Not a huge amount, just enough to verify that I own the account I’ve pointed them at.  I made a grand total of 62 pence.  I suspect that running a scam that involves repeatedly getting accounts verified in order to earn free money would quickly fall foul of some safeguard.  Google and PayPal have been around too long to fall for that.  Haven’t they?

The timed article (see previous post) popped out as expected.  Although it wasn’t there the first time I checked at 10am. Maybe WordPress needs prodding into action once the time has passed. As soon as I’d refreshed the page, the post appeared.  I’m impressed with that. I could write way in advance, building up a buffer of posts just waiting to spring into place.

The subswebhost at uklinux has been down intermittently during the day.  If my one subscriber hadn’t alerted me it would have gone unnoticed.  Not a lot you can do in a situation like that except grind your teeth and wait for the servers to come back up.  And look to see who else does hosting at a reasonable price with enough support to run WordPress… (Lots of them.)  To be fair they don’t have much downtime, but it would be nice if there was a flag on the site that said ‘Yes, we know it’s down, we’re working on it’.  At least you’d know they were aware of the problem…

Timed publishing with WordPress is easy, and I’ll show you how in 4 simple steps

1. Write your article

Often the hardest bit, I’ll leave you to get that done on your own, but why not include a link back to this article… Whatever you do, don’t click Publish yet.

2. Check the ‘Edit timestamp’ box

It’s to the right of the box where you typed your lovingly crafted prose…

3. Enter a date and time in the future

Decide when you want the post to go live and enter it into the boxes like so…

(You might want to set it to a date you’ll actually be around to see…)

4. Now you can click ‘Publish’

Go on, click the ‘Publish’ button…

…and that’s it, you’re done. Any problems you get as far as posts not appearing when they should are probably down to a dodgy WordPress installation or your hosting provider. Hassle them, not me.

You can use this technique to ensure your posts go up at a regular time, I aim for 9am give or take a few minutes. It’s also good for holidays and times you know you know you’ll be away from a keyboard. Using timed publishing means that your adoring readers will never be left waiting for your content…

Have fun…

More playing with the stylesheet for the site, gone back to the square corners, I think it’ll fit better in the long run. Still needs more adjustment in the margin and padding areas. The text is now running up hard against the edge of the blue tint. Also need to make that a green tint to fit the rest of the site.

Be aware of everything until there is nothing but the present and there are no corrosive fears to eat away at confidence.

Joe Simpson - This Game of Ghosts

Online tools rock. WordPress, GoogleDocs, Picasa and Pixenate, does anyone need the desktop anymore? How long before all the applications disappear into the cloud? I’m just looking for one more tool to complete the set. A web based colour chooser that lets you adjust as HSL and gives you a six digit hex code as an answer. Must be out there somewhere…

I had assumed that the Life Remix Network was a huge network of blogs, but apparently not. Starting out from unclutterer.com I now read a number of other LifeRemix partners. Funny how things seem to connect together…

And why it’s not a good idea. I’m forever changing the text size on sites to make them readable on my minuscule notebook screen. So here’s the problem, as the blockquote emerges from under the rounded corner it looks horrible. This isn’t just due to me fiddling with the CSS to add some padding to the images, it would have happened anyway. Try increasing the text size whilst looking at the previous post and see what I mean.

Here’s a another test quote

I have discovered the scale of my strength and the depth of my frailty and have been forced to accept, however reluctantly, our fragile mortality.

Joe Simpson - This Game of Ghosts

So the options are to go back to square corners, or change the blockquotes so they don’t have a solid background, that way the rounded corner square corner interface never happens. Thing is, if I alter the CSS stylesheet, it will alter all the quotes already posted, so if you’re looking at the site thinking there’s no problem with the quotes, then I’ve already changed them. It’s all getting a bit circular…

This post is also a test of the FeedBurner FeedFlare.

Having solid images threw up another wrinkle, no padding round the images which in turn was letting the text run up hard against the picture. It was a fairly easy fix in the CSS, courtesy of

a img {
border: 5px solid white;
}

I’m always a bit wary of fiddling with website templating code as I never know what I’m gonna break in the process. There are so many little problems and exceptions with CSS as far as browser compatibility goes, fixing one thing invariably seems to break something else.

Still don’t seem to be getting any advertising in the RSS feeds. This could be because advertisers need to specifically buy space in my feed. My distinctly lacking subscriber base could be putting them off. I would be happy if I could get anything other than the syndicated post to appear in the feed. I think I’ll have to go back to FeedBurner and add a test bit of FeedFlare to see if it’s working. If not, it could be to do with how Google Reader renders the feeds, although that’s unlikely as I’ve seen ads and other clickable links in RSS feeds.