Nicholas Clarke

I use Google Reader as my main RSS client. For me it has answered all of my problems I had with using a desktop client + it allows me to share posts that I think are interesting without having to write a post myself by just clicking a button. It does however have some oddities itself e.g. phantom posts that I can never find but are in my sidebar folder structure.

Yesterday I noticed another feature, someone shared a post of mine and I noticed that my embedded video was not displaying!

After hunting around and comparing a couple of other RSS feeds I noticed that Google Reader seems to be stripping out YouTube <object> tags. To fix the problem I had to use <embed>. After waiting for Google to refresh their cache it is now working + I also get a nice popout link (something they must add).

If you are also experiencing the same problem be sure to check out what html is being generated by your site and then subsequently removed by Google Reader.

Tonight I logged into WordPress in order to clean up my spam comments and I noticed a new feature. I know that there was an unexpected release to fix a security issue, so I guess some new code was included when I upgraded

When you select the Akismet Spam tab in the comments section of administration you now get the option to filter the items by their type. I have not had a real comment left since upgrading to see if it is also on the non-spam comments tab.

I looked at the change log and could not find this mentioned, so I wonder what else was included in version 2.3.2.

If I get change tomorrow I might take a peek into the code and see what I can find.

It wasn’t until I read Ryan Boren post about the new beta for WordPress that I realized I had misunderstood what Microsoft’s Live Writer can do. His first bullet point was “Tagging support for Windows Live Writer“!, this was odd as I thought Live writer was just for Microsoft’s Spaces blog site.

I now stand corrected after downloading it and giving it a try. Its quite a cool blogging desktop application that allows you to post to different blog engines. All I had to do was point it to my URL and then it came back after 1 minute with all of the settings/locations and enabled me to start posting.

I did however notice a couple of oddities, the installer looks like it is just waiting for input, it is however just taking a while to install and while it is doing that it offers the change to append additional services to the setup. Not very clear, I even canceled it a couple of times as I could not find the next or finish button.

The other was the fact that there seems to be about 3 visible buttons, menu items or sidebars for the same thing. Check out the screenshot below:

I can count:

• 2 x View
  • Toolbar x 2
• 2 x Tools
  • Toolbar x 2
• 3 x Weblog
  • Menu
  • Toolbar
  • Sidebar
• 4 x Insert
  • Menu
  • ToolBar x 2
  • Sidebar

Not too sure why all of these different links and buttons are needed as they all serve the same purpose.