Month: February 2009

Read only Facebook – Database write failed

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To my despair Facebook went read only for a brief period of time (aproximately 10 minutes). I was not able to comment on my friend’s status messages, or like them, or post my own status message; I was confronted with the message bellow. However adding friends, approving requests were working fine. I believe the issue was isolated to status messages and related functionality (IMHO most popular).

facebook-home_1235722315186

Facebook do not dare to do something like this again, I need Facebook to keep in touch with my friends. I’m not a Facebook addict, just that the issue happened to coincide with the time of day I would get on Facebook to get an update on my friends andmake my own online presence.

I would like to know whether you had a similar issue, or was it just me. At the time of writing the issue is fixed. Thanks Facebook for the quick fix.

jango vs. last.fm

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last.fm

jangoI had been using last.fm for a while and recently tried out jango. Though jango lacks the bells and whistles of last.fm like desktop client, feeds, etc it does it’s job; play music.

I like jango for it’s discovery algorithm. It plays music I’d like. With time it has been improving. In contrast last.fm would get worst with time, playing songs I’d not like at all. Either from genres  I wouldn’t like or from artist I have marked as I dislike.

jango seems to have better collection of tracks (more about quality than quantity) compared to last.fm. I really get annoyed when last.fm plays mix tapes, which doesn’t happen on jango 🙂

Biggest minus point of jango is lack of a desktop client, but it doesn’t bother me because I can browse around jango site without the track stopping (I believe they use iframes). Next is a lack of an API/feed. At least a feed of items I recently listened would have been nice, so I could add to the blog 🙂

IMHO, jango is good if you would like to listen to good quality tracs from artist you like and last.fm is awesome for discovering new music, new artist, and even new genres. last.fm has an API for the inner geek as well. last.fm is truely a radio while jango is more of a juke box.

Either way both are awesome services that help you avoid boredom and know about artist you listen to. I would say I like both jango and last.fm, each with it’s plus and minus.

Google Analytics for WordPress plugin is incompatible with AddThis plugin

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Google Analytics for WordPress plugin adds an onclick attribute to links when “Track outbound clicks & downloads” is enabled irrespective of whether there is already an onclick attribute. AddThis plugin adds a link with onclick attribute to the post when enabled. This combination causes WordPress to generate invalid mark up. Same would happen if the post contains any links with onclick attribute (very unlikely scenario).

I have created a patch (with Git) that adds the content of $coolBit to the existing onclick attribute (without onclick=””) else a new onclick attribute is added with the $coolBit. You can download the patch. I have also reported the issue to Joost (plugin developer).

Hope this will be useful for someone in a similar situation until the fix makes it into the plugin.