I just received an e-mail from someone who believes that just because he refuses to use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, that the viruses, spyware and other problems that affect these applications cannot impact his system in any way. He refuses to understand that Internet Explorer is still integrated so tightly into Windows that it always runs whether you use it or not, and is still capable of picking up viruses, spyware and other exploits that give attackers unparrallelled access to a computer at little to no cost of time or energy.
Strangely, the same person thinks there is no speech synthesizer in Linux that can speak the language he needs. Funny that I found one in all of 1 minute, and wasn’t even half looking for it. Even better, the voices I found are able to be used by two different freedomware speech synthesizers, Espeak and Festival.
I have heard it said that someone who has no knowledge of how a computer works shouldn’t even sit down in front of one. I never wanted to take it that far, but the person who e-mailed me and prompted me to write this blog post is starting to make me feel that this is more true than I ever imagined.
As part of the switch to a self-hosted blog, I decided to minimize the number of third-party services I depend on to make everything work. So after a good deal of fiddling, I have been able to cut the cord that was tying me to Feedburner. WordPress has built-in RSS feeds, both for posts and for comments, and I don’t have any problems with either of them. Even better, I was able to install a plugin that allows readers to subscribe to e-mail updates from a very easy-to-use form that I put right in the sidebar. No more clicking on a link that takes you to an entirely different website to subscribe to e-mail updates. It’s also better to have that subscribe/unsubscribe form in a visible location on every page instead of just having a little link that says "Get the email sitting up near the top of the page next to the archive. Maybe now I'll get some e-mail subscribers 😀 . Either way, I really like this whole layout better than anything I had with third-party services. I only hope my readers enjoy it as much as I do.
This is mainly just a test, but if I did it right, my posts on my old TumbleLog should look nearly identical to the posts on The Kyle File. I notice that even the subscription links for the feed and e-mail subscriptions on Tumblr still work as expected, because I haven’t yet decided to replace Feedburner with my self-hosted feed. I may test that shortly to see whether or not e-mail subscriptions will still work using the form on the main page if I switch to the standard follow button plugin. The only problem I may have with that is that my e-mails may not go out at the same time, or may be formatted differently, but that isn’t really a big issue at this point.
Just testing this gnome-blog desktop posting app. It looks quite useful, although I may need to categorize my posts from the website or the phone, as I see no category listing here. There may possibly be a later version than this one though, as the AUR package is orphaned. I may adopt this one if I find it useful.
The Kyle File's face lift is now complete, and all features are implemented. Reading and following my posts about all kinds of subjects is now easier than ever, and it is even easier for me to post all kinds of random ramblings to this nice little webspace. Although the most noticeable changes appear to be cosmetic, I am now making full use of a self-hosted WordPress installation on my own VPS, complete with plugins that have imported every post I ever made to my TumbleLog, automatically publishes my posts to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, with more to come in the future hopefully, and even keeps the same Feedburner subscription link I had. The most important changes I am introducing include the much more flexible and nicer-looking theme, the software freedom that comes from using free and open source code and the killer WordPress Android app, which works extremely well with Talkback on Gingerbread and up, and makes writing blog posts from my phone almost as easy as texting. Oh, and I guess I should mention that it isn’t in any way owned or controlled by Yahoo, or even Google, with the exception of the Feedburner feed, which I could replace at any time. I have also added some additional quick share buttons, and the ability to “love” or “hate” my posts, which is something that I almost had on Tumblr, but has been reimplemented and improved here. Enjoy my better blog, and don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of me or my posts in the comments or with the “love it!” and “hate it!” buttons. And as always, feel free to rip anything you like and call it yours, as my original posts are still in the public domain as always.