Herro Flom Japan

Lately I've been having a thought nagging at me, waking me up in the middle of the night.

"I'm not smart enough. I don't have enough skills."

There are lots of ways I could be…more. Maybe it's because I'm pushin' 40 and I'm not where I expected to be by now.

To make a long story short, I decided to write a little program that lets me use my GPS enabled mobile phone to update my whereabouts on that little map in the right hand sidebar of my blog. It took a bit of studying PHP and WordPress source code over the past week or so, but I feel better now. Proud of myself. I like making things that I can share with others.

[tags]emo, geek stuff, programming[/tags]

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My boss wants me to set up a blog for him so he can talk about politics and business. But not just any old blog, no sir-ree, this guy is smart. If it won't make him money, he's not interested. No kidding aside, I wish I were more like him. And it has to brain-dead easy to post. Not that he's brain dead, but he doesn't have the same patience that I have when it comes to wrangling with technology.

First, the brain-dead easy part. Windows Live Writer. My God, this thing is excellent, and it's still only in beta. When you write a post, like I'm doing right now, it magically formats the edit window to the look and feel of your blog's template. Fonts, colors, CSS frills, background images, everything. And there are plugins available to add various functions, none of which float my boat, but they're there anyway.

My master will be very pleased.

There's only one caveat with WLW: the Bad Behavior anti-spam WordPress plugin blocks it. I found the fix in this post.

Next, the hard part. He wants the site to be bilingual, with a mobile version and a feature for paid subscriptions to daily moblile updates.

• WordPress is already internationalized, so we have that covered.
• The mobile version of the blog will be provided through the MobileEye+ plugin. I've been using it here and so far haven't had any problems.
• The daily mobile updates will be delivered via phplist.
• Subscriptions and memberships will be handled by aMember Pro, a $139 PHP script that can hook into WordPress and phplist and over 70 different payment systems. It does all the work, you just sit back and watch the money roll in.

This will be my first foray into full-blown ecommerce. It's hard to beleive I've been working on the Internet for this long and have yet to set up a site that's designed to take peoples' money.

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