Day: January 12, 2014

Sentiment on Cats Not Influenced by Student Level or Time Of Year

/Psychology

Because I know everyone cares deeply on this issue, I’m happy to report that in a survey of 117 students, slightly less than half (46%) believe that they are “cute and cuddly and I lub them so much” while 53% feel “They’re antisocial and psychotic and I don’t trust them at all”. This difference is not significant (p = .4). Student level (100 versus 300 level class) and time of year (fall versus spring) also do not affect sentiment.

Conclusion: Half the population love little fur balls, fur balls that the other half of the population distrust deeply.

I apologize if this face causes evil flashbacks. But you are on the Internet, what do you expect?
I apologize if this face causes evil flashbacks.
But you are on the Internet, what do you expect?

Oh, if you’re wondering why I have this data – I use Socrative to collect quiz data from my classes and as part of the first day of class stuff, I have them take a demo quiz. I ask the cat question there, just for fun. I analyze it because I’m a big freakin’ geek.

Publicize to Facebook not working? Check Yoast WordPress SEO!

/Technology

Now that WordPress’ built-in publicizing function works with Google+, it’s an obvious way to hit all social networks at once. However I found out that one of my existing plugins was messing with specifically publication to Facebook. And since a lot of my social interaction comes via Facebook, this was a problem.

I traced the issue down to Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin, which has an option to turn on Open Graph meta data under it’s social settings. I’d disabled this because previous versions of the WordPress Publicize plugin (or perhaps Yoast’s) had fought about what tags to throw in there, resulting in Facebook not showing anything. Apparently the situation is now reversed, and you DO want to turn the option on.

Screen Shot 2014-01-12 at 12.33.25 PM

After turning it back on, my posts now flow to all my networks, including Facebook!

Hopefully this helps someone – I spent a few hours working on finding exactly where the problem was!