ExpressionEngine 2.0

I've just upgraded to ExpressionEngine 2.0, a process which was not without it its glitches. I think I've got them sorted out now, though I seem to be having trouble with the feed still. Let me know if you notice that anything is broken. I've still got to sort out the Twitter Timeline in the sidebar, but apart from that, things should be OK.

Off for a week

I'm sorry for the silence around here recently: things have been hectic to say the least. I'm just about to fly to the Netherlands for a conference and other work business for a week, so things are likely to remain quiet for a bit longer.

I may get a chance to post something if I get some wireless access, but time will probably be more limiting. Once I've got over the hassle of travelling, I'm quite looking forward the trip, as I've never been to Holland before. I'm particularly excited about the fact that I might get to ride a real Dutch bike on real Dutch bike paths!

Twitter to Disqus

Here's something I meant to mention a while ago: I've set up my Disqus account (which provides the commenting service here) to allow people to sign in using Twitter. So now — if you have a Twitter account — you don't have to have sign up with Disqus or comment as a guest. Instead, you can use your Twitter credentials (via OAuth) to sign in, and as a bonus, you can Tweet your comment automatically.

Give it a try!

Revived tumblelog

I've just revived my old Tumblr tumblelog, slipstream. The latest version of Tumblr has some very nice features, and now with Disqus, I can get commenting working there too with very little difficulty. I'm probably going to use it for short posts and links (particularly for photographs, audio and video posts, as Tumblr is set up nicely for those) and leave this blog for longer articles. That's the plan anyway! I've gone through several different styles on slipstream over the past week or so, so the appearance may well change again before I feel comfortable with it...

Updated style

I've been meaning to update the style of the site (again) for a long time, because it had got rather hard to maintain. After spending a lot of time this Christmas migrating the site, the last thing I really wanted was to spend more time tinkering with the style, but it was the best time to do it, so I gritted my teeth and tackled it.

There's not a huge visual difference, but it's much more organised behind the scenes, and uses the Blueprint CSS framework, which is much neater. I think that there's also a bit less markup now.

It's not totally finished, as I've got to polish a few things, and I haven't checked whether it validates, but it's good enough to leave for now.

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone! I'm about to go and show my face downstairs and remind my husband who I am!

Happy Christmas

I probably won't be posting for a little while. I've got various family visits to make, and I've got to move all my various web sites to a new server. The latter will be lovely when it's done, but is currently causing me some headaches. At some point during the move, I'll put a temporary message up on this site while I'm shifting the virtual furniture around, but you should be directed to the new site automatically when it's all done.

Have a very peaceful and relaxing Christmas, everyone!

RSS feed has moved

An admin announcement: Feedburner has been bought by Google, so they are now administering the RSS feeds for this site. The feed should be redirected automatically to the new URL, but if it isn't, then please update your RSS reader with the new URL for the feed: http://feedproxy.google.com/butshesagirl. I've changed the URLs on the page (such as the link in the sidebar to the right) to point to the new location.

Thanks!

Trying out Disqus

I've been having issues with comments on this blog for a little while. I love seeing people discuss things I've posted about and I think it adds immeasurable to the content of the blog. However, I've had a problem with spam comments for a little while. An Akismet plugin handled things well for a time, but recently I've been getting spam that seems to be manually entered, and superficially looks like a legitimate comment, so Akismet doesn't catch it. This got so annoying that I turned on moderation, which has the dual drawback of making commenting much less immediate for legitimate commenters, and making it more of a hassle for me, because I have to regularly sort through the comments in the moderation queue. There has to be a better way.

I've been looking at third-party commenting systems, and came across Disqus. It basically handles comments for you instead of the built-in commenting system of your blogging software. I'm using the generic Javascript version because there isn't a plugin for ExpressionEngine, and this has a few downsides in terms of how easy it is to integrate with old posts, but it seems to work OK. On older posts, you'll see the previous comments left with the built in system, then the comment box provided by Disqus, with any new comments in a separate list. A little clunky, but I guess it will do until I work out how to make the appearance a bit more integrated. On new posts, you should just see the Disqus system.

There are some advantages for commenters: while you don't have to sign up with Disqus to post comments (you can just fill in a name and email address -- which will not be shown -- as before), if you do sign up at some point, you can 'claim' all your comments. You can see all the comments you've made on all Disqus enabled sites in one place on your Disqus profile, and people can rate your comments so you gain 'clout'. This blog also gains a Community Page here, where you can see all the recent comments on the site, subscribe to comments feeds and so forth, all from one place. From the point of view of me as an adminstrator, I just have one easy location to view all comments and moderate them, which might make things a bit easier.

I'm going to play it by ear for a few posts and see how it goes. Do play with the comments and let me know what you think of the system. I'm trying to strike a balance between an easy and transparent experience for legitimate commenters and making it harder for the spammers.

Comment moderation turned on

I've been getting a fair bit of spam slipping through Akismet's fingers recently, so I've decided to turn comment moderation on and see how it goes. Please feel free to comment as usual, but remember that your comment won't show up immediately. If you are a spammer, your comment won't turn up at all!

Trying out Flock

I'm trying out Flock (a 'social web browser') following a recommendation from Martin Polley as a way of integrating ma.gnolia bookmarking into the browser. My timing was poor, because there's a problem at the moment with posting bookmarks to ma.gnolia from Flock because of a temporary problem at ma.gnolia's end. However, I tried it out with de.icio.us, and it was a pretty seamless process.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Flock. Martin said that it's a kind of love it or hate it thing, and I can see what he means. If you use a lot of social software (flickr, social bookmark sites, facebook and so on), the integration features are pretty good. You can even blog direct from Flock, which is what I'm doing right now (all being well...). I also like the Web Clipboard, which lets you drag on links, text and images, then drag them on to other services or into a blog post. I can see that if you use Flock for everything, it's really handy to collect everything in one place for easy posting.

But.

The interface isn't bad, but it's pretty cluttered after you've been used to the minimalism of Safari. It also seems slower to render pages, and seems to like popping up endless warnings about popups, available feeds and so on. I also wish that there was a way to view my Google Reader feeds in the Feed sidebar -- you can use the button on the navigation bar to save feeds to Google Reader, but there's no built-in way to view them.

I'm going to play around a bit more with it, but I suspect that I'll probably go back to using Safari, Cocoalicious and MarsEdit for posting to my blog.

Blogged with Flock

Cocoalicious

I've been using ma.gnolia for my online bookmarking for a little while now, and the non-private bookmarks appear automatically in the sidebar of this site. I like ma.gnolia a lot, but I've had a tendency to use it mostly for bookmarks that want to publish on this blog, and largely in a write-only way. Part of that is because it always seems like a bit of work to log in to ma.gnolia and search through bookmarks for one that I'm looking for. So for sites that I'm marking for my own use -- ones that I know that I'll want to refer to later -- I tend to use Safari's own bookmarking feature. But that means that I lose the tagging capability, and I have to look in two places if I can't remember where I saved something.

There are plenty of desktop bookmarking applications which access your de.icio.us bookmarks, but not so many for ma.gnolia, being a relative newcomer. However, they publish an mirrord API which (as the name suggests) mirrors the de.icio.us API. This means that you can use many of the desktop clients intended for de.icio.us, as long as the software lets you specify the URL of the API. So I've started using Cocoalicious, which is a very nice Open Source de.icio.us client. The trick seems to be to enter the API as follows:

http://your_username:your_password@ma.gnolia.com/api/mirrord/v1

and then enter a single space for both your username and password when prompted. The rating star system in Cocoalicious doesn't link up with the rating stars in ma.gnolia, but everything else works perfectly. It's a very nice bit of software -- it's pleasingly simple to add links via a bookmarklet in your browser, but also very fast to find what you want by text in the URL, description or by the tag. Now I'm saving all my bookmarks (private and public) in ma.gnolia, and accessing them using Cocoalicious.

Leaving again

It's that time of year again when I have to pack my bags to go to Brazil for three weeks to teach a course. As usual, I haven't got nearly as much organised before my departure as I'd hoped. I had planned to write a few articles to forward post here, but -- well -- that didn't happen. Frankly, I'm amazed that I seem to have got things organised for the trip, but I'm paranoid that I've forgotten something vital. It all seems a bit too easy...

One thing that I set up before the trip last year, which has been immensely useful this year, is a kind of master packing list. I wrote a detailed list in OmniOutliner of everything I took (separated into checked baggage and hand baggage). Since I know that I travelled comfortably with those items last year, I can be fairly confident that if I pack those things again, all will be well. As with GTD, getting things out of your mind and into a 'trusted system' is a huge help. It basically stops you sitting bolt upright in bed at 3am and yelling "Torch!", startling your partner in the process.

I leave on Sunday, and while Brazil will be -- I am sure -- as beautiful and wildlife-packed as usual, it's going to be a tough three weeks. I'm also going to miss Mr. Bsag (and Cleo) like blazes - I'm hoping they'll look after one another while I'm gone, but I'll have to make do with a picture of both of them on my phone. It's our seventh¹ wedding anniversary while I'm away, so we're having a substitute celebration on Saturday. Roll on mid-September!

In the meantime, if something goes awry with the site in my absence, or gets swamped by spammers, I'm afraid that I won't even know about it, still less do anything about it.

¹ Seven years! Shouldn't we be itching, or something? ↑

Feedburner adverts

If you subscribe to my FeedBurner feed you may have noticed (or will notice) small adverts at the bottom of each article, which have appeared recently. I haven't actually seen them myself yet, because the first ad appeared to be geographically targeted to US readers, but they are supposed to be appearing in the feed right now.

It's a bit of an experiment, really. For one reason or another, I could really do with a little extra income right now (well, I could really do with a lot of extra income, but I'm not greedy or optimistic), and while I don't want to put adverts on the site, I thought that having adverts in the feed might be less annoying for readers but bring in a little bit of money. Or it might really annoy readers, and bring in no money, I just don't know yet. So I'm going to try it for a month or so and see how it goes. If you feel strongly about it, let me know!

Feeds redirected

Prompted by some problems with my RSS2 feed in Bloglines reported by David (thanks, David!), I've redirected both the Atom and RSS2 feeds to the FeedBurner feed. The biggest headache I've had in my frequent flits between different software tools for publishing this blog is breaking the URL for the feed. There are quite a few people who subscribe to the feed and rarely visit the site itself, so if the feed goes quiet for a while, they just think that I've stopped writing. Without a visit to the site, they have no way of knowing that it's just the feed that's broken.

If I run all my feeds through FeedBurner from now on, I can avoid this by having a stable URL for the feeds, and just switch the feed that FeedBurner pulls in if necessary, without end users noticing any problems. There are also other advantages to FeedBurner, like being able to pull in the Ma.gnolia links, present the content flexibly to feed readers, irrespective of whether they can read Atom feeds or not, and automatic validation of the feed.

If you're subscribed to one of the old feeds, your feed reader should just notice the redirect and store that as the URL for the feed from now on. Let me know if there are any glitches!

Feed(ing) frenzy

Following the transfer to ExpressionEngine to run this site, the hardest thing to get right has been the feeds. That's partly because they are inherently somewhat tricky, and also because caching in feed readers and browsers makes it very hard to debug.

Anyway, I think that I've got it sorted now. I've set up two ways to access the Wings Open Wide feeds, so that people subscribed to the old feeds should start to see content again (thanks to David of fuddland for the reminder that I'd broken it).

I've also set up a separate feed for the media section with my reviews in it which is here. For those of you who are feed junkies or just gluttons for punishment where my witterings are concerned, there's a bumper combo feed which I constructed using the excellent FeedDigest. This combines the feeds for my writing, my photographs, the links in the ma.gnolia list in the sidebar and the media reviews.

I no longer have a comments feed (though I could make one if anyone is interested), but when you comment with EE you can check a box to get it to email you when there's a follow-up. I think that's what most people used the comment feed for.

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