lorennorman.com

A couple videos of me sitting in the bed of Chad’s truck on the way home from the lab. Nothing terribly interesting, just playing with my new 3G wireless card and data plan. I really need to bring my camcorder so i can take better action shots on the way home (or broadcast it live, even!)

And I finally figured out how to fix it!

UPDATE:  This set of instructions is for Version 1.0 of the plugin

In your WordPress admin panel, click “Plugins”, then click “Edit” next to the Seesmic plugin.  Now you’ll be presented with the code for the Seesmic plugin.  All you really need to do is find all instances of “clear:both;” and remove them entirely.

The problem is the way that some themes are written.  It has to do with how your sidebars are implemented, that is, if they use floats or not.  The “clear” CSS attribute causes your Seesmic videos to appear below your sidebars, which generally means it just slams a huge amount of whitespace above the first Seesmic embed on any page.

Clear out the “clear” tags, and its gone!  (make sure to clear them ALL, or some strange things will happen)

UPDATE:  This set of instructions is for Version 0.1.5 (the latest version at this date)

They’ve moved the “clear:both;” stylings into the seesmic-wp.css file in the base of your Seesmic plugin directory, and that file isn’t easily editable from within the WordPress interface.  You still just need to find and delete them all, but the process will be dependent on how you do your FTPing and file management on your server.  Probably you’ll just want to open the file on your local machine and reupload it.

Sorry I had my facts wrong, I had no idea they had updated the plugin!

I’d still like to get some feedback from the developers, because we technically shouldn’t be going into plugin code and changing things willy-nilly like this, but this hack seems benign enough.  The official place to talk about this is the Seesmic tech support page at Get Satisfaction, and Loic himself assured me (in the comments) that they will take a look at this, so perhaps some feedback is forthcoming!

Happy video chatting, everyone!

At this month’s investment club meeting, we launched our website proper over at BenHurInvestments.com.  Much more than Just Another WordPress Blog, this site is dedicated to the ongoing investment activities of our club.  Our motto is “Empowering Personal Investment Through Group Education.”

What this means is that, above all, the point is to learn and teach, not to immediately get rich (but someday!)  So we necessarily create a lot of great artifacts, such as stock presentation videos and investment guidance commentary, so now we have a place to put them.  We even share a spreadsheet with all of our current and past holdings!  (We’ve been beating the market for more than 2 years, by the way…)

We would also like to eventually get around to opening up more information about how to start an investment club yourself, such as incorporation, choosing good members, managing the funds in various accounts, and basic stock research methodology.

I am particularly excited about the blog because it gives me a better platform for my stock videos than just leaving them on my channels at YouTube or Vimeo.  Not that there’s nothing wrong with those sites, it just makes good sense to have all of our videos about stocks in one place.

So what are you waiting for?  Go grab the RSS feed and stay ahead of the market with BenHur Investments!

I haven’t had time to cover this week’s podcast, but i wanted to post it anyway.  Marty’s coverage here.