About this Site
Right up what?
Right Up Top is my personal blog; in this case, the “me” is Jake Rosenberg. I’m a music snob, sci-fi nerd, and Yahoo! software engineer living in San Francisco, but if you’re reading this, you probably already know that.
I maintain this blog as an outlet for my personal thoughts on music, work, politics, and assorted other junk. And it just wouldn’t be me if it didn’t toss out some of my favorite quotes, would it?
How-dey-do-dat?
Many folks have inquired about the way the site is built, and some have asked about the stuff I’m rocking in that fancy sidebar you see to the right. I’ve spend a decent amount of time working on making the site look nifty, so here’s a brief overview of the tech specs.
The site is running on WordPress (currently version 2.6) using the skin Envy by Small Potato. I’ve made some basic modifications in the skin (I took out some extra links and buttons I didn’t want to use, but just minor HTML edits). I also use a number of plugins for WordPress that I highly recommend, many of which I’ve modified slightly (or not-so-slightly) for my own use.
- Akismet is a no-brainer. The reduction of comment spam it gives you is simply astounding; don’t run a blog without it.
- The Audio Player plugin is very useful for embedding MP3s, WAVs and other types of audio files into posts.
- The Comment Timeout plugin is a godsend for preventing comment spam on age-old posts that no one but spammers would be commenting on.
- The Assorted Silliness module is something I wrote myself. It consists of two parts, a simple quote management system that allows me to enter in quotes and authors into a flat file database, and the site module, which simply pulls a random quote from the database and sticks it on the site. Clicking on a quote takes you to the author’s Wikipedia page.
- The Flickr images displayed in the sidebar are embedded via the Flickr Badge widget by Ben Coleman. Simple and clean. Most of the pics there are taken with my Nikon D40x.
- The In Rotation module on the sidebar is generated from my Audioscobbler data and embedded in the sidebar using the Last.fm Records widget. The playlist data is scrobbled directly from my music player (iTunes) to Last.fm via the Last.fm application in real time, compiled by Last.fm and then retrieved by the plugin. If a record shows up on that module, there’s a decent chance it was the last thing I was listening to.
- The show calendar on the site is generated from my Last.fm show recommendations (which is also based on my Audioscrobbler data) and compiled and formatted using the Last.fm Events plugin, which I modified to feed off of my “recommended” events instead of my “attending” ones (that’s why there’s some crappy stuff in there sometimes, and why I don’t actually attend most of those shows).
- The Latest Tweets module is, of course, my twitter feed, which is embedded into the site using the fantastic Twitter Tools plugin. The plugin also automatically files a tweet everytime I update the blog, and can actually make daily digest blog posts with your day’s worth of tweets, although I don’t have that feature enabled.
- Posts to my Tumblog are automatically imported into the blog by the FeedWordPress plugin.
- Many posts have my current playing song embedded in the bottom; this is done automatically by the by signatunes feature of FoxyTunes, which is a fantastic Firefox and Internet Explorer plugin that controls almost any media player from your browser tray, and lets you Twitter your current song with one click with the TwittyTunes extension.
- I often use Windows Live Writer to compose blog posts; it’s a great piece of blogging software that can be used with almost any blogging software or service.
Contact Information
Questions? Comments? Gushing adoration? You can always contact me at themasterof@rightuptop.com.
