jill/txt

[setting up moblogging is not a cinch]

Ugh! I want to moblog from Provence (I’m going tomorrow! Yay!) and none of the options are quite working.

• Email to Flickr which posts to this (Wordpress-powered) blog: This kind of works, but no title gets sent, well, no words at all, really. I like words.
• Email to Flickr which posts to a newly created Blogger blog: This works better. The layout’s better, the title tag works, but still no OTHER words. I like words.
• MMS to weblogg.no: This seemed promising, since it’s set up by a Norwegian company and is specific to Norwegian ways of using technology - MMSes are great, really easy, free on weekends… But after just having set up a new blog on Blogger.com I was really frustrated. The interface is jumbled in Firefox, and really needs some work in terms of user-friendliness. There are lots of very small letters and a lot of buttons and NO HELP FUNCTION! Once you’re in there and you try to post something it tells you you can’t until you’ve set up categories, which really seems rather complex for a fresh blogger. The explanation of how to SMS or MMS posts is not in the interface you see after creating a new post, but at the bottom of the front page, and it’s ambiguous, too. When I MMSed a photo and the code word “blogg” and some text to the number given, I got an error message that I hadn’t set up a default category. But as far as I can see, I have. So I think I’m giving up on weblogg.no for now, though I’m kind of loathe to - I know how much easier it is to criticise than to create, and I really appreciate that there’s a Norwegian option now, but I’m totally spoilt by lovely interfaces. Using this made me squirm with delight to return to the elegant simplicity of the interface to Blogger.
• Email to buzznet.com: This works, and I set up my own “moblog” pretty easily, and both words and image came through, but it’s so ugly and overloaded with stuff.
• Wordpress also supports posting through email, but you need your own mail server, and I don’t have one.

Any suggestions? I’d really like to be able to post images to a blog while I’m in Provence… There is a computer, there, but it’s under the stairs, it costs a euro for ten minutes, there’s usually a queue, and really, I don’t want to sit there when I could sit outside and chat. If I can’t work anything else out, I expect I’ll post through Flickr from my phone (best way to get the photos out) and come add some words now and then from the computer.

[problems switching from Movable Type to Wordpress]

It’s five days since I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress, and my experiences are, to say the least, mixed.

• Movable Type doesn’t export Norwegian - or presumably, any non-English - characters, it just leaves them as blanks. Prøverommet becomes Pr verommet. Obviously, this means Wordpress won’t import Norwegian characters. It would also mean that moving my database between Movable Type installations would lose Norwegian characters. I wish developers who want to sell to the world would start realising that most languages other than English use more characters than a-z. I think all the European languages do - except perhaps Italian and Spanish.
• Wordpress uses PHP. That’s great if you want lots of control: PHP is a language that you use with HTML (or XHTML) - it lets you get stuff out of a database and get the server do lots of clever stuff that HTML can’t do on its own. However, I never learnt PHP. It looks easy enough, but I have a lot of things I’d like to spend time on and I’m not willing to spend a lot of time learning PHP. For the user, the PHP thing means that the templates you edit are all in PHP - so to display the title of your blog, in your Movable Type templates you’ll write < $MTBlogName$>, in Blogger you’ll write < $BlogPageTitle$>, in Tinderbox you’ll write ^title^ and in Wordpress you’ll write < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>. Once you get used to all the question marks it’s sort of doable even without really knowing PHP, but the documentation does pretty much assume you know the lingo. For instance, you “pass parameters when calling the function to configure some of the options", which means that instead of putting name inside those inverted commas in the brackets, you could have put description. Or maybe both.
• It assumes your server has lots of cool stuff installed. Our server has lots of cool stuff, but not all the same cool stuff, so some things just don’t work. It’s not my personal server, so I have to wait for the administrator to work out whether it’d be cool to install stuff.
• The default template marks almost everything up as lists, which default to having horrid bullets in front of them. I suppose that’d be OK if I just took the time to style it the way I like it. I’m struggling, though - for instance, I’ve taken away all the list tags from the information about each post that’s showed beneath a post, but it still seems to think its a list. Not really understanding the PHP, I don’t know whether there’s something there that causes this or what. So I gave up and I’m left with an ugly blog.
• There really is a lot of documentation on Wordpress, although some of it assumes you know PHP - for instance, the main documentation of the templates keeps repeating that this is or isn’t in the Wordpress loop, and I haven’t the faintest idea what that means. However, the open sourcedness of it all ensures that there are lots of willing contributers of documentation, and even PHP is well-documented elsewhere - it’s obvious you could teach yourself PHP pretty easily simply from playing with Wordpress and googling.
• The installing was a breeze. Far, far simpler than Movable Type. You only have to ask your administrator for a MySQL password, type the password and username into a configuration file, upload it to your server and the rest is done in a friendly web interface. None of that changing permissions - until you want to upload files or change templates, after which you’ll have fun learning about your server. Neither Movable Type or Wordpress is a good idea for a fresh blogger not interested in an intimate acquaintance with their server. Use Blogger instead - or another hosted service.
• There are built-in spam management tools in Wordpress that look good, and there are plugins, too. I’ve not got any spam yet, of course, because the spammers haven’t yet discovered my new URL for commenting. The spam is one of the main reasons I left Movable Type. There may have been simpler ways of solving that, but MT-blacklist just wasn’t enough.
• I still haven’t figured out how to display Trackbacks, though they’re clearly part of Wordpress functionality. I’ve also looked pretty hard for a plugin that will let me show the most recent Trackbacks and I can’t find one. I really liked displaying them prominently and that was easy to do in Movable Type, so I’m disappointed.

I’m going to keep trying Wordpress for a while more, but my experiences this far are pretty mixed. Had I been a better programmer and familiar with PHP and able to write my own plugins I expect I’d have loved Wordpress - apparently it’s easy to write plugins if you know the language. As a semi-geek I’m not convinced. Steve recommended Textpattern, but that’s proprietary, and I think if I go back to a proprietary system it’ll be Movable Type. Except for the spam. Ack.

[this template]

This layout is called Rubric, is designed by Hadley Wickham, and won second place in a styling competition for Wordpress. I’ll come up with something of my own in a while, but not just now.

[Update: design is changing…]

[wordpress]

Mark Pilgrim has an eloquent post about reasons why open source software is good, and it’s not about the money. He’s switched to Wordpress, as hordes of other bloggers are doing. I haven’t researched the alternatives, but Wordpress does look good. Not sufficient for my students, but I’ve got half a year to work that out. Wordpress have even set up an installation you can play with - simply log in as admin/demo. The installation looks a lot simpler than the Moveable Type installation, except I’m going to find out what my server’s MySQL setup is. Which shouldn’t be too hard.

[change]

Now that there’s more images in the standard layout, of course, my photos look different. Hm.

[frank schaap is my hero]

Frank Schaap is my hero. He tidied my rather diverse margin-left, right and centres (as it were), suggested a slightly different font that apparently will actually look good on all browsers (sadly my beloved old Verdana size="medium” really doesn’t look that great on Windows, and it doesn’t even exist on most *nix platforms) and loaded that big image to the left through CSS, as a background to the left column, instead of in the HTML and did a few more things and now it all seems to be wonderful!

Except that instead of gracefully loading bit by bit into my browser window it all now sort of waits a few sinks and then winks into view all at once. I suppose I should reduce the image sizes. Ah well.

Thank you thank you thank you Frank! (PS he also does interesting research and has a cool blog, fragment.nl. His book is excellent too: an ethnology of a online gaming society, a role-playing MOO, actually)

[nearly redesigned!]

Oh, what the heck. This new design isn’t finished, but it’s getting there and I’m having fun with it and I’ll just fix it as I go. I’ll keep publishing the old design as old.html at least until this design stabilises, so just go there if you get too frustrated at this. I promise that this new design will soon acquire recent comments, trackbacks, nice round corners for the left column boxes, better date stamps for posts and, not least, more working links. Oh, and archives and lists of publications and such that actually match. Let me know if it looks weird in your browser!

[maybe]

Though round-edged boxes and columns that go all the way down do require disappointingly complicated CSS (using little images makes it feel like cheating) I’ve actually managed to build most of my new design much faster than I’d expected. There are some glitches (notably the right column’s currently below everything else and the corners of the boxes on the left need blue backgrounds) and there’s plenty not in there yet, but it’ll be sitting over here at maybe.html while I work at it. Right now I’m tearing out my hair at that right column. If I absolute position it it breaks the left column going all the way down thing which depends on floats, and a 1 pixel high image repeating down the left in a container box that all the way around the whole layout and also needs a footer. Update: A position:absolute worked beautifully now. I suppose I changed some other detail. CSS is cool except that when you change one little thing everything else quite easily goes wonky. Usually because you forgot to close a comment or something ridiculously simple.

I guess it’s fair that I suffer, though, since my poor students are going through the same stuff.

[column all the way down]

How to make the background colour in a CSSed column stretch all the way down: use an image. Sigh. I thought the point of CSS was not having to use hacks and single-pixel gifs and all that nonsense. Though perhaps this is better.

[round]

How to make round cornered boxes in CSS, based on this sliding doors principle.

[planning image]

I generally prefer the playing around phase of maybe redesigning one’s site to the nuts and bolts I-can’t-get-the-CSS-to-work-in-Netscape part of it all. I’d like more colours and pictures. I wonder if I could get away with something like this and still get taken seriously. You know, as an academic. Probably not - it looks more like a teenager’s intimate web diary. If I were a skilled graphic designer perhaps I could make it ironic, multivalent. That’d be cool

Another thing is that while I really want to keep the front page of my site a blog, it’d be nice if people could actually find stuff. You know, my publications, or what I think about weblogs and education, or the links for that talk they just heard me give. Anders Fagerjord (whose front page I love except it’s not a blog) recently wrote about Derek Powazek’s new design, which does combine a bit of bloggishness with photos and so on. Not quite me, though.

I tried making a banner to paste across the top of my site too, thinking I could just add that and not change the rest. It gives entirely the wrong signals, though. Well, not entirely. Just that they’re not the only signals I want to be transmitting.

[damn spam]

Yikes! I just got over 1200 comments all pointing to various subdomains of e–pics.com. Even with mt-blacklist it takes a while to delete them. Without it I would have been stuffed. The master blacklist doesn’t include this URL - add it if you’ve got mt-blacklist! My blacklist, btw, is public.

[comment spam]

There’s an evil bug in Safari or MoveableType that makes comment spam kind of jump into the actual post itself when you delete it. I’d started ignoring this, since it doesn’t seem to affect the actual post if you don’t save after deleting the comment. Only I guess I saved, because last week one of my posts was indeed replaced by an ad. Luckily Andrew Boaill wrote and told me so I could fix it: thank you Andrew.

Jay Allen promises to release MT-Blacklist, a new, improved, easy-to-install and spamproff anti-comment spam plugin today. This is a good thing.

[comment spam]

Extremely frequent visitors may have noticed that link-packed comments advertising various drugs keep popping up and disappearing here. They’re always comments to posts that have a lot of links pointing to them and thereby a high Google PageRank, which is obviously what the spammer wants to get in on - links from a site with high PageRank give the linked-to site some of that PageRank. I’ve been deleting them as fast as they arrive (or as fast as I see them) and banning the IP-numbers they were sent from but these - or this - spammer is annoyingly persistent, is obviously on dialup and so has zillions of IP numbers, and it’s really boring deleting spam all the time. Fortunately Liz links to a solution to all this that lets you blacklist certain URLs, which are then never displayed in comments, though other, benign, URLs are shown. Unfortunately this solution involves three plugins, tweaking, and slower rebuilds and comment processing. Maybe I’ll just keep deleting, for now.

If linklove describes linking to lovingly spread the goodness of one’s PageRank, and linkslutting is doing anything to get other people to link to you, what is this? Linkcoercion? Attempted linktheft? I’m not going to call it linkrape. It sure ain’t rape if you can delete it and its consequences completely.

[codes]

Belzebob’s collection of MoveableType codes for inclusion in your templates is compact yet sufficient for most purposes. In Norwegian.

[CSS variations]

Wow. Look at all the different ways the exact same HTML can be displayed using different CSS stylesheets: The CSS Zen Garden. (via Jon)

[displaying comments]

Eirik’s started displaying comments and trackbacks prominently, which is lovely! Monologic blogs (with no comments) are less interesting than the dialogic ones, he finds, and though I used to be a comment-skeptic, these days I agree with him. Eirik also shows the code he put in his MoveableType template so it’ll display comments. My code’s just the same except I added anchors so that when you click on the link to a comment on the front page, you go straight to that particular comment. Liz told me about that ;)

[layout problems]

Any MoveableType experts around? I’d love help on this. You see, if someone sends me a trackback, but the entry it’s sent from doesn’t have a title, MoveableType substitutes the URL of the post instead. The URL is invariably far too long and on PCs this breaks the layout of this site. There’s a nasty overlap thing that happens. Macs (Explorer and Safari, at least) deal with the long URL by elegantly breaking it up. If you’re on a PC you’ll be seeing the ugliness of this right now, because I got a titleless trackback.
(more…)

[blog portal]

Yes, Jarle, I agree absolutely, Humanistic Informatics should have a portal to our blogs, like they do at Harvard. We’ve talked about it. Soon we might start working on it too!

[geekdom]

Today I scored my first free pizza in compensation for technical assistence. Peppe’s Pizza very wisely provides wireless, thus making them the ideal place for this kind of transaction. Do I get to call myself a geek now? Or at least the MoveableType guru of Bergen?

[tinderbox might learn to speak with MoveableType]

Mark Bernstein’s looking at getting Tinderbox to talk with MoveableType, Blogger.com and other web- and server-based blogging applications. I used to use Tinderbox for blogging, but moved to MoveableType because the network emphasis of MoveableType is really important to me: trackbacks, built in comments and automatic pinging of whatever sites you want. Tinderbox, on the other hand, is much better than MoveableType for organising your own notes and is more flexible as a singleuser tool. A combination might be really good, if it’s open enough.

[blogshares.com]

Here’s a really hot trading tip: Jorunn Danielsen’s Andedammen is currently valued at ZERO dollars in the fictive blog share market game Blogshares.com. This means you can buy shares in her blog for free, and then, when you link to her, the value will skyrocket. Real, fictive money for free!

Blogshares is a brilliant concept. It’s like the gaming version of the short article I wrote last year on Links and power. I’m disheartened that jill/txt is only valued at $218.80, but I’ve been interested to see that almost all the blogs I regularly read and wanted to buy shares in have low valuations too. Except my teaching blog which is worth five times as much as this blog, because all the students link to it… Phil Ringnalda’s post about how using Blogshares might improve blogging is an interesting response to the predictable “you bloggers can’t see past your own links” attitude. Phil writes:

Now that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, does it?

[errors]

Something’s wrong with my CSS, so the title overlaps the text in Netscape browsers (thanks to the people who’ve alerted me to this!) I promise I’ll fix it but it won’t be for a few days - I have to finish this thesis chapter before I let myself do more blog tweaking. Blog tweaking is so much more immediately gratifying thank writing. You get instant results, and they’re usually just wrong enough that you need to do just a little bit more. It’s really, really, dangerous. Btw, I’ve put my main index template for this blog online because I wished I had more templates to look at when I was doing it. And the stylesheet’s online too of course, and anyone who wants to steal, modify or whatever them is more than welcome. Obviously there are errors, like this netscape thing. I have documented it fairly thoroughly, though.

[in transition]

The layout of this blog is in transition - having moved to MoveableType I want to make things like links from other blogs to posts in this blog very visible - I want to emphasise the network. Of course there aren’t any trackbacks yet, or comments in this new system, but when they come, the idea is that they’ll show up over there on the right. I’m not sure whether that’ll happen instantly or only when I rebuild the site. The archives are shoddy though hopefully there. Anyway, bits of this might just plain not work or there’ll be dead links and it’s kind of ugly and inconsistent in places, but hey, it’ll improve. Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

[moving to moveabletype]

This is my first post to jill/txt using MoveableType.

I started blogging in October 2000. It was reading Caterina.net I realised what blogging was about. I can’t remember how I found Caterina, but once