Year: 2016 Page 5 of 19

Fix Publicize no longer publicizing your posts

On July 7, 2016

Publicize, the part of Jetpack that pushes my posts to Social Media™ has stopped working recently. It turns out to be an issue with the plugin after the last update.
There is a manual fix from the developer.

If you’re comfortable editing files, you’ll need to go to *YOUR DOMAIN*/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/publicize
Open the publicize-jetpack.php file and remove the lines shown here

I removed lines 362-380, saved the changes and now Publicize is working again. I’m sure they’ll include a fix in the next Jetpack update, but this will get you up and running again until then.

And you thought your job was hard

By Carl

On July 7, 2016

In Links and Quotes

President Obama will soon be Former-President Obama and he’s looking for a new job. Running a country is a lot like running a company, but with less hostility.

Obama told Bloomberg:

“Now, I’m always careful about drawing too many easy parallels there, because sometimes there are CEOs who come in and start explaining to me how I should be running the presidency. And I sometimes have to stop them and say, ‘All right. One, I appreciate your advice. But imagine a situation in which half your board and management were actively trying to get rid of you and prevent you from accomplishing anything. And you had 2 million employees, and you couldn’t fire a large portion of them. And your competitors weren’t simply promoting their own products, but were continually saying how your products were the worst that were ever invented and will cause a civilizational crisis. If you pull that all together, then you’ve got about half of what I’m dealing with on a daily basis.'”

Heavy

By Carl

On July 7, 2016

In Observations

The West Wing has me thinking about the death penalty.

The news has me thinking about how scary it is to be Black in Baton Rouge or Minnesota.

Did you know there was a group dedicated to tracking and filming crimes and uploading them to deter youth from violence?

Guns are everywhere and mass shootings are as routine as running out of milk.

The jobs are gone. Eaten by computers.

Happy Thursday.

Using Facebook Group emails to post updates

By Carl

On July 6, 2016

In Observations

I’ve spent 942 hours playing Destiny That’s 5 weeks 4 days 6 hours 8 minutes 45 seconds of my life I’ve spent inside a world created by Bungie. I love this world and my gaming friends. Bungie puts out news about the game on their blog which some of us read religiously and some ignore completely. In an effort to get the information into people’s hands more easily, I wanted to set up a way to get the new post to our Facebook Group every time Bungie publishes a new update.

I thought this would be simple through IFTTT but they removed the Facebook Groups channel. I learned that each Facebook Group has its own URL and Email address. It’s usually Groupname@groups.facebook.com. However, my group’s address did not work. I had to setup the address since we never had (and didn’t know we could.)

Facebook provides a good article for creating a web and email address for a group I administer. In short, do this:

To create a customized web and email address for a group you admin:
1. Go to your group page and click the … in the top-right corner.
2. Select Edit Group Settings.
3. Next to Web and Email Address click Customize Address.
4. Enter your web and email address.
5. Click save.

Now you’ll be able to post to your group using that email address as well as being able to access and shared the Group’s page directly at http://facebook.com/groups/GroupName

I used this to create an IFTTT recipe to send Bungie’s Destiny updates to our clan’s page.

This recipe can be used to send any RSS feed to any email address. Not just for Facebook Groups. But it solved the problem I had.

Legacy

By Carl

On June 28, 2016

In Observations

Tonight, I am driving with my wife to The Blennerhassett Hotel in West Virginia. There, we slumber and wake early tomorrow to continue to Cincinnati, OH. I wish the trip was under better circumstances, but it’s to attend the funeral of my grandmother. She may be gone but the legacy she left will be remembered far past my life.

“It would break my heart if it was developed for any other purpose. This way, it is a comfort to know that whatever happens to me, this beautiful property will remain.” — Marie Holscher

Marie Holscher, on the farm. Courtesy of Xavier

It will remain untouched. It’s a beautiful property with towering trees and a lake where I fished growing up when we’d pile in the car for a visit. In addition to being beautiful, the farm is used as a farm.

In 2007, my father worked with her to get the property and house protected for the future. The Clermont Sun wrote about the easement. Monroe Township resident donates agricultural easement

Not just 42 acres of woodlands and farm fields (the farm produces profitable corn and soybean crops), the Holscher farm is also home to the Aaron Fagin House, built in 1832, that is listed with the National Register of Historic Places. The Fagin House has had only four owners in its 175-year history.

She wanted the house and land to remain after she passed. And it will. It will not turn into a strip mall or housing development.

“My husband (who died in 1957) and I bought the farm and moved here in 1950,” Holscher said. “It has been in our family ever since that time and is a much cherished home. It is important to me to preserve this house and its surrounding acres just as it is right now. Hopefully, the easement will accomplish that.”

I haven’t been to the farm in years. But I am looking forward to walking through the expansive lawn to the lake and towering pine trees. Even thought she has passed, her legacy will outlast my father and myself. It will remain a pristine part of the world. Nor a parking lot. Nor a mall. It will remain farmland and a legacy.