Two more of my gambling-related photographs were published online. Wew.

The Dallas Morning News points out that the moron(s) who run the George Bush library foundation couldn’t figure out how to SEO their stupid site and are losing millions in donations. Good.

By the way, this wasn’t the first snafu by W’s ace team of web designers. Turns out they let the domain GeorgeWBushlibrary.com expire, some squatter picked it up for ten bucks, and they had to buy it back. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.

We’ve been using twitter for a while and have helped a few of our clients get up and running. Explaining the concept of twitter to someone can be challenging, and new users are bound to make mistakes.

Virginia GOP chairman Jeff Frederick used twitter to ruin his party’s chances of luring a Democratic senator to switch parties, shifting the balance of power with this tweet:

“Big news coming out of Senate: Apparently one dem is either switching or leaving the dem caucus. Negotiations for power sharing underway.”

Meanwhile, New York Republican Jim Tedisco used twitter to pull in nasty comments from his opposition directly to his website in real time. Tweets like:

“Will Tedisco Finally Reimburse Taxpayers Over $21,000 For His 20-Minute Car Ride?”

made it on his site.

Moral? Don’t use twitter to discuss secret negotiations and avoid publishing unfiltered tweets on your website if you have people that don’t like you.

[Thanks to Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo for spotting these gems.]

There’s a whole lot that’s wrong with New Orleans, but if we had to pick one thing worth fixing, it’s the sorry state of of the city’s leadership.

Thanks to some contacts we made while working in the Big Easy in 2006, we now have a chance to do something about it. We’re proud to support James Perry’s exploratory run for mayor of New Orleans in 2010, and are helping build his new web page.

If you’d like to get involved, please donate to the campaign or volunteer.

We like our company name, a reference to a non-standard HTML tag. It looks like there might be a new competitor, the pulse css animation. If you are on an iphone or using a a webkit nightly the element below should pulse If you are not using one of these browsers, you can just enjoy this blinking text.

Thanks Eli Horne for bringing this to our attention.

We’re pretty proud of the totally revamped site we built for 511 Contra Costa. Graphic design credit: Adduci Studios.

It looks like they choose every damn photo ever taken of Virginia City, but my shot made the final cut for the Schmap photo contest! (I know, hold your applause.)

I’m not in love with it, but Schmap also makes the widget I’ve helpfully included here. Just for fun, try to find my picture without pulling all your hair out. Hint: I blogged about it earlier if you need to cheat.

This has been making the rounds on all the blogs, but it’s still kind of funny.

I like this guy, who debuts around a minute thirty into the report.  I haz home computer too.

Recently we’ve helped a few of our clients move wordpress installations between domain names. This is a fairly easy process except that links that were made inside of posts, such as links to other posts, pages and images hosted on the site are likely to break. Also, if you change permalinks around a lot or move stuff around inside of your wordpress “uploads” folder, you might find lots of broken links.

You’ll need access to run SQL statements on your database. For most people, using phpmyadmin is the easiest way to accomplish this. phpmyadmin is usually available on the control panel backend that your webhost provides.

Before you do anything, its a good idea to backup your entire database. If you are using phpmyadmin, you can do this by selecting your wordpress database and going to “export”. Select “Save as File” and “zipped” or “gzipped”.

Once you are ready to do the find replace, you can enter your SQL statements in the “SQL” tab of phpmyadmin. Here is the syntax for a find replace in mySQL:

update TABLE_NAME set FIELD_NAME = replace(FIELD_NAME, 'find this string', 'replace found string with this string');

In wordpress, to search the content of all posts and pages, you would use the table wp_posts and the field post_content:

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, 'find this string', 'replace found string with this string');

Its important to note that a forwardslash (/) is an invalid character, so you can use a backslash (\) to escape each forward slash. Its best to use a full URL when find/replacing on the post content as if you just use the slug you might end up changing more than you intended and this is searching the actual text of every post as well as the URLs contained inside of link and image tags.

For example, to change URLs from http://www.oldsite.com/blog to http://newsite.com would use:

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, 'http:\/\/www.oldsite.com\/blog', 'http:\/\newsite.com');

A lot of what we do at blnktag means showing people how to do things, like blog, use some piece of software, or edit a design template.  If you’ve ever tried, you probably know that describing what you’re doing isn’t that easy over the phone or in a text email.  And anyone who’s ever used the print screen key on a PC, copied the image into Microsoft Word, and emailed it to a friend knows it’s not easy to do using a PC either.

Two really great programs, only available for OSX, allow you to grab images from your screen or web cam and immediately post them online.  Skitch was the first one to fill this niche, and it has the added bonus of letting you easily edit or manipulate a screen shot to add emphasis to what you’re saying.  Here’s a demo using another great ap, Screen Toaster:

The other program, GrabUp, doesn’t have the features of Skitch but is amazingly fast and posts files to any URL you can log-on to using ftp.  Strongly recommended.