On weekends we often end up at one of the local childrens museum since the kids love it. As it should be, these places focus on engaging and teaching while keeping the fun intact.

This particular exhibit is a steering mechanism that turns the pole (and everything attached to the pole) whenever the wheel is turned. How does it work? If you are an adult you say “gears”.

If you are a child, you might say “magic”.

On the side of the table there is a plexiglass window that shows how the gears work to turn the pole.

Education: 1
Magic: 0

Are there things we do everyday that appear to be happen magically to our public?

Maybe we should share the magic.

@BlahGeeTsa asked what audio players were out there and of course I had to respond with my favorite - http://www.macloo.com/examples/audio_player/

If you have ever listened to audio from a Wordpress page you have probably seen it already. It is a great player because it is simple and I find it to be very reliable. One of the cool features is - when set up correctly, starting a second instance of the player will turn off the first instance.

But then, just when I thought I had the perfect player, @ScottyIseri (you know, of “Scotty Got An Office Job” fame) shows up with this bad boy.

I like it alot! Here is the home page.

What are your favorites?

[Here is a page that has the player I was first talking about.

This is just the development site, but most things should work.

hitlist-preview.com]

Here is a post from @jowyang talking about his approach to web strategy. It is a nice visual representation of what needs to be included for a campaign to be successful. He points out that whatever tasks you cannot perform yourself - you need to learn to delegate. Obvious point, but a good reminder.
The Three Shperes Of Web Strategy

One of the things I hate about wordpress is, not unlike adobe reader, it is always out of date. Good for the boys they are cranking out great new versions - but that nagging message that is right in the middle of everything you do on the admin screen drives me crazy.

Until now. Just install this plugin and the update nag will bother you no more.

This is my first officially released plugin and I thought I would start small. Other than the wp calls it is literally one line of code. I have made larger, more complex plugins but was always too lazy to clean them up for public release.

Let me know if you like it.

no-update-nag.zip

I have seen a growing number of “Twitter for Business” type posts lately and here is another.

He basically points out most of the things any frequent twitter user would know, but sometimes it is nice to get a well laid out list in front of you.

He also points to a number of other twitter for business articles at the bottom of the page, so you can get your twitter fill all in one setting.

I particularly like the one about using twitter as an ad hoc focus group. Its OK to ask “How am I doing?” once in a while.

http://blog.thelettertwo.com/2008/10/09/my-experience-with-twitter-a-collaboration-of-tips/

How ironic is it that my last post 6 months ago was about Brian Gardeners Revolution Themes (no one clicked and got me any money, btw) and just today I met with Brian Gardener?

Is that ironic or just a run-on sentence? Maybe both.

Anyway, he informs us that WordCampChicago is underway and it is going to be a good one.

http://wordcampchicago.com/

This happens in July! Can’t wait.

I recently found these themes that I think are great.

RevolutionThemes.com

I will be putting my affiliate link there soon so you can click on it and I get copius amounts of money.

This was the other wordpress 2.5 issue I had.

This was on a live server and not local. I tried to upload an image and the image crunched ok, but I got this message when it was done. I think it has to do with write permissions but the solution I found was to add this to your .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

That seemed to fix the upload issue but the next issue I had was when I tried to actually insert the image into the post, all I got was a blank screen from the media page.

After a few times of the blank screen I restarted firefox and now everything worked fine.

I guess the first problem affected the http state of the browser or window or something and the restart just cleared it all up.

** According to Google Analytics this is my most popular post ever! So if it was helpful, please leave a comment and tell me how glad you are that I copied someone else’s solution for you to find.

As I said I am slowly moving a few of my blogs to Wordpress 2.5. I have run across a few issues and one was a blank screen when I was trying to install Wordpress. I checked the config file and all was good with that. I figured it had to be in the php.ini. That is usually where things go awry when installing for the first time.

I searched around a bit and found a solution that said log_errors had to be on.

I went to php.ini and changed log_errors = off to log_errors = on.

I then went back and deleted all the tables from my fresh install (it make it that far) and ran the installer again and that fixed my blank screen problem.

Did I mention this was a local install? All of my installs on real servers didn’t have this issues because they probably all have log_errors = on already.

This is a great example from Google. People sending in their stories on why they love gmail and the only thing google has to do is put together a simple but creative video that relays these stories. It is not corporate but it is very engaging. Give your customers the tools to tell their stories. Simple yet priceless.