yesterday, as i was innocently watching tv, emma came up to me, with hands clasped together, and asked me to pray.  the conversation went like this:

em: mamam, we pray?
me: you want to pray?
em: yesh.
me: ok. let’s pray.
em: we pray, tatat?
me: you want to pray for tatay?
em: yesh.
me: ok…let’s pray for tatay……..Jesus…
em: eshta…
me: thank you.
em: tank yoo.
me: for taking care of tatay.
em: we beh tatat.
me: in Jesus name.
em: amen.

i love when she does that.

but then soon afterwards, she also wanted me to pray for her baby ball and then the big ball, so i did, because you just don’t know how important orbs are to a baby.  sometimes, it even takes precedence over eating fried pork.

(*pic: during thanksgiving. the cousins are singing karaoke…a common practice of karaoke exposure found in filipino families…)

Emma keeps on surprising us with her ability to say words and her natural inclination to remember things. Last night, she opened a bible and started singing read you bible, pray everyday … a whole stanza of it with action too.

the funny thing is that she knows how we get so excited when she does these things. as every parent, we “ask” her to repeat the things she just did, and as every child, she’ll put up a fight not to do it.

growing up is just getting more and more interesting.

If it so happens that your user_nicename entry in your wp_users has a space in between entities, your individual author feed is basically screwed and won’t show anything.

To replicate this problem, when you are creating users for your blog, enter two names as your login id, in my case it would be “Perze Ababa”, the login function in wordpress will respect that but the built in magpie rss module and url redirector built in wordpress does not. your resulting individual author feed would end up looking like, http://domain.com/blog/authors/first-name%20second-name/feed/, as generated by the wp_author variable. Even though the wp_author function will always return the right number of posts, clicking on the above geneerated url will always return an internal 404 from wordpress’ point of view (i.e “there are no posts”) because of the escaped %20 character.

Until they fix this bug, you are better off setting up single name users and just change the display name later on. If you do create a user with two names separated by a space, a workaround is to replace the entry in user_nicename with a single name entry. Once this is done, the generated individual author feed becomes http://domain.com/blog/authors/single-name/feed/ which is then valid.

I’ve been using a plethora of freeware blogging clients ever since 2001. Over the years as my mobile devices have changed, my need for a freeware blogging application also evolved over time. My latest toy or so to speak has been a cingular 8525 using the latest WM6 Official AT&T ROM. Now that we’ve switched blogging platforms from Moveable Type to Wordpress, I needed another XML-RPC compatible mobile blogging application that’s compatible with Wordpress.

Search has been in vain up until today and the answer was just right under my nose. Over the past 6 months i’ve been using pocketsharp mt, an app specifically written for the pocketpc with moveable type in mind. It turns out that I just needed to point where the xml-rpc functions are. I should have known better, Moveable Type is written in perl and wordpress is mainly PHP, but since pocketsharp mt is using the same XML-RPC services, it can be configured to use wordpress as its blogging platform.

As proof, this post was entirely written in pocketsharp mt on my cingular 8525 phone and will also be automatically exported as a note in facebook. More ways to share my exploits to my “friends”.

At least i’m not attacking anyone with vampire hugs, jedi mind tricks and definitely not trying to superpoke anyone.

as of right now, i can’t seem to figure out why my individual author feed is not returning anything. something is funnily awry, and i just can’t quite put my finger into it.

Over the past five years, twelvesixteen website gave me the chance to learn and implement various web related disciplines. From PHP, CSS, XML, javascript and various web apps such as wordpress, coppermine, etc.

Last night was a major step in finishing this overhaul. Over the past couple of days Marchesa has been busy tweaking the overall look and feel of the site … I helped.

The first challenge we encountered was the multiple platforms that we use to deliver content … I mean blogs, pictures, updates, video, whatever. With the diversity of the choices out there it seemed very tiresome to maintain 4 different blogs in a multitude of blogging platforms. Even if you just want to mirror your entries among all platforms it gets annoying after a while. We needed a solution *cough* *opensocial* that would enable us to bring all these platforms together without leaving all our “friends” in the dark.

Marchesa and I have a boatload of blogs out there and one major requirement is that we should be able to bring in if not all, most of our blog entries from every single platform. Here is a sample list of my backend requirements,

* import entries from moveable type, myspace, friendster, facebook, blogger, and the beast we fell in love with called xanga.
* able to create posts and individual pages
* can manage podcasts for marchesa’s original songs
* mobile accessibility
* an over arching access control system that can unify various web applications
* spambuster
* automatically update SEO sitemap so google and other search engines can easily pickup our entries.
… among other things.

Nevertheless, just last thursday, I was able to import 5 years worth of blogs without a hitch … well some images were lost but its just a matter of pointing them to valid URL references and all will be fine.

You might also notice at the bottom of every entry, a sleeker version of an entry sharing widget. This enables you to share our entries across facebook, newsvine, etc. and enables you to e-mail them to your friends.

There are still a bunch of changes that I want to discuss but i’ll share those next time.

finally! our twelvesixteen site has been built AND tweaked.

with perze fixing the rooms while i decorate, i also wanted to thank my Ate for helping me continually tweak this site.  i’m not much of a css person, but little by little my eyes are starting to see patterned codes w/ the help of my sister.  she’s really good at coding (check out her samuanie site).

our theme changed, from red to chocolate brown and old rose/pastel pink (my favorite combo).

there’s still a lot we want to add, esp. a page dedicated to our twelvesixteen projects.  but for now, it’s all just fun stuff. also, we totally destroyed our old guestbook because the flash was too flashy and didn’t seem to mesh well with our page.  nevertheless, we built a new one, a cleaner look, with more writing space and options. please visit our guestbook and leave an entry.