If you looked up the Cebu sky last night, you’d have the crap scared out of you. At least seven balls of light were clearly visible in a linear formation (if you squint hard enough and connect the dots, it could be the Grim Reaper’s scythe.) The lights were stationary and stayed visible for minutes.

Text messages were being sent around, asking people to look up the sky. I ran to our office’s canteen and saw the lights for myself. It was eerie and beautiful. (Click on the photo to view the larger image.) Across the street, people were stopping to look at it. I couldn’t make out their faces, whether they showed awe or fear or fascination.

Continue reading ‘Close encounter of a different kind’

The latest episode of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Pinoy Pod features several top Pinoy bloggers: Manolo Quezon, Abe Olandres, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, represented by executive director Sheila Coronel, Rickey Yaneza, and Bryan Boy. The “Portrait of the Filipino as Blogger” segment is too short because Pinoy Pod squeezed in two topics for the episode: Pinoy bloggers and two Fil-Am filmmakers.

Central to the very short discussion is the political blogs v. gossip and showbiz blogs issue. As you can see in Pinoy blog rankings like Abe’s Pinoy Top Blogs, showbiz-oriented weblogs hog web traffic.

Manolo told Pinoy Pod: “I was never upset about it unlike some other people because you just have to realize that it will always be a smaller percentage of people interested in politics day in and day out.”

Continue reading ‘Portrait of the Filipino as blogger’

I finally got to try watching a World Cup game online last night and boy was I blown away. Four years ago, the only option for people who can’t leave the office to view the games in a bar or hotel broadcasting the matches was to monitor the latest scores in text-based websites.

Yesterday, I watched the end of the Australia-Japan match and the start of the United States-Czech Republic encounter via peer-to-peer Internet broadcast of the ESPN 2 feed and the quality was great. (Click on photos to view larger images) It’s a bit better than the quality you get from YouTube and Google videos. You can get the application here. You can also check my previous post on other options in watching the games online.

Early tomorrow morning, Brazil plays its first match. It will be against Croatia. I’m stocking up on junk food and start praying our Mediocre Electric Company (Meco) in Mactan Island, Cebu doesn’t act up again and cut power to our subdivision. We have been suffering frequent blackouts lately. On second thought, I might just watch the games in Marriot or any of those bars in Cebu City broadcasting the matches.

The World Cup opened last week and many football fans are losing sleep keeping up with the games. I know I am. Live matches aren’t available on my cable TV provider but another company is offering live World Cup matches for a one-time fee. What I watch at home are replays of the games broadcast the next day.

Online, the tools of dissent are helping football fans access the BBC’s streaming video coverage of the games, erstwhile limited to UK residents. Public and anonymous proxies used to help dissidents in repressive countries access censored content allow you to view the coverage of the British broadcaster, which is also blogging the event. Here’s a great tip from GHacks.net. In another post, GHacks suggests using TUVPlayer and connecting to ESPN2. I might try it out later tonight.

Continue reading ‘The beautiful game, online’

In most WordPress themes, trackbacks aren’t segregated from regular blog comments. This is fine but if you get a lot of trackbacks in a post, it gets in the way of the arrangement of comments.

For a long time, I just used WordPress’ stock comments template but at the back of my mind, I had listed the segregation of trackbacks and comments as something that I would be implementing in this blog and the theme that I’m finalizing. Last week, however, my post on using Dreamweaver to modify a WordPress theme got a lot of trackbacks and I saw the need to separate these notifications from regular comments on the post.

I didn’t have to search for a solution because I had already bookmarked this post by web designer Rachel Cunliffe. Just copy the code she posted in her blog post and paste it into your WordPress comment loop in comments.php. Replace the code in comments.php starting at <?php if ($comments) : ?> until <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>, don’t replace the entire code in your comments.php or else you’d encounter errors.

It has been more than a year since I used Dreamweaver to design a site. I’ve mostly been running sites using PHP-MySQL content management systems (CMS) and depend on the thousands of ready-made themes and templates to control the site design. For the occasional static page, I use Nvu for visual editing. But after reading this article on SitePoint, I wanted to try using Dreamweaver to edit one of the templates I’m using.

WordPress, like most PHP-MySQL CMS, uses template files to control the appearance of websites. The webpage is assembled from several PHP files controlling specific aspects of the site like the header, sidebar, main content and footer.

To use Dreamweaver to edit or customize WordPress themes, you need to combine these different PHP files into one page so that you can immediately view, while editing the codes, how the page would appear.

Continue reading ‘How to edit Wordpress themes using Dreamweaver’