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One of the first plugins I installed when I moved to WordPress was Amazon Media Manager. It’s a handy way of getting the details of various Amazon products on to your site easily, so that you can link to books, CDs or DVDs you’re interested in. It also includes your Amazon Associate ID in the links if you have one, which removes a number of otherwise very tedious steps.

I used it to power the media links in my sidebar for a long time, but somewhere in the upgrade to WordPress 1.5 it stopped working. However, now Amazon Media Manager (AMM) 1.5 is out, and it’s fantastic. The new version allows you to search for media within the WordPress admin interface, and select from the results—-this is a huge improvement. Many more fields are stored now, so that data like the director of a film is stored separately, and can therefore be displayed separately. There’s also a star rating, which is very handy. It also allows you to define any number of different templates for displaying the results on your page, which gives you huge scope to format things in exactly the way you want.

At the moment I’m more or less replicating what I had before (with the addition of ratings stars), but I plan to spiff things up a bit when I get a chance. It’s a really nice plugin if you like to write about what you’ve read, watched or listened to. And who doesn’t?

Sorry about the MySQL errors a little earlier—-my fault. It’s been one of those days…

As some of you may know, I’ve been using Textpattern to run my project site, Tracks (more on why I made the decision to use Textpattern rather than WordPress later). Textpattern 1.0 RC3 came out last week, and when I eventually got around to thinking about installing it, and I couldn’t believe how straightforward it was. I followed the instructions for upgrading via svn which are detailed on the Textpattern forum, and it was simplicity itself. I have shell access at TextDrive, so I just needed to log in via ssh, follow the instructions, and bingo—-everything worked perfectly. Checking out a copy of Textpattern via svn is a great idea, because the next time it gets upgraded, I can just issue a svn update command in the directory, and it will automatically fetch the new versions of files for me, with the added benefit of being able to svn revert back to what I had before if something goes wrong.

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I’m just in the process of upgrading to Wordpress 1.5, and some things are temporarily broken. Bear with me while I fix stuff up. If you saw brief flashes of either nothing at all, 500 errors, or completely different stylesheets, that was me frantically trying to sort things out.

In the course of keeping up with Ruby-related things, I came across a weblogging engine written in Ruby and called hobix. The hobix homepage could well be the maddest I’ve ever come across; the tagline “hobix: the white pantsuit of weblahhing (sic)” gives you fair warning. Hobix is written by _why the lucky stiff (his friends call him _why), who is also the evil genius behind Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (of which more later), and the excellent RedCloth (combined Textile and Markdown format markup in a Ruby library).

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I’m under a bit of a torrent of Trackback spam at the moment. It’s particularly nasty content, and—as yet—very difficult to block without blocking Trackbacks totally. So that’s what I’ve done; until someone comes up with a counter-attack, I’ve turned Trackbacks off. In fact, I’ve also changed the permissions on wp-trackback.php to 700 so that it can’t be executed.

It still doesn’t stop me being notified of the trackbacks, and I still have to delete them manually from the moderation queue. Unfortunately, they seem to be emanating from a huge number of possibly zombied computers, so you can’t even block the IP addresses in an .htaccess file. Sigh.

I used to use MagpieRSS to pull my del.icio.us links into the sidebar on this site. It worked very well, but I’ve had problems in the past when the cache directory has become unwriteable because of permissions problems. The feed is then fetched every time someone loads the page, which is obviously very bad news for Joshua’s bandwidth, not to mention contravening the terms and conditions for the del.icio.us service.

It seems that when I transferred all my files to the new server, the permissions on the cache directory got changed so that MagpieRSS was no longer caching the feed. This meant that Joshua had to ban my IP address until the problem was sorted out, as the feed was being fetched a couple of times a second. Urk. I don’t want that to happen again. Since permissions can easily get messed up (and MagpieRSS doesn’t give you any visible indication that caching is failing on the page), I’ve decided to use another method.

RSSDigest allows you to enter an URL for a feed, and automatically build a bit of Javascript which will display that feed on your site. Unlike many similar services, it’s highly configurable so that you can get exactly the look you want. It also lets you set a caching interval (I set mine to 120 minutes), so that the server for the feed isn’t overburdened. Best of all, the caching is no longer my responsibility! It’s a very useful service, and could of course be used to display any kind of RSS feed—not just a del.icio.us feed.

I read about a clever anti-spam plugin on the WordPress Development Blog. Spam Karma assesses comments on multiple dimensions to determine their ‘spaminess’. It also tries to prevent any false positives at the same time as minimising the effort required to moderate comments manually.

I’ve installed the plugin now, as I’ve periodically had problems with comment spam (though nothing like the level of spamming I got when I was using MovableType). It should be exactly like commenting before. However, if your comment gets flagged up as being ‘borderline spammy’ (perhaps because it has more than three URLs in it), you may be asked to enter a code into a text box that you’ll be presented with as an image. This is to check that you are a real human and not an evil spambot. As usual, let me know if you hit any problems.

Well my DNS has propagated now, and it seems as if my move between hosts has been relatively uneventful. I think that I’ve put everything back more or less where it belongs, but if you spot anything that’s broken, missing, or not where you expect it to be do let me know.

My move wasn’t prompted by dissatisfaction with my previous host, Blogomania. They have been great hosts: reliable, great value and—apart from a small blip a few months ago which is now resolved—giving great support. I’ve recommended them to people in the past, and would do so again—they are a very safe bet. The problem was that I want to do some more Ruby and Rails development¹, and to produce live web applications rather than ones that just run on my local machine. Most good hosting companies (including Blogomania) provide great PHP support, but very few support Ruby.

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A reader¹ emailed me to point out that part of my rambling entry about MacExpo (embarrassingly, the most rambling part) had been quoted in the ‘Voices from the Web’ column in the latest issue of MacUser. I subscribe to the magazine, but I’d been busy, and hadn’t had a chance to open the issue—it was quite a surprise.

¹ I feel an irresistible urge to add “…a Mrs. Trellis from North Wales” at this point, but that would baffle people who don’t listen to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

I’ve just discovered Feedburner. It’s a service which takes your RSS or Atom feed and splices in bits of other content or functionality. So—for example—you can produce a ‘SmartFeed’, which dynamically delivers the correct format (RSS, RDF or Atom) to a the reader, or you can splice in feeds for your last few flickr images. It’s free, so I set one up out of curiosity, which you can find here. It’s got the works; flickr photos, del.icio.us links, Amazon associate ID automagically added to any links to media items, and it’s a SmartFeed. My only gripe is that it doesn’t seem possible to show the full text of an entry in the feed, but perhaps I’m missing something. What do people think? I might provide this feed for a while to see if people prefer one giant feed to a number of more specific ones.

This is the kind of thing that always happens when I go away for a few days; this time I came back to find a storm of web traffic discussing the long-awaited release of Movable Type 3.0. As I switched to WordPress last month, I can sit back and read the war of words without worrying about whether I should upgrade or not. An article by Mena (one of the developers), has received—at the time of writing this—661 trackbacks. I scanned the list and I think it would be safe to say that the majority of respondents are not happy bunnies.

Indeed, the initial announcement produced so much bad press that they have now modified the pricing structure. My own opinion is that they have every right to make a living from all the hard work they have put in, but that it has been very clumsily done. Many people thought that previous announcements strongly suggested that MT 3.0 would be free. There is indeed a free version, but while it isn’t physically crippled in any way, the licence prevents you from having more than one author on the blog or more than 3 websites. My guess is that as MT has traditionally been software for ‘Power Bloggers’, this would prevent most users from benefiting from the free version. Add that to the fact that there don’t seem to be any significant new features in the new version, and—more seriously—that there are a number of fairly major bugs, and you can see why people are getting so exercised about it.

If you want a balanced view of the debate, Brad Choate offers a well-considered pro- viewpoint, while Mark Pilgrim gives an equally fair counterpoint.

I had been thinking for a while that I’d like to incorporate some quick links in the sidebar to things that I’ve read and enjoyed, but I was still deciding on the best way to do it. There are some nice WordPress solutions, like markku’s excellent wp-recent-links, but I was feeling exceptionally lazy and thought that there must be another way to do it.

Then I remembered the service which allows you to quickly mark and categorise links, and display them publicly: del.icio.us. It’s really easy to set up an account, and you can see my page here. There’s also an easy method (using a query string) to get a raw HTML fragment containing the last x links in your feed, which you can then include in your blog page.

So, I put a bit of PHP in my sidebar to pull in the last 10 links. You should be able to include HTML files from remote sites using:

include 'http://somesite.com/file.inc';

but it seems that my hosts don’t have the allowurlfopen option enabled, so I had to think of another way to do it.

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Mark Bernstein has been commenting on comments on blogs (if that isn’t too recursive for you). He wrote:

Comments don’t belong in weblogs.

I don’t agree, at least in a global way. First, I think that people are entitled to make whatever they want of their own weblog—it’s their own space. Some people see their weblog as a kind of considered thinking space which they want to control quite tightly. Others welcome the interesting chaos that allowing commenting can provide. I’m definitely of the latter opinion.

Perhaps I’ve just been lucky—apart from comment spam and the odd childish contribution like “u smell”¹, which I treat with the contempt and indifference they deserve, people who comment here mostly provide funny, informative and interesting contributions, and that adds greatly to this site. I suppose that if I ran a very political or controversial site, I might have more of a problem with trolls, but I still don’t think that commenting per se is bad—it all depends on how well-behaved your audience is.

¹ Actual comment, now deleted.

The comments feed seems to be behaving a little erratically, and is only updating intermittently. I’ll look into it and see if there’s a way to fix it. Anyway, the main posts feed seems to be working fine. I meant to point out yesterday that there are also feeds for the comments on individual posts, if you are following a particular discussion. The link is just above the comments form on the individual entry page.