Recently in Blogging Category
No big surprise that I've hit this given it seems to be one of the most common problems WP users encounter. I've been trying to connect with the iPhone WordPress app and have not been succeeding. I still haven't gotten around that, but I did notice that besides the main page, links were not working on the blog.
I'd changed to a non-default permalink option. And that was causing 404's. It seems to be that when I do this WP was supposed to automagically update an .htaccess file for me, but this isn't happening. Changing back to the default permalink style and sub-pages on the blog are working now.
Still no forward progress on the iPhone app connection hanging.
Between looking at the .htaccess and the Fedora wordpress-mu.conf for apache, it's also clear to me that I'm not currently understanding how the site is supposed to work in general. I need a server work flow diagram or something that shows when a request comes in how it hits apache, what rules do/might apply, how it then hits which WordPress scripts, how those then pull up different content from the filesystem and database and direct to other URLs and any subsequent apache involvement around redirecting. There's multiple pieces here, their interaction's design isn't clearly spelled out and involves a bit of magic, and I'm not a standard install. Plenty of places for subtle configuration breakage.
And configuration breakage is where I am.
I've been contemplating moving off MovableType in favor of WordPress. There are two main reasons:
- Performance: MovableType's rebuilding is very annoying. My blog is fairly small, but post times are getting intolerably high. I think for my usage I'd sacrifice (or at least consider/compare) having the fast load time static pages for not having to build static pages frequently and being able to manipulate my blog/site quickly.
- iPhone access: MovableType's fine here if your blog is hosted by them. If you're in their "power user" class of self-hoster, you're just out of luck. You can browse to your blog, log in and painstakingly create simple text posts. But WordPress has a very clean simple app for phones which allows easy photoblogging.
I'm on vacation for a few days which gives me a chance to play with WordPress and learn a bit about how to admin it in my environment which isn't the standard type of install for either WP or MT.
Some first impressions of WordPress:
- WordPress seems very much influenced by MovableType, coming from the latter. Who knows...maybe it was the other way around with MT4. Either way the UI is all very similar.
- I run a server with multiple IPs and which hosts multiple domains. Some of those have a blog. It is unlikely I'd ever do anything other than have multiple domains on the machine, each with a single blog. With MT I have to do multiple MT installs as best I can tell and admin them all. Same for WordPress. Although WordPress-MU potentially offers a way around that. WordPress and WordPress-MU also are integrated into my OS's package system. If the blogging software is packaged with the OS and I only have that single instance installed, administration is easier. I've got a fair amount of digging here to see if I can actually do what I want, but it sounds possible (Multi-Site Manager plugin?). In MT I probably also could move to a single install of MT, but it'd still be a tarball I plunked down in the fs somewhere and managed manually.
- Security: I really like that it is very simple to tell WordPress that all user logins and administration should happen over SSL. With MT this isn't horribly hard, but involves a bit configuring in apache.
- Plugins: At first it looked like I needed a special plugin just to send mail which seemed crazy. Again, as with MT, I'm apparently not the normal WordPress user. Most seem to admin their own WP instance in a virtual host that somebody else provides. So they'd not be allowed to run a mail server and have to do mail via POP. But I did end up getting a mail from WP so this did "just work", but the config made it look like it wouldn't. I'm generally not crazy about having to run lots of plugins.
- Themes: I used to comprehend MT themes a bit, simple CSS and simple MT specific mark-up. WP seems similar, but my first attempt at minimally making a mod'd theme
All things considered things look very similar between the two. MT's a bit more polished.
Next step is to try importing all my old content, checking if links were correctly preserved or if there's apache url rewrite magic I can do to make them be, do some performance comparisons and try posting from my phone.
I'm not sure why anybody would be that interested, but apparently somebody sees a market in determining authors' sex. Their AI isn't so smart though. Their site has a poll which shows them only doing slightly better than 50% accuracy.
As for my blog, they think it's authored by a woman. And Jenn's blog appears to them to be authored by a man.
A long time ago my employer started to try to wrap its corporate brain around blogging and I posted a disclaimer in response to their suggestion that us bloggers be open about who we are, not hide our identity, misrepresent our personal opinions as the company's and so on. But apparently that's not necessarily enough and it's been suggested I add a proper disclaimer, so I plopped one one level up to make it more clear that the entire domain is mine and basically is personal ramblings about whatever I ramble about. The link from http://dolavim.us points to my http://vato.org stuff where there's a resume that tells you who I am on the professional side of things and neither the contact info in the resume nor the whois records for either site point at anything other than me personally. So there you have it.
I suppose I do need to add something to the blog template to shoot over to a static page of "who am I" type info. One more thing to add to the todo list when I have some time to fiddle more with blog templates.
