Getting some snow in DC today, about a half inch as of 2pm. Small, dry, fluffy flakes. Watch it on NWS radar.
Open Realty Templating
I’m working on a real estate website for a client, using Open Realty for content and listing management — and I’m not liking it too much. (Refer back to my entries on “horrific CMS interfaces.”) It works fine out of the box if you’re okay with the “Trapper Keeper Design for Dummies” gumdrop look, and after removing a few pages of pre-inserted data (mostly introductory copy on Open Realty, in case you didn’t know what it was before you installed it) and a dummy example home listing, specifically the White House.
Said introductory copy claims that templating on O.R. is “easy,” but it took me a while to figure out where one actually goes to change templates (Site Config, second tab is “Templates,” duh, right under my nose), and where the admin main menu says “Templates” it’s actually referring to customization of listing and agent form fields. Then you create a template in the /template directory, based on the default given, dubbed “vertical-menu.” I wanted to see if O.R. had any other templates available, so I went over to the Templates page, where I was greeted with this:
Note the date. It’s been a long wait for some O.R. users, I guess.
Ascent.jpg
Dupont Circle North Metro escalator, also called ‘The Bowl.’ From below it looks like Jacob’s Ladder.
(Ascent.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
Green.jpg
Greenpeace clipboarder, off-duty, at Union Station. When these guys try to solicit me I usually say No and mention the Rainbow Warrior at Tubbataha. “Outdated maps,” my foot, someone fell asleep at the depth sounder.
Metro.jpg
Balloons.jpg
Dolphin balloons at Safeway. They also have bird, bumblebee, and dragon balloons. Not sure what holiday these are for. Lent? Maybe the dolphins signify tuna?
(Balloons.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
Not a Missile on Google Maps
My first reaction on seeing this Google Maps zoomed-in sat photo was “OMG MISSILE OVER UTAH MUST SEND LINK TO EVERYONE” but OKCalvin has set me aright by pointing out that cruise missiles don’t have dual contrails, and that closer examination of the object shows that its wings are dark against the background:
Sure enough, someone on this Airliners.net forum entry is pretty sure it’s a Mesa Air CRJ-900, with dark green wings and tail. I am, as usual, late to the party. (AIM transcript in the comments.)
Lovely Weekend: Blood on Stairs and Hemp Brownies Edition
Above: Museum visitor viewing Rosie the Riveter, sunset along the Southwest Waterfront, blood on the stairs, hemp seed brownie mix (non-THC), and a panoramic photo of the Capitol taken right before a friendly reminder from CHPD that tripods are not allowed on the grounds.
It was a lovely weekend out in DC. Amy and I viewed Treasures of American History, sat along the Waterfront near the Women’s Titanic Memorial to sketch buildings and watch the sunset, listened to the Master Chorale sing various popular classical masterworks at National Presbyterian, and viewed Rembrandt prints and photos of Paris in Transition.
Mobile Posting Annoyances
As part of my plan to integrate mobile content into the main weblog stream, I’ve been wanting to start posting to HNBP by sending MMS messages from my phone to Flickr’s email-to-blog feature. There are a few problems with the process, however, as one may have seen while I was posting Test.jpg multiple times through the course of the evening:
- My Nokia 6600 sends MMS with the image filnename as the default message subject — eight character limit and “.jpg” extension and all. This cannot be changed on the N6600. This means that mobile photo post titles will usually be awkward filenames.
- Flickr has no option to set Movable Type categories. Del.icio.us is able to do this via the “cat_id” field, and it should be a relatively simple API function, but Flickr has not implemented it.
- Flickr’s blog post layout template tags include photo size options, but they do not work. Instead, you need to go to your upload by email-to-blog settings and change the photo size there, and the change cascades down to your template layout, regardless of what photo size tag you are using. This was very confusing, and is a pretty serious bug.
So for now, I can post to here from my phone; I’ll just need to log in and add the “mobile” category later on, which kind of defeats the purpose of posting from my phone to begin with, but it’ll have to do till Flickr finally gets on fixing their various email-to-blog issues.
That’ll just leave the Twitter feed to add to the weblog. Sadly, the Feeds.App Lite plugin which comes bundled with MT 3.3 only does links and titles, not dates, so I can’t use it to chronologically blend my Twitter posts into the content stream. I’ll probably take a cue from Sparticus’ advice and use a third party feed parser like SimplePie to grab the content on a schedule and show it here. But now I have rambled on enough.
