I just updated the blog again, changing the theme to FreshPress. While the old theme was cool, XHTML compliant and really easy to tweak because of it’s BlueprintCSS based layout, it was kind of ugly. The trade off of using FreshPress is not having Blueprint.
I didn’t realize how nice it is to work with BlueprintCSS until I had to tweak FreshPress’ header to include my jquery based drop down menu. The change only took a little bit of time but I’m happy with the results. Tweaking from an already clean looking theme is a lot easier than starting from the other way around. At least for me.
Ever since I got my Macbook Pro I’ve experienced the slow wake up issue. It is by far the most annoying persistent problem with the MBP. Here’s the solution:
- Install SmartSleep. This adds a new pane to your System preferences that allows you to tweak the underlying system settings.
- Set the current sleep state to “smart sleep”, and the Sleep / Hibernate level to 20. This means when the battery is at 20% go into hibernate mode instead of sleep mode.
- Done. After installing this I haven’t had the slow wake up problem anymore.
Here’s why the problem happens in the first place. There are four states the MBP can be in: on, off, sleep and hibernation. In hibernation the contents of your RAM are written to the disk. Check out /var/vm, you’ll see a file called sleepimage that is exactly the same as size as the RAM in your system.
When Apple released the MBP they included a new feature called SafeSleep which for battery swapping reasons writes every byte of your RAM to disk when the battery is swapped. This is a cool feature but really annoying if you want to get to work and have to wait a few minutes for your machine to come out of hibernation.
Since about 2005 the default mode was to go into sleep mode (keeping the RAM powered) and also writing all RAM contents to disk in case of a power failure (battery removal). This of course increases the time it takes for the computer to get to sleep as well as the time for it to wake up. I don’t know why it would affect the wake up time but it just does. :)
Being the adventurous type I prefer to use Mode 0, which is keep RAM powered, don’t write anything to the disk. The downside of this is that if I ever remove my battery I’d lose everything that was running when my computer wakes up. However, using SmartSleep helps a bit here.
SmartSleep can dynamically tweak the sleep mode settings based on your battery’s charge. If your battery has a greater than 20% charge it will use Mode 0. If it has less than that it will adjust your system so that it hibernates. Very cool.
My sources for this information:
- Make my Macbook Pro Hibernate
- Fixing Macbook Pro Sleep Problems
- SmartSleep - System preference pane for adjusting the sleep mode. Get it!
reCAPTCHA is one of those amazing ideas that makes you say, “gee, why didn’t somebody think of that sooner?”. It accomplishes two objectives in one very clever way.
- Provides a captcha to verify a real person is posting content
- Digitizes books one word at a time by leveraging people power
Adding reCAPTCHA to Wordpress is very easy:
- Sign up for an account at reCAPTCHA
- Get your public / private keys
- Download the plugin for Wordpress
- Install the plugin and active it
- Done!
Using reCAPTCHA frees me from having to authorize every comment before it is posted. I really hate comment spam on the blog and this was the only reliable method. Akismet is wonderfully accurate and combined with reCAPTCHA I have no worries about allowing comments to be posted without my authorization.
It is always good to be able to work on the blog rather than in it.
I updated MostlyGeek with the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King. Previously the site used Twitter’s JavaScript badge to display my latest tweets. There are a number of advantages to using Twitter Tools over the simple badge:
- Automatically tweet a new blog entry
- Automatic downloading of my latest tweets
- Automatically blog tweets
Also while adding the plug in I noticed that my server clock had drifted off by about 3 hours. The server has been up for 679 days and drifted by about 0.66 seconds a day. I was surprised because the ntpd daemon was running to keep the clock in sync.
Turns out I didn’t create a ntp.conf file 2 years ago and the server has slowly been drifting. Fixing the problem was straight forward:
- Created /etc/ntp.conf, reference: Clock Synchronization with NTP
- kill the running ntp daemon
- use: sudo ntpdate ntp.domain.com to force resync the clock. When the clock is really out of sync this is preferable to waiting for ntpd to gradually adjust the time. My 3 hour difference would have taken a very long time to finally sync up. A pull the band-aid off fast approach.
- restart the ntpd daemon
Following quickly from Revision 1 of the new MostlyGeek I started personalizing the free theme I found on the net. Today I:
- Added Twitter to the front page
- Created a custom sidebar for the front page
- Reorganized the Pages a bit.
In the
footer.php file add Twitter’s javascript. After the page is finished loading the Twitter updates will be pulled and presented on the page. A tip here is to put a small message into the <ul> list so that something appears there even if the JavaScript fails. I put, “Getting updates from Twitter…”
Creating a custom sidebar for the frontpage is also a quick change. I didn’t like the side-wide sidebar so I simply removed it. Since the
SlipFire theme uses Blueprint it was very easy to drop the side bar, resize the main content area and add in a new column.
I also moved the Pages around a bit. Wordpress has the ability to have page hierarchies which really helps to keep static pages organized. Next up on the update list will be to create
custom page templates for the archive and about page.
