Patrick Tulskie

If you read my site from your Blackberry or iPhone then try pointing your browser at http://m.patricktulskie.com

This is powered by Mobi which basically takes the RSS feed from my site and parses it into a normally readable page.  This works pretty good on iPhones and Blackberries but I would imagine that it will be just fine on even your normal cellphone.  It took me like 1 minute to setup my site so if you’ve always wanted the m.yourdomain.com then here is an easy way for you to do it.

I think I might need to write some logic in the back end to redirect viewers to the mobile site if I detect they are browsing from a mobile browser.  Hmm.  That’s a post for another time I suppose.

Please note: I am not affiliated with this service at all.

My father IM’d me this afternoon because he wanted to comment on my article about Digg vs Mixx. Apparently no one could register and no one could comment on my blog as a result. I had initially turned it all off so that I didn’t have to deal with spammers and the like but I had forgotten to turn it all back on once I had some countermeasures in place. Oops.

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Well I had a smooth upgrade to Wordpress 2.6.  No problems.  I also changed themes at the same time.  Not entirely sure if I like this or not.  The Hemmingway stuff from the previous one was pretty awesome.  Maybe I’ll try to combine to two into a super theme of sorts.  For now this one will stay though because it feels more readable and comfortable.

Like it?  Loathe it?  Tell me.

Update 7/15/2008:
I was informed today by James Januszka (http://twitter.com/jamesjanuszka) that if you were not logged into the site and you tried to view a full article that it would not work properly.  I apologize for that and spent some quality time with the theme working out what was going on.  Apparently there was a missing close div tag.  The author of the theme still denies that there was a bug and insists it is a conflict with plugins in Wordpress.  If anyone is looking to use “Hello ” and needs the fix, let me know.

Welcome back to the saga of Patrick’s battle with the Chinese.  When we left our hero, he thought he had battled off the Chinese internet registrar and the government in a few short emails.  Alas, he was wrong.  Carol had one more thing to attempt to sell to him.  Sensing that this was a scam of some sort, and not really caring about who looks at his lowly blog in China, he decided it would be fun to start messing with them.

If you haven’t read the previous posting about this nonsense then you should probably do so.  Basically a Chinese company contacted me with some nonsense about someone wanting to buy my name in China and wanted to know if I would allow this.  I said no, and they started trying to convince me to register the names with them… and then this happened…

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UPDATE: I had taken this down since I didn’t want to blow my cover but it looks like they realized I was onto their game.  I believe this company that has contacted me is actually just trying to screw people in other countries out of money by threatening them with fake companies.  If that’s not the case and they are reading this then I’d like to see some proof otherwise.  The rest of the emails will come shortly when I have time.

I know.  I know.  There are plenty of questions going through your head right now upon reading the title of this… How could this possibly happen?  Why do they want some Irish/Polish mixed name?  Don’t they have enough to do with the Olympics this year?  How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop?

Well, I’m as bewildered as you are.  Let me start at the beginning since it was only this morning and I am pretty sure I can re-count it.

I woke up to my blackberry going off next to me for an emergency email.  No one sends me emergency emails, with the exception of the Chinese government, so naturally I had a look see.  I skimmed it quickly and determined it could wait until morning because they did not say anything about me needing to wake up immediately and get dressed.

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Dawned on me the other day that this blog was kind of a pain in the eyes to read.  That’s what I get for not taking the time to make my own theme for Wordpress.

What I did was I made most of the fonts on the page black, but this had some negative affects in terms of not being able to read the text on some of the black spots on the page.  I’m working on it, I know.  Just want to let everyone know I’m aware.

One of the other things that was pretty annoying was the slow page load time when my twitter status is loading.  I handled that with some PHP to verify the URL of the page you’re looking at and I also moved the javascript to the very bottom of the site before the end of the body tag.  This makes sure that only pages where the twitter status is shown will actually load the javascript AND it also makes sure that the rest of the page loads in a timely manner so you don’t need to wait around for my status if you want to read something else.

Just some usability metrics that I had to handle and I thought I’d mention them.  I’ll be doing another article on the PHP used to handle the twitter status probably later on this week.

One might ask themselves why they landed here. Why are they reading this? Well. Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure. It’s a good thing you did land here though because this place might just be the best place you’ve ever wound up on the internet. No I’m not being arrogant… I did say it “might” be.

I’m not entirely sure where I was going with that. Anyhow. This is just the customary first post on the blog, but I would encourage you to return soon. Add it to your RSS feeds. Just do it. I mean at the end of the day, it’s just another feed and you might learn a thing or two.

If you’re ever so slightly aware of my normal style then you know that I usually have an orange site. Well, now… I don’t. I decided to go with a green layout this time around and I guess it’s all part of the new change and trying to freshen up my image. Enjoy.