MichaelValiant.com—Conversations on Ecommerce & the Social Web (& maybe a few other things)

Upgrading my Blog

TheCanadianFoodie | June 30, 2008

I am about to upgrade CanadianFoodies.com to Wordpress 2.5.

So please ignore any short term randomness as I disable plugins, upgrade and (hopefully not) troubleshoot. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program shortly!

Thanks for your patience.

* Update (15 minutes later) - Upgrade complete. If you notice any further randomness, it is completely my fault!

Rate this:

2.7

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Topics: iFoodie | Comments

Excuse Me for a Moment

Michael | June 30, 2008

I am about to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5.

So please ignore any short term randomness as I disable plugins, upgrade and (hopefully not) troubleshoot. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program shortly!

Thanks for your patience.

* Update (20 minutes later) - Upgrade is complete. If you notice any randomness from here on in, it’s completely my fault!

Rate this:

3.2

Topics: Wordpress | Comments

Breaded Veal with Mushroom Gravy

TheCanadianFoodie | May 28, 2008

I forgot to take a picture! -ack- I must be out of practice… I took a few days off work to celebrate an extra long holiday weekend (and my birthday - yay me!-) and that generally means a little more time to plan a nice meal. And in typical fashion, I went with a few new dishes… Thursday night meant Breaded veal in a rich mushroom gravy (a hunters-style gravy) and lemon beans (with lemon zest and more mushrooms) . Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie | Comments

Wintered Vegetables

TheCanadianFoodie | May 5, 2008

We spent a day in the fields today. For future refernce (because I know you MUST be visiting and reading my site fanatically!) Saturday or Sunday means garden day. Unfortunately, and if you followed along last summer you probably know, we live in the city. Not that living in the city is unfortunate, there are plenty of good things about living in the city and at this point in our lives it just makes sense to be close to everything. But, I was raised in the country and would like to find my way back sometime before I retire :) Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie | Comments

The Perfect Steak

TheCanadianFoodie | May 3, 2008

How do you know when your steak is finished on the bbq? Practice. But in the meantime, stop asking HOW LONG… because it’s not the right question. Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie | Comments

Canadian Foodies in 2008

TheCanadianFoodie | April 24, 2008

Hello everyone! Thanks for visiting. To any of my old regulars, thanks for checking back. We’ve been a little quiet around here over the past 6 months or so… what can I say :) I’ve been hibernating through the long Canadian Winter! Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie | Comments

The new and improved ScribeFire

Michael | April 22, 2008

I love Firefox.

I have plenty of other browsers installed, some are good, some less so… but I’ve never found anything to coax me away from Firefox.

Believe or not though, this post isn’t about why I love firefox, but rather it’s addon capabilities.

There are a lot of smart folks who have produced a lot of smart addons that make my day to day life easier and more productive. (I’m sure most of those smart folks don’t read this blog, but if you do, THANK YOU!)

Specifically, the reason for my little ode to Firefox came about because I just installed the new version of ScribeFire.

I used to use ScribeFire back when it was called Performance or Performancing and for one reason or another stopped (I honestly can’t remember why). But I came across news on the newest release today and reinstalled it… and what a treat!

ScribeFire is a Firefox addon that provides you with full posting capabilities from any webpage.

Once you’ve set it up to talk with your blog (took about 15 seconds) you can create posts/notes/drafts/pages from anywhere! No more copy and pasting from one tab or window to another!

And the ScribeFire WYSIWYG is significantly better than any built in blog editor I’ve used before.

Other features from ScribeFire:

…categorize and tag your blog posts, upload images, set the timestamp of your posts, save works-in-progress as notes, post an entry as a draft, share your posts on social websites, and upload files via FTP.

You can also open multiple posts in ScribeFire at the same time, copy text from a website and preserve the sites formatting, copy text as a quote with attribution, supports common keyboard shortcuts, call up old posts in the ScribeFire interface, flip between code and design views, pull in images or video from flickr or youtube instantly and even promote your post via several social bookmarking sites right from the interface.

I love the fact that ScribeFire is tabbed and isn’t locked to the page you are on, so you can do some research, opening each source in a different tab, and then open ScribeFire and flip back and forth between all your sources, pulling what you need without interrupting your blogging interface!

A couple of funny things I did notice already (hey, nothing’s perfect right!?)…

Some tags, like heading tags, are absent from the interface and you will need to code them directly (not a huge deal).
If you accidentally use the wrong formatting somewhere, clicking the same button doesn’t UNDO it, you have to flip over to code view and delete the associated tags

All said this is a great addition to Firefox for any blogger and I heartily recommend giving it a try (I’ve only been using for 1/2 an hour and look what I have to say!)

This is the best lifehack/workhack tool I’ve tried out in a long time!

Rate this:

2.9

Topics: Blogging, Lifehack, Tools | Comments

On another note…

Michael | April 21, 2008

I read an interesting article on China today that claimed two intriguing things (neither of which I’ve spent the time to try and validate… but they sound good!):

1. If the entire population of China were to walk past you in single file, the line would never end (due to the rate of reproduction).

2. There are more English speaking people in China than in all of North America.

Rate this:

2.9

Topics: Conversations | Comments

Firefox is the #1 Browser

Michael | April 16, 2008

I was just glancing through some of the analytics for this domain (MichaelValiant.com) and noticed that Firefox has taken over as the number one browser being used by visitors.

And firefox didn’t just slide ahead, it blew by IE usage!

So either Firefox is taking a huge market share nowadays (and I love the new betas of 3 (other than the fact that my plugins don’t work)! So keep it up FF!) or I am attracting more and more of the geeky side of the interwebs.