BASHing WordPress
This is, without a doubt, the coolest WordPress theme ever. If I wasn’t so concerned that most readers of this site aren’t familiar with the command line interface, I’d be using it right now:
Read MoreAdSense
From one house to another… a quick shout-out to my college roommate, Rich, on the relaunch of his sports commentary site, House of Sports Blab. I don’t know about the name, but the content is first rate. We spent the afternoon putting some fine touches on the WordPress template design, tweaking the style sheet, and so on. The main thing he wanted was a location for Google AdSense advertising. The spot we dedicated to it is directly below the tagline on the right-hand sidebar. Speaking of AdSense, for a long time I’ve frowned on such advertisements and vowed that I’d never put such junk on this site. I’ve got nothing against Google, but we’re bombarded with ads from the time the radio wakes us up in the morning until we...
Read MoreAviation Blogs
I’ve added some new aviation-related blogs to my links page. It’s about time, too. I periodically search for sites like these, but find them few and far between on the internet. Thankfully, I found a way to leech off the research of others! I simply looked up the Bloglines lists of some people who subscribe to the RSS feed here at The House of Rapp. Among the discoveries are an official Boeing site for the flight test program of the new 777-200LR jetliner, two sites written by airline pilots, and another which is penned by a freight dog here in...
Read MoreA Refresher
For the past week, I’ve been having an interesting discussion over at Damn Foreigner on the subject of military recruitment. Manish wrote an article suggesting that since there are so many supporters of the war, it shouldn’t be hard to find new recruits for the Army unless those who support it aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. His analysis seemed a bit oversimplistic and I said as much in reply to his post. It’s turned into a relatively long — but civil — comment thread. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a place or person with whom to discuss opposing political viewpoints in an intelligent yet respectful manner. This is especially true on...
Read MoreWordPress / Gallery Integration Problem Solved
It’s been a few months since I switched from Movable Type to WordPress as a CMS solution. Overall, I’ve been happy with WordPress. However, there was one large bug I was never able to squash: it didn’t want to play well with Gallery. For some reason, I was never able to call WordPress functions from within the photo gallery pages. I wanted to make these function calls in order to have the side bar menu (which contains recent posts, comments, and other WordPress data) remain consistent on all the pages. A simple server-side include should have taken care of this, but it never worked. I’d end up with the following error message: Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/ronrapp/public_html/wp-includes/wp-l10n.php on...
Read MoreI’m a Damn Foreigner
Manish has been kind enough to invite me to join him over at Damn Foreigner. He’s on the other side of the political spectrum, so it should make for interesting reading! Anyway, I just published my first post. I like the name he picked for his web site. We’re all “damn foreigners” in one sense or another, aren’t we?
Read MoreKooks and Tinfoil Hats
Kooky: Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly thinks it’s high time we redacted the Fifth Amendment: I’d like to see videotaping required for all police interviews, and in return I’d suggest that the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination be discarded. If police interviews are all recorded and trials are all held in public, it’s not at all clear to me what value the 5th Amendment right to silence has anymore. And… Our “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” Tinfoil Hat Award of the Week goes to the Kool Aid loving readers at Daily Kos who are convinced President Bush is going to call off the 2004 election, declare martial law, and block out any web site that disagrees with him. Oh, and Bush is the Antichrist, dontcha...
Read MoreThe Daily Kos
When it comes to bloggers, the biggest name in liberal politics on the web is The Daily Kos. He’s raised a lot of money for political candidates, is frequently referenced by campaigns, and Hugh Hewitt has even discussed putting him on the air. All this as a result of his successful web site. But yesterday Kos stepped over the line and it looks like it may cost him. He posted this about the deaths of four American contractors in Fallujah: I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them. I’d link to the entry but it’s been deleted (and half of his Kos’s political...
Read MoreSemper Fi, Bob
There are as many types of weblogs on the World Wide Web as there are people to read them. But one of the most timely weblog subcultures is a unique brand of no-spin news borne out of the war on terrorism. They’re often referred to as “war blogs” — online journals updated remotely from the Middle East by soldiers who give first-hand accounts of what they’re experiencing. I don’t follow too many war blogs, but one I did check out periodically was Bob Zangas’ Journey in Iraq. Bob served a tour of duty in Iraq in 2003 with the Marine Corps, then returned a few months ago as a civilian to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Sadly, Bob was killed a few days ago when his car was ambushed at a roadblock just south of...
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