More evidence of my lack of grokking MovableType:
This week Gerrit was talking about Google Analytics and it looked interesting. I pay very little attention to who accesses my blog or when, but it seemed like it'd be interesting to find out. So I did some googling for movabletype and googleanalytics.
I didn't find much useful, especially in a MT4 context. But it's easy right...just past the magic script includer at the end of your pages? Except I don't quite comprehend how/when/why MT makes my pages. So I start putting it at the end of a bunch of templates and it's not showing up when I view page source in various pages. After a fair amount of trial and error with the templates there was a moment of dawning comprehension. I think I now understand what the different index templates are for and they're apparently just made up of widgets.
And there's a Footer widget! So: to use MovableType4 with Google Analytics the easiest way is to just paste the magic script includer code that Google give you into your Footer widget just before the </body> tag. Quite obvious in hindsight, but I guess I'm a little surprised that googling didn't find a simple statement like that.
Poking further I've found I didn't have archive mappings post MT upgrade and have created them.
And I re-undid their silly default file permissions.
I see they've changed from using underscores to dashes for multiword files/directories. So there's a bunch of old underscore named content that's been regenerated with dash named content. Seems like yet another pointlessly annoying change. I supposed if I delete my old ones I possibly break old links and need to tell apache to do some url rewriting.
On the bright side I figured out that the missing photo thumbnailing was my part...somehow I lost something I needed and it wasn't MT being brain damaged as I assumed.
And I am starting to find the info I need in the MT documentation as I stumble through problems and am starting to understand how MT is meant to work. I still think they need a better set of initial user documentation that describes the big picture and how different pieces parts of the system are meant to work together.
I still have template and archive and asset tinkering to do, but am making progress.
SixApart is being smart in not updating any of your templates when you upgrade, because most people have customised theirs and wouldn't like the new ones to just over write theirs. But then when enough changes in the templates and MovableType internally that old things aren't likely to work, at least give me the option to back up my stuff and then mass update to their stuff. Then I have a sane starting point from which I can start customising.
After painfully trying to delete all the old templates and manually cut and paste out of the ones MT4 comes with (but just in the filesystem) into my blog...I discovered there's a plugin that will mass update. Why on earth would they not have included that as a base feature?!
The update to MT4 has been really painful and it seems the system is just really poorly thought out from a usability standpoint...
At least things are minimally working now and I have a theory as to why my photoblog broke. I just need some more time to tinker with making it work again. But then I still need to figure out why MT doesn't want to automatically make thumbnails for me anymore when I upload images. They come out with a fancy Asset Manager in acknowledgement of media uploads being a pretty central part of blogging to many people, but something as simple/central as thumbnail autogeneration disappears!
Argh.
I had the most simple of simple setup before. But MT4's gone and broken it. And MTRecentImages just doesn't cut it. It doesn't claim to be supported with MT4 and it doesn't see things that I've uploaded via MT4's new asset manager. Or maybe it does, sometimes? And then MT claims to have some magic sidebar now that automatically shows recent images. I'm not seeing it. Argh.
I don't have a lot of patience at the moment for such poorly documented stuff.
I've been subscribed to AWAD for many years and noticed today that they have their own bit of javascript for inclusion in your web site.
This and the google one yesterday got me thinking think I'd never even looked at plugins for MovableType. There's a huge list.
One of these days I'll have to play with adding some stuff to my blog. I still owe Jenn a Gallery though and should update mine to the new major release. And I should update our MovableType installs for that matter. Guess I'm slacking on the sysadmin front.
This should be interesting. I'd guess my blog has extremely little worth, assuming the worth is based on readership or influence or something like that.
My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?
(NOTE TO SELF: it works better if you replace the www.boingboing.net url in it with your own blog's url)
(NOTE TO SELF2: it's not dynamic, but rather on the linked page there is a "take the test" link where you feed your blog's url and then you put the value in the html for display)
Blogging meets podcasting meets TV is what I've been thinking since stumbling onto Current a week or so ago. Somehow I must've missed all the press and commentary (this guy's done very good PBS stuff) around the premiere of "Al Gore's new network" earlier this summer. It seems like a very hip/cool and also meanful/powerful medium.
From the bits that I've watched I can agree with the criticism in the above links. But I do have to say the Katrina coverage has been very insightful. It's as close as I've seen on TV to the type of detail that BoingBoing has been publishing. I kind of see it as an extension of the change in perception to blogs that has started to happen the last few weeks also thanks to Katrina. When the mainstream press is failing, alternative sources will become popular. It's the market at work.
One definite negative though is that I haven't watched much and have seen lots of repeat content. Some of which was actually mentioned in the above links from earlier this summer. Hopefully they start getting more people submitting so they can have more fresh content. But then that starts to beg the question...who exactly is holding the editorial control? Are submitted pods censored or recut? And since it's Al Gore's network, presumably there will be considerable bias in what is and isn't aired?
How long until there's a conservative channel seeking to balance current.tv's content?
I've been reading about blog spam but hadn't experienced it until this weekend. Jenn started getting a tonne of bogus trackbacks linking to pron and other crap on her blog. She's been deleting them but has turned off commenting for now to avoid that admin work.
There's a balance between anonymity/privacy and protecting against idiocy to be struck, but this makes me wish there was an established/universal credential system for users. I remember honestly thinking way back when that PGP's web of trust was smart. Personal encryption never really took off and is still viewed by the unwashed masses as something mostly for criminals. In the meantime servers got certificates and ssl out of business necessity.
So half the equation's well established.
On the user auth side it seems like most work is going towards systems geared towards gathering marketing information for big corporations (ie: Microsoft Passport like services), because business is only likely to push a system they view as providing a return on investment. The Liberty Alliance isn't good entirely either. The EFF and other watchdogs seem very quiet on the subject these days. Probably since Sept. 11 it's dangerous to talk about systems insuring privacy and anonymity.
Today I started my new job! After being shuffled from SANFS client development to some not exactly defined yet job on GPFS my dream job opened up and I was able to transfer to that instead. I'll be working in IBM's Linux Technology Center with a team that does base/core kernel work.
Technically I think I'm supposed to update my disclaimer according to corporate blogging rules, even though this should clearly be a personal blog where I don't express anything in an official or even unofficial IBM voice.
It seems like there should be some sort of a way to weight the blogosphere such that "interesting" new things filter to the top. But not all blogs are equally read, nor all readers equal.
In some ways this reminds me of building a personal web of trust with signing private keys in public key encryption, which never really went anywhere. But were this accomplished in blogging it would add to the credibility of news coming out of blogs. Really it all comes back to a topic Lessig covered nicely in Code: Having a way to identify ourselves in cyberspace and to trust the identity of others is really useful. Balancing that with privacy and the desire at times to be able to be anonymous, things generally (barely still?) possible in realspace, is the hard part.
I got Jenn a domain a while back, but she never set up a web page. In the meantime before I got Movable Type set up for her to have a blog she started using Blogger. MT has notes on how to export from Blogger and import, but it's not exactly a smooth process. Jenn doesn't have too many entries though and they're mostly imported. The images and some of the metadata is hooky, but she'll massage that I guess. Anyway, her site is here.
There's been a lot of press lately about a variety of people getting into trouble thanks to their blogging. Since I'm reading Code still and there's also been press about corporations and government ability to get reporters to divulge sources, I've been thinking about what the constitution allows. It seems like increasingly we need a constitution that protects not just against big government but against big business...that the founders would cringe at the control business exerts over people today.
At any rate, I definitely self-censor when it comes to things possibly work related, whether in normal "speech" or on my blog. Here are some interesting links on blogging responsibly and not getting on your employer's bad side:
My fonts are kind of foo'd right now I guess, so here's a simple mouse sketch of what I'm trying to accomplish for a given entry's layout.
Managed to populate some old entries in category "Photoblog" along the lines of what is described in this MT photoblog howto. Tweeked the main index template and style sheet to get a new left sidebar and have it pull the excerpt field of the last ten entries, which are populated with thumbnails.
I can't manage though to figure out how to have a blog entry include a whole image if I add an align="left" in an image tag and there isn't enough text so the entry "ends" after the bottom of the image. It looks really dumb with the images just aligned left, because the text of the entries gets all jumbled against the pictures instead of a picture and its entry being vertically distinct. Similarly I don't like all the wasted white space when the text is all below an image. Annoying...need to read and play more I guess sometime.
The December 2004 Communications of the ACM has the primary topic of blogging. There are interesting articles about "Why We Blog," semantic blogging, and the evolution of blogging software.
An article out of IBM's Almaden research center's WebFountain text analytics project. This article is annoying in that along with the researchers listed in the credits is their manager. Anyway, apparently for my age I'm most likely to blog about "Hal Hartley, geocaching, Camarilla, Amtgard, Tivo, Concrete Blonde, motherhood, SQL and Tron." I don't even know what Hal Hartley, Camarilla and Amtgard are.
Which is interesting considering the final article in the section is on democracy and filtering. It asserts that the democratic process relies on well informed participants, but that internet filtering technologies that are enabling community are at the same time allowing us to ingnore aspects of life of which we really should have an awareness.
I'm not convinced I've installed this quite correctly. "View Site" takes me to the wrong place. And updating the theme didn't appear to do anything, but maybe that only themes a given blog and not the parts of the software you see when logged in to create new entries? Plus mine has no entries.
So here's an entry.
