Blog Archives

For the past while, I’ve been working on a new WordPress site for the New Directors / New Films festival. Basically – this film festival is freakin’ awesome. Films like Clerks, Pi, and You can read a bit about the project on my work site. But this post is not about the site or even the festival, but about the promo video that was made for the festival.

Below is the teaser video (made by theLab) – who did a full rebranding of Comedy Central – produced a super slick and interesting video which gives a glimpse of what the festival’s all about.

A Few Quick Observations About This Video

1. There is no melodic score. Instead, the piece is scored by sounds of cinema and digital-life.

2. Bleeps. Cuts. Scratch. Static.

3. There is no actual video of the films. They are all stills.

4. It’s awesome.

What do you think about the video?

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
New Directors/New Films introduces New York audiences to the work of emerging or not-yet-established filmmakers from around the world. Presented jointly by The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, this renowned festival in past years has uncovered talents like Pedro Almodovar, Darren Aronofsky, Nicole Holofcener, Courtney Hunt, Spike Lee, Kelly Reichardt, and Steven Spielberg.

Related Links :

• For more on NDNF, visit the official site
• You can also read more on the NYTimes ArtsBeat Blog.

people in NYC have a tendency to “power” things. power walking, power brokers, power tools, now power blogging?

Nontheless – regardless of title – Lorelle VanFossen offers these WordPress Power Tips at WordCamp:

Here’s a shortlist of tips included in the video:
1. Use FireBug – A firefox plug-in/add-on for developers, themers, and well…power bloggers
2. Use tabs when browsing – Write your posts in one tab, preview your post in another.
3. Use Future Posts – write a post now, post it later. This will help your blog stay populated with new content. It won’t, however, help you predict the future.
4. Checkout userscripts.org

If these tips help you become a power blogger, let me know. I’d love to see your power blog!

Working with Internet Explorer is not fun. Working with WordPress is. For people who use, modify, and work with WordPress in Internet Explorer, you might notice that your blog will look very different in these old browsers.

I found this nice article, which helped me modify this blog for Internet Explorer, but still keep styles I wanted for Firefox, Safari, and well . . . any other browser.

The post suggested I use a different stylesheet altogether for Internet Explorer. So I did. And this is how I did it :

Make a copy of your themes css file (usually style.css) and rename it to iestyle.css (in this example). That file is where our IE specific css and tweaks will reside safely, not polluting any other browser except IE ;’) If you know what changes you want to make for just IE, go ahead and enter them now (in iestyles.css).

Now we’re going to use a conditional comment (as recommended by M$ to address these issues) so that whenever IE version 6 or less (and only IE version 6 or less) comes to our site, it will see our iestyles.css. We need to edit the theme’s header.php file. Open it up and look for where our styles.css is called. The conditional comment has to appear after the existing call to style.css!

Place this conditional statement in your header.php:

And make sure you change the link of your stylesheet!!

Thanks again to Sam at samdevol.com for the great tip and clear documentation!

I’m using this nifty plugin to automatically post my blog posts (from my blog) straight to mySpace. This way, I can keep my friends, family, and stalkers up-to-date on what interesting things are going on, without having to log into mySpace.

Hopefully, this plugin will work, and you’ll be able to begin tracking me better than ever before.

Last week, there was a picture of Me and Misnomer Dance Theater in the NYTimes.

The article was a feature on how many people are now running businesses out of their homes. It was quite nice to do the photo shoot. We also shot a YouTube video, which you can see on the Misnomer YouTube Page.

The author, Marci Alboher, also posted the video on her own NYTimes blog, Shifting Careers, a great read for any freelancers or people working from home.

Aside from the barrage of freelance work, web consulting, web development, and other web hackery, I’ve been consulting a few people on wordpress stuff…

If anyone out there is in need of a site, quickly, just use WordPress. It’s a great content management system. Over time and with practice, you can really put together a nice looking site with regularly updated content.

This October, I will also be leading a workshop with Chris Elam at The Field:
Strategies For Internet Outreach

The workshop is at capacity – however, we will make all the materials and tutorials available online. Keep an eye out for that here and on the Misnomer Blog – I’ll be uploading a wordpress plugin package, so you can download all your plugins from one place.

This will make it easier for companies, developers, and other web-folk to find and install useful plugins on wordpress.

The package will include:
cForms – allows you to insert forms into your WordPress site!
videoCommenting – comment on videos and leave time markers! developed by John Schimmel and Shawn VanEvery, ITP all-stars!
audioPlayer – stream audio on your blog, in a flashy way!
slimStat – a stats counter for your blog
sociable – social bookmark posts from your blog
podPress – easy management of podcasts + wordpress

If I’m missing any key plugins, do let me know!

For other recommended wordpress plugins,visit my plugins page, or the wordpress plugins page.

My WordPress Blog crashed this weekend while I was updating it. I was adjusting the values in Options -> General and made a mistake: I set the value in the WordPress URL field to be my root directory (www.jakilevy.com) instead of where it is currently.
I could not login, or reset the value.

I had to go into my database.

This was helpful during my process :: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/site-url/ :: but it wasn’t what saved me.
Since my host does not have PHPmyAdmin, I had a difficult time accessing my database.

My friend, Michael, who started his own business, Help With a Smile, is what really saved me.

He wrote a PHP script for me that reset the necessary value in the database.
Here’s the script:

define('DB_NAME', 'Database_name'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'username'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'mysql.yoursite.org'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value

?>


In order to use the script, you must change the values to reflect your database. If you don’t have the values readily available, you can get them from your wp-config file on your server.

Copy the code above. Insert into a text editor. Save as fixwordpress.php. Upload to your site: www.yoursite.com/blog.
Enter the URL: www.yoursite.com/blog/fixwordpress.php

Congratulations. Your site is fixed.