If you use the WP Calais Auto Tagger plug-in, your site is on a server with PHP5, and cURL enabled, but no tags are returned, there may be hope. Although on other sites, both this and the auto archive tagger were working fine, here at ChrisMerriman.com, the post tagger was returning NO tags, even on long posts with a lot of viable keyword nominations.
For some reason, it turns out I need to change into Visual (as opposed to HTML) editing mode first. I can immediately swap back into HTML mode, without clicking the ‘Get Tags’ button first, and still have success, but for each post, I need to load Visual editing mode at least once.
At first I assumed the plug-in used some hook that is only loaded/parsed within (the admittedly standard and default) Visual edit mode, but on other sites this step was not necessary. So… no idea why it works, but I hope my comment on his plugin’s page, and this post, will help out someone someday and ensure they can use this plugin, and through it, Calais’s services to automatically suggest tags for the posts they are writing.
Jul 28 2009
Calais Auto Tagger Problems?
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Sep 23 2008
Ubuntu And Open Source Alternatives To MS Office
So, a week or so ago, I was having problems with Outlook, or more specifically Microsoft Word (which gets loaded in the background each time Outlook started as it was the default HTML e-mail editor). I tried a couple of standard approaches to fix the problem, and didn’t get very far. Having had enough of some of the bloat that has been added over the years, as well as losing my original receipt and product key for Microsoft Office 2003, I decided to finally try out OpenOffice properly. I’ve installed it in the past, and made sure it could at least cope with the sort of everyday requests home users would throw at an office suite (for when friends & family asked if their was a viable alternative), but this was a concerted effort to see if I could eventually take over all my work processes to this collection of apps. The basic formulas I was using in Excel seemed to transport over well, and nothing else seemed to much of an issue, so it looks as though it will stay on this installation for now.
Moving on, I decided to try out Thunderbird as a replacement for the e-mail functions (at least) of Outlook. As I still have a separate product key for Outlook (from my last few smartphones and PDAs), I will be keeping hold of it for contact & calendar synchronization with aforementioned devices; at least until I can see how solid alternative synchronization programs to Activesync are.
Finally, I rounded off the beginning of more new learning processes by (almost) properly installing a Linux distro – Ubuntu. I say almost, as it didn’t involve fiddling with partitions, I used Wubi to install the OS, which uses a large file on my C: drive as a virtual partition. That probably isn’t the correct terminology, but hope gives a good indication as to how it works. So far, no major problems, considering my previous Linux tinkerings on my own PC have been limited to live CD/DVDs, where a lot less configuration is required/possible. Other than the nVidia GUI for setting up multiple displays stubbornly initially refusing to grace my system with it’s presence, not too many problems so far. Obviously a lot of my old ebuyer bargain basement USB toys don’t have Linux drivers available, but as I’m not intending to switch to Ubuntu as my sole OS, this isn’t a deal breaker.
Oh, and just in case people didn’t bother reading the comments section to the Some News post, the picture was my way of imparting some VERY good news – Irina is pregnant, with the happy day predicted to occur some time around mid-February.
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Apr 18 2007
Had the start of a 419 scam via Skype
Apr 12 2007
Before I Forget
I need to write a quick note on, and big thank you to the author of, wp-headlineanimator. To go straight to the plug in pages, check here and here.
I had a few problems with the configuration of this plug in, and contacted the author, asking for a little assistance.
A few days later, he contacted me via Skype, and explained the mistake I had made in defining the path to the font file I wished to use. We then hit another snag, apparently, my server doesn’t support EXIF detection. Oh no I thought, I’ll have to find an alternative (ha ha) plug in. NOPE!!! As we were chatting away (once I’d remembered to re-enable AGC in the mic input ) he re-wrote the plug in code and sent it to me. I was as happy as a pig in muck. (He’ll be including the modifications in the next release I believe)
For a demonstration of what the plug in actually achieves, see the graphic below.
OK, looks pretty, but I could have (eventually) knocked that up in PhotoShop, right? Wrong, that file isn’t static. That is to say, each time I add a new post, that picture will reflect that, and show the new post.
OK, great, but the point of it is…. ?
Well stop thinking about your own site, and think of the applications this image could have in the wider cyber-world…
e-mail signatures, forum sigs, anywhere you can refer to a URL, you can now have an enticing image that shows the readers your most recent posts. Whilst RSS feeds can achieve something simlair, most forums wouldn’t allow the sort of code required to be used in a sig, and this approach, once setup, works really well.
Although putting your site in a forum sig/mail sig is hardly new, having so much information packed in should certainly help your image&hyperlink to be noticed quicker than any other posters.
Stargazer kindly displays the code you need to use to show the graphic, hyperlinked to your site, in terms of HTML, and if you are using it in a forum sig, it is pretty much the same, you just need to remember to swap out the HTML tags for their BBCode equivalent.
so,
[a href=”http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/”][img src=”http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/wp-content/animator.gif”][/a]
(you’d need to change the square brackets [ ] for pointed < >, I swapped them to prevent WordPress from misinterpreting the text as script, can’t figure out how to tell WP to just plain ignore HTML tags right now)
becomes
[url=http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/][img]http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/wp-content/animator.gif[/img][/url]
I chose to add a small border to my template image, as the forums I use vary in colour themes, and without the border, the white background contrasts to greatly on dark-themed sites. I’ve still not figured out using a transparent PNG and keeping the transparency in the resulting GIF file, but I’m going to try and work on it a bit more before bothering the author again, quite so soon.