called it a major success. But I became worried that it had been too successful and had moved on to another town — the website had gone down, the MySpace page had gone quiet and hadn’t been updated in a coon’s age, etc. It seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet … until I re-discovered it today!
I had been sitting in a meeting and had the good fortune to be sitting near a terminal with internet access. (Google to the rescue!) I ran across a reference on a local Star Wars forum to an event called “ImagiCon.” Another quick Google and I had found the website: ImagiCon.org. From the sound of it, it’s the same con, but renamed, with a spiffy website, and by the look of it a lot more to see this year.
YAY! 
Ok, so who else is going? 
Blogger How-To: Add Sticky Content / Fake Front Page
December 29, 2008 by Nicki
Working on my most recent side project, I’ve had to brush up on my Blogger/Blogspot coding. One of the things requested of me was to find a way to have a static front page on a Blogger site.
WordPress has this feature built-in, but Blogger currently does not. 
I know of two ways that this can be accomplished:
Solution #1
Create a new post with the content you want to show on the index of your Blogger site and save as normal. When you add more content to your site, re-open your “front page” post. Click Post Options. Change the Post date and time to values which chronologically fall after those of your last “regular” post.
Now go to Settings, Formatting. Set it to show only 1 post on the main page.
The idea is to always keep the “front page” post as the newest, so it is the top post (and therefore the only one shown on the main page). You’ll have to do this every time you add new posts to your Blogger site.
Or …
Solution #2
I like to call this one the “Sticky Content method.”
A while back someone had shown me that enabling the showaddelement attribute in a Blogger XML template allowed you to add widgets above your posts. Basically, changing a small bit of code in your template …
… gave you this ability:
I’ve seen plenty of people do this to display Google Ads or other PPC stuff above their posts.
To do this, you’ll need to first download a fresh copy of your template — go to Layout, Edit HTML, Download Full Template.
Open it in your text editor of choice (use Notepad if you’re not sure) and search for type='Blog' or “posts”. Either of those should show you the section code containing the Blogger function for calling blog posts. You’ll see a line that says something along the lines of:
<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
When you change showaddelement from ‘no’ to ‘yes’, you are then able to add widgets above your blog posts. Save the changes to your XML and upload it to Blogger (go to Layout, Edit HTML) using their upload form. Once that’s done, go add a widget by going to Page Elements (in Layout).
Click Add a Gadget, and add the HTML/JavaScript widget and type in the content you want to show on your front page and save.
Keep in mind: that this would show up on EVERY page on your site unless you adjust a couple things!
Download an updated copy of your template and open it in your text editor of choice. Now that you’ve added a widget, you should see something like this:
Hint: Look for the title of your widget if you get lost!
Change the following:
<div class='widget-content'>
<data:content/>
</div>
to this:
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<div class='widget-content'>
<data:content/>
</div>
</b:if>
Basically, you are telling Blogger to only display that widget if the page you’re on is the home page (main page).
Now, let’s fix the blog settings so that nothing shows up on the main page except this widget. Go to Settings, Formatting, and set it to show no posts on the main page.
Pretty cool, huh?
Closing Thoughts
Whichever method you choose, make sure that you have some way for your visitors to access your site’s content. I suggest adding Blog Archive and Labels widgets. You could also use the Feed widget and put in your RSS feed to show your blog’s latest posts.
I hope the solutions I’ve posted are clear, but if you need anything explained further please feel free to ask in the comments below!
Google knows football
November 24, 2008 by Nicki
I sniped this one from the Times Daily forums:
Click the image to view full size.
ROLL TIDE!
WordPress dupe content workaround
October 29, 2008 by Nicki
Recently I’ve started paying more attention to Google’s Webmaster Tools. As much as I hate to admit it, they’ve been really useful in helping me track down outdated content and bad links, and really clean up search results for my site. One of the many things I had kept putting off for this site was removing duplicate content — in my case, posts with duplicate titles and descriptions.
Google is known for ‘punishing‘ websites with lower rank for this. Donna Fontenot touched on this in her “SEO For WordPress” presentation at WordCamp Birmingham earlier this month. She had displayed some examples for nuking duplicate content search results by modifying your header’s meta robots, title, and description tags.
As you can see, my weekly “Humpday Hilarities” posts, although not yet completely indexed by Google’s bots, definitely fall into this category.
As it stood, my site loomed perilously on the edge of getting one of those infamous “Duplicate Content Penalty” from Google (assuming it hadn’t already!). So to get around this, I made a few changes to my template’s headers.php file. In addition to Donna’s robots suggestion, I modified my description based loosely from the code in her presentation:
I also modified my title a bit based on her coding as well:
Basically in both of these snippets, I am checking the post title to see if it’s “Humpday Hilarities” and if it is, add the date into the code to make both the meta title and description tags unique. While most users would never need anything like this, anyone who posts a specific topic with repeating titles might find this handy.
What do you think?
Feedback, questions, constructive criticism is (as always) welcome. Feel free to use the comment form below!
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