{blog_title}

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.

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!

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

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.

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? ↑

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!

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!

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.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’ve recently transferred this site over to using ExpressionEngine (EE) from WordPress. WordPress is an excellent tool, but if you want to do a bit more then EE is really superb. The templating system takes a little while to get your head around (not that it’s particularly difficult, it just does things a little bit differently), but once you have, there’s more or less no end to what you can do. In the process of rebuilding this site, I’ve frequently thought, “I wonder if I can do this…” and found that I can. EE has enormous flexibility, with ‘weblogs’ which are just containers for data, and can be displayed in any way you choose. One of the things I initially worried about was whether I could replicate the domain structure of my old site so that old permalinks could be redirected, or would just work. I found (after a few questions on the support forum), that EE could be installed in a subdirectory of my web root, but if I copied a couple of files into the webroot, that subdirectory would not need to appear in the URL. Then I could just name template groups appropriately to form what would appear to be subdirectories of the main domain (/blog, /wingsopenwide etc.)—nifty. An .htaccess rule (again, a solution provided by the support forum) transforms the old permalinks to individual articles (which had the article date in them) into the new /blog/archives/entry-title format.

I thought I’d document the process I went through in a little more detail—partly so that I don’t forget what I did, but also in case anyone else is trying to solve similar problems:

• Importing the old entries and comments using WPExport
• Translating the templates
• Setting up the structure of the site
• Using the gallery to replace the old Wings Open Wide photoblog
• Entry Linker plugin
• Using phpThumb to dynamically generate thumbnails
• Creating the Media blog
• Setting up a dynamic link list via NewsGator

{Read more...}

If any of you visited earlier, you will have noticed either an “under re-construction” page, or a big ‘ole mess. I’ve been tinkering again (not that this will be much of a surprise to anyone). I used to run this weblog using WordPress, which I still think is a very fine bit of software. However, a couple of things made me think that it might be worth a bit of work to port this blog over to ExpressionEngine.

The first was that I built my Tracks site using ExpressionEngine (hereafter, EE), and was very impressed with how powerful but easy to use it was. Then Leslie Camacho of pMachine very generously donated a couple of Personal Licences for EE to me for the Tracks site and my own. This allows you to use the Photo Gallery module, which isn’t available in the free Core version. As some of you may know, my photoblog has been very broken for a while, so it seemed like a great opportunity to rebuild that using the Gallery module.

The second thing was that it would be quite a bit easier organisation-wise to administer all of my sites through one administrative interface. I’m doing things in stages, so Tracks is still running from a separate installation, but I’m quietly confident that I’ll be able to merge the two. That brings other advantages, like being able to share information between the sites. For example, I currently have to remember to update the link to the latest version of Tracks in the sidebar manually, but when I merge the installations I’ll be able pull the information in automatically.

{Read more...}

Sorry about the formatting problems—-my Markdown plugin seems to have suddenly gone feral, and if I have it activated, the contents and comments are not displayed (thanks to Joe for pointing it out!). I’m working on it.

At the weekend, I finished the long-overdue re-design of my project site for Tracks¹. I used to use Textpattern to run the site, but while it was pretty powerful, I found doing some advanced things a little tricky. I spent a while looking around for other solutions, and eventually decided on ExpressionEngine Core. You have to pay for the Personal version, but the Core is free for non-profit use and has the all the features I need. If I ever find myself flush with cash (heh, I wish), I could always upgrade to the Personal version without any hassle.

{Read more...}

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.0 (always a somewhat nerve-wracking process). Things generally seem OK, with the exception that the commenting form has gone AWOL. Previous comments are being displayed, but there’s no form to add new ones.

So, yes—-I do know about it, and I’m currently trying to fix it. More later.

Update: OK, I think that’s go it. It was a rogue plugin. Let me know if there are any other screwy things.

I’m back. I’m very tired but I had a fantastic, productive, awe-inspiring time in Brazil. Right now I’m ploughing through a huge pile of emails, but once I’ve sorted myself out a bit, slept, eaten some real veggie food for the first time in three weeks (most emphatically not rice and beans), and of course caught up with the hubbie, I’ll start writing about some of the great experiences I’ve had.

Well, I’m flying in a few hours, so this will be the last live content for three weeks or so. Mr. Bsag is under strict instructions to look after himself, the house and the garden (in that order), and I’ve promised to phone him as often as I’m able.

I didn’t like to leave But She’s a Girl… with the lights off, so I’ve resorted to a common broadcaster’s summer practice; I’m posting repeats. But She’s a Girl… will have been running for three years next month, and looking through the archives, I realised that there were a few posts I wouldn’t be embarrassed to put up again. These will turn up intermittently while I’m away—-if the WordPress post scheduling works OK. If I do happen to get any internet access, I’ll post something live.

Have a great September everyone, and I’ll return with tales of adventure near the end of the month.