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Stephen Pickering

Category: Blogging

  • How to Fix a Spotify Embed That’s Too Tall or Stretches Too Far Down the Page

    I just released a new single last week, and when I created a new post about it, which included a Spotify embed of the single, even though the embed only contained two songs it stretched all the way down the page. When I google searched for a solution, I came to this page: Spotify embeds have large blank space at bottom on WordPress.org, but their solution, a bit of CSS code added to your Appearance >> Themes >> Customize >> Additional CSS didn’t work for me. As of this writing I’m using the TwentyTwenty WordPress theme.

    At first I thought I found the answer simply by adding px after the height number the Spotify gives you for the code. In their code it’s just the number 180 in parentheses. I added a px at the end of that number, and that seemed to solve it, at least as an individual post, but on the main page of the blog at the domain level (as of this writing it is my most recent post), the problem still persisted.

    Somewhere along the line of my search, I found someone had wrapped the <iframe> tag that Spotify gives you in a <figure> tag which I had never heard of, but that didn’t help either. What finally worked (at least it seems so at this moment, is keeping that px addition (to the height not the width) and then wrapping the whole thing in a div tag. Here’s what the final code looks like:

    <div><figure><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/5r5zBUsuM7tsJtDC3x0AE9" width="300" height="180px" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></figure></div>

    You can see I went ahead and left the figure tag in there. I don’t know if that makes any difference or not. But the above code seems to have solved my problem as of this writing at least in WordPress and the particular TwentyTwenty theme I’m using at the moment. Just replace your own Spotify code within this nest and add px at the end of the height value and see if it works for you.

  • Changing My Mind About Publishing in Today’s Media Landscape

    I pulled into Kroger’s tonight, and what I felt was a good poetic line seemed to flash into me —like so many do that don’t necessarily have a direct meaning consciously, but feel like they came from another place and I am just the receiver and feel like they are pointing towards something that is deep and true.

    Normally I’d put the line in Notes like I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of times before and that’d be the last I’d see of it. Today I said, “Screw it, let’s post it.” And there from my car, from my Chrome browser on my iPhone 7+ I opened up my WordPress, created a new post and typed in the line. After I hit save, another line came to me that I added, and while I was in the store a third.

    We’ll see how this experiment goes, but my point is, something keeps calling me toward this way of doing things in “real time” as the phrase goes.

    Here’s another example with music. A few months ago, I had a somber tune (sweet sad) come to my head on a Saturday night about like this one, and right here in front of this iMac I propped my iPhone, opened up Garageband and recorded it, knowing it would be my next single.

    But then a case of the “perfections” came in, and I still haven’t published it. I feel now like I should have gotten it out there, if not that night, for sure within the next week, even if it had a bracket of (Demo) beside it on Spotify. Now so many months later, the tune has sort of lost its “spark” inside of me, and even if I could lay down a technically better performance from taking my time, it would have lost its emotional spark that getting it at the moment or close to the moment would give.

    Of course ten years ago, much less twenty or thirty, this would have been a ludicrous approach, but as an example, I was just listening to Rick Beato talking about the B-Side Police single “Murder by Numbers” and as much as I love Synchronicity. I would just absolutely love as much a sort of “B-Side” album of the band recording the whole album live in the same mode of “Murder by Numbers” — mistakes and all.

    The great Carver Mead said “Listen to the Technology.” My gut is telling me that the technology, offering itself like this with its focus on immediacy, is telling us to publish, even in the formal arts of poetry and music, with the same immediacy that social media does.

  • How To Fix Access Denied Error On Twitter Follow Button

    If you haven’t installed the new code, it’s here: https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#follow

    Even if you have already done that, you may still get that error message instead of the button. What you need to do is clear your browser cache, and it will show up fine.

    On Chrome on Mac you click the Chrome menu button and select “Clear Browsing Data”, another menus will pop up, “Empty the Cache” should already be checked, but if not check that one.

  • Some Blogging Advice: Continually Update Your Old Posts

    I haven’t given any ‘blogging’ advice in a long time. And whom and I to give it?

    But I have noticed one little thing that can help get your posts a little edge. Maybe it’s this increasingly ‘real-time’ World, or maybe they’ve always done it, but Google is so much constantly crawling, that when your content changes, even on an older post, the Google ‘bot’ almost immediately notices and comes running to check it out. So in this ‘timely’ World, it could get you a spot on the top or at least on the front page of results, for your particular topic. In other words, one gets the since that ‘timeliness’ is increasingly an ingredient in the secret ‘sauce’ of Page Rank.

    Also I’ve noticed another benefit: It sort of gives you a sense of continuum and wholeness to your ideas if you’re keeping them alive in this way. In other words, if you add to them when some new material arises, simultaneously your subsconscious goes to work, ‘effortlessly’ bringing you some new creativity and synthesizing your main ideas, perhaps by doing it’s own ‘crawling’ in the otherwise overlooked areas of your mind.

  • Google+: A Threat to Tumblr?

    In response to John Battelle’s blogpost: Google+: If, And, Then….Implications for Twitter and Tumblr, I wrote the following: (Note such posts harken back to one of my blog posts about blogging itself: That is, if you find something you are interested in, and read blogs about the topic, often times your replies become long enough to qualify for blog posts. Also, by replying and leaving a link to your blog, it drives a little traffic as well.)

    That was one of my first thoughts when I experienced Google+ that Tumblr was in trouble

    Still they have a community. I’m on it. My impression of it is more of photo and gif sharing, but not personal photos as much as interesting photos, magazine like photos, that people are posting from somewhere else. To get attention on a Tumblr to post, the photos need to be striking, extremely funny, or otherwise “headline” grabbing.

    Like Twitter, not a lot of personal feel to it, but fun, and I like Fred’s attitude that companies don’t kill other companies as much as companies kill themselves.

    But my main takeaway from Google+ is not so much the service itself, although it is great, as like you say, it’s integrated with all of Google’s other services. Google may be Germany, but the seem to be the one company of all of these that has all the pieces. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that will be a powerful value proposition.

    It almost reduces Twitter and Facebook to applications on this vast Cloud OS, rather than platforms in and of themselves. And Apple, for all it’s wonder, doesn’t have a Cloud Syncing OS, much less a Social Network. I think Apple should buy Twitter and Facebook should merge with MSFT.

    The deep integration of Google+ with Android will be compelling and I don’t see the “app” for the iPhone as being as robust an experience as it will be on Android. This could be a long term threat too Apple as well if they don’t get their Cloud Offerings together.

  • Another Step to Increase Your Blog’s Exposure

    Update: I totally didn’t expect this because this particular blog post isn’t about Qualcomm specifically, but IT’S actuallys showing up on the Google finance page for Qualcomm! I feel a little guilty about that, but I guess that it’s because I have either the name or Symbol within the post. So I guess you don’t necessarily have to have in the blog title. But I’ve already got about 20 hits from it this morning. Weird. Exciting, but as I said, I kind of feel guilty and didn’t intend that. Still it’s interesting to note.

    I noticed a little “Easter Basket” type unexpected thing that can get you “free” traffic. If you are interested in stocks and you blog something about that stock, use the stock symbol in your headline and it will show up on Google’s finance page.

    The other day I saw and insight by George Gilder on his forum about the company Qualcomm (QCOM) and it wasn’t a very long statement, but it was too long to be tweeted. I even tried FriendFeed which allows more characters but it still wouldn’t fit. So I went ahead and blogged it. I wasn’t thinking about getting exposure. I simply wanted to remember this statement, but I thought in the back of my mind that if I tweeted the headline with the tag $QCOM that it might show up on the sight Stocktwits.com.

    Then I noticed I was getting a lot of hits from Google. I went to the link and it was to the finance page for Qualcomm. Halfway down the page theres a list called “As discussed in blogs” and there my post was right on top! Now Qualcomm is a big company with almost 20 million shares traded daily. So you know that page gets a lot of traffic. So if you write about a smaller company, then it might not do as well.

    But of course I wouldn’t write just to get traffic. Only write about a stock or anything if you are truly interested in it and have something to say. And if you are an individual investor its a good idea to spend a couple hours a month investigating the news, press releases, and quarterly statements.

    I just happen to be interested in individual investing and of course the companies I’m invested in. If you’re not, then obviously this tip isn’t right for you, but I do think it demonstrates the upside surprises that can come by writing something your are really interested in.

    And it really impresses me more and more about Google and how it surfaces good blog content. I’ve heard before that Google likes blogs. And this demonstrates it’s true.

    Also Google has recently updated its algorithms to get rid of the junk and content farms. This is beneficial for the individual voices who are publishing things they truly interested in.