Category: blogging

  • Review: MarsEdit 3.0 useful for offline blogging and editing

    For the past few years, I’ve been composing and editing most blog entries directly on the web inside my browser via the WordPress installation that runs Gravitationalpull.net. Every now and then, I get burned when the browser crashes or loses web connectivity after I’ve written a big chunk of unsaved text. It also means that…

  • How to exclude some pages from your WordPress header menu

    I am planning to change my header image to something more fall-like and as I started mucking around with some image files in various dimensions, I got tired of tweaking the various settings and php files of the SubtleFlux theme. So I decided to investigate alternatives. Just on a lark, I clicked on the new…

  • Most popular and favorite posts of the year here

    Another year is in the books, so here’s a quick look back at some highlights of the last 12 months of posts at the Gravitational Pull dot net blog. I was proud to see that total page views doubled in 2009 from the prior year to about 44,000 and total visitors also doubled to about…

  • Changing themes at Buckingham Palace

    Well, I was getting a little tired of my WordPress theme, Mandigo. Not that it wasn’t great but I find myself in the mood for something different after just about two years of no change. I’ve opted for a much simpler, cleaner, and less busy look using a theme called SubtleFlux by an unknown author…

  • WordPress 2.7 is the best WordPress yet

    When WordPress 2.5 came out a few months ago, there was a lot to like but there was also a lot to not-so-like. The layout of key parts of the program, including the dashboard and the editing page for new posts, didn’t seem very well thought out. The overall design was visually noisy and distracting,…

  • Bluehost Internet hosting service eases upgrades with SimpleScripts

    I have generally good things to say about my web hosting service, Bluehost. They are very reliable, with uptime for my site of over 99.5% (at least since I started monitoring it in September using the free SiteUpTime service). Bluehost also offer lots of add-ons and free services, like high-end spam filtering and automatic installation…

  • Facebook isn’t a web site (or a spaceship), it’s a time machine

    I’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook lately. A couple of months ago, maybe around the time Barrack Obama got the Democratic presidential nomination in Denver, a funny thing started happening with my 50 or so “friends” on Facebook. Since I joined earlier in ’08, there’s been an awful lot of dead air — most…

  • Fixing my blog’s del.icio.us widget without a widget

    I tend to read a lot of web pages every work day and they can all blur together if I’m not careful, or the coffee machine is on the fritz. So I use a couple of methods of saving and organizing my webstream, including Google Notebook for stuff that’s highly relevant to whatever project or…

  • Seeking more interaction from readers, I’m adding post ratings

    A survey of web sites and blogs a few years ago found that only about 1 in 100 visitors are motivated enough to leave comments (tip o’ the cap to ProBlogger for the link). On this blog, sadly, the ratio is even lower. For example, over the past month there were 2,453 visitors and just…