Freedom though, includes freedom of choice.

Despite all the OS’s fuss and “wars” one has to chose his set of tools that best fit him and his needs. Lately I see many Linux- and GNU-heads stating that, well, you can’t be a hacker or believe in the hacker culture if you use a Mac (or Windows). “Go Linux.”

This approach reminds me the Marxist practices at USSR: we’re all the same, no matter what.

Hacker != Proprietary software

They say these two things can’t go together. We say, why not? The culture of sharing knowledge, code, tearing machines up, making customs solutions, studying how something is built, etc cannot be forced to be a possession only of one ideology or of the practice of using open-only software. Then it becomes proprietary itself. It’s contradiction in terms.

Speaking of freedom, people forget the actual freedom

Isn’t that a paradox? We are not the same. Each one of us is different. You have different needs than me, I have different needs than you. Forcing ideas and concepts to such narrow terms is not freedom at all. We need to re-think things again, re-challenge ideas, people.

It’s 2011, we need change

What’s the purpose of having many programming languages that satisfy different needs? It’s time to understand that we should separate the human factor and ideologies out of hardware & software and enjoy true free creativity without setting ourselves and our practices in vary narrow terms and bounds of  these ideologies.

Because, true creativity, innovation and progress won’t come by the people who use only GNU or only Mac or only Windows. They won’t come by Stallman, they won’t come by Jobs, they won’t come by Linus or Gates. They’ll come by the hackers, entrepreneurs and people who actually create, focusing on just to create without limiting themselves to certain sides or OS wars.

And this, reminds of Apple’s quote:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world. Are the ones who do.

It’s time to reconsider things.

In fact, it’s piece of cake. You don’t have to know anything about PHP or CSS.

Step 1: your Comments loop

Every WordPress theme supports comments. That equals to a comments.php file in your theme directory. Open it and find the the foreach and endforeach loop (it might look something like this:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?> and <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>.)

Now, place this code everywhere inside this loop:

<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar($comment, '50'); } ?>

The “50″ string or whatever in this code is your Gravatar’s photo size. You can edit it so it suits your theme’s design or your own likes.

Step 2: Style the Gravatar

By now, Gravatars won’t be styled (left, right, padding, etc). We will do it with a simple CSS code snippet. You probably have noticed that the Gravatar code spits out the “avatar” class on each image. Why not tell now the CSS to float the image left and add a small right margin. Open your style.css file of your WordPress theme and add this line of code:

img.avatar {float:left; margin-right:5px;}

This is it!

There you go! Simple and efficient Gravatar implementation to your WordPress comments. Of course themes will differ, you can style them however you like using CSS. (Hint: this code will only work on WordPress 2.5 and above; but I assume everyone now uses at least 2.9.2 so it won’t be a problem.)

More info about Using Gravatars at the WordPress Codex.

Having problems? Do you want to suggest a different workaround? Feel free to comment.

I came with the idea of using the Like button as a post-to-Facebook button, something like share but renewed and with the “like” keyword in it’s description. It serves two aspects: the act of liking the post and the act of sharing the post.

In the short, I wanted to embed the Like code in my single.php file in order to appear below each post the same way Sociable plugin works and when someone clicks on it to like, share+post the specific post into Facebook.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out of the box.

The thing is that when you try to create the Like button via iFrame or the Javascript SDK you are prompted to enter a URL that Like will prompt users to “like” and post to their Facebook’s profile. The URL itself is dummy. That means it’s not dynamical. Wherever you will put the Like button it just will like+share+post the URL you typed before (in my case, http://apas.gr/).

In fact, the workaround of this problem is very easy — and you probably thought it already by now.

The Like code looks something like this:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?
        href=http://example.com">
        scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
        style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

Instead of giving a statical http:// URL, why not give inside it a WordPress PHP tag called

<?php the_permalink() ?>

This PHP tag will, everytime, give the Like button the permalink URL of the specific post the visitor reads. Isn’t it cool?

So, your code have to look something like this now:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?
        href=<?php the_permalink() ?>">
        scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
        style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

I found it very useful and fun to workaround this little problem. Do you know or can you think of other useful ways of using the new Social Plugins? Feel free to comment below!

P.S.: You can see the custom Like button in action a few pixels below this post.

Και το χειρότερο είναι ότι το “νομίζουν” που ανέφερα, αναφέρεται σε δημοσιογράφους και πάσης φύσεως ειδήσεων αναμεταδοτητές που ενώ δεν ξέρουν να στείλουν ένα mail, μιλάνε για hacks. Έλεος. Δηλαδή εμείς για τι θα έπρεπε να μιλάμε; Για πυρηνική φυσική; Και αναπαράγουν την είδηση και μιλάνε με υπονοούμενα σαν να είναι “εγκληματίες -cyberpunks- χακεύουν το CERN και αμαυρώνουν την Ελλάδα. Όλοι τους θεωρούν φοβερούς και τρομερούς και φοβούνται μην ξαναχτυπήσουν το CERN”. Mετά ο απλός πολίτης (καραμέλα έχει γίνει πια αυτή η έκφραση) πως θα καταλάβει ότι λένε ψέματα και ότι δεν έχουν δει (τα ΜΜΕ) ούτε το screenshot από το html που ανέβηκε σαν index? (Φυσικά το ίδιο γίνεται σε κάθε hot-topic που ενώ δεν ξέρουν τίποτα μιλάνε σαν experts)

Y.Γ.: Και όσοι το είδαν τι κατάλαβαν? Ότι το 2600 είναι αριθμός στυλ “2.600″ ενώ είναι hackers clan. Έ-Λ-Ε-Ο-Σ!!

Όσο για το “… και μερικές σκέψεις γύρω από την Ελληνική internetική πραγματικότητα”. Τι να πει κανείς; Πιστεύοντας ότι το “κακό” internet μας τρώει τα παιδιά και τα κάνει αντικοινωνικά ή τα κάνει να αυτοκτονήσουν!

Δεν φταίει το internet άμα είσαι τόσο μπετόβλακας και πας σε forum ή σε chats για το πως να κρεμαστείς σαν κεφτές απ’ το ταβάνι! Ούτε φταίει το internet που το παιδί σου καίγετε επί 3 μέρες συνεχόμενα στο local internet cafe παίζοντας WoW ή L2 κλπ κλπ.. Δεν μπορεί να φταίει κάτι άψυχο που αποτελείται από καλώδια, 0 και 1 και ρεύμα ώστε να σου προκαλεί ψυχολογικά προβλήματα.

Δύο παράγοντες φταίνε. Αν είσαι μέχρι τα 16-17 φταίνε οι γονείς σου και το μυαλό σου και αν είσαι από 18+ τότε μόνο το μυαλό σου. Καθήστε και σκεφτείτε λίγο τι φταίει. Γιατί και εγώ έλιωνα στο WoW… Αλλά το σταμάτησα. You know why? ‘Cos it sucks! And needs your money.

Εάν έχετε χρόνο για κάποιο comment θα σας παρακαλούσα να το αφήσετε. Θα με ενδιέφεραν οι απόψεις σας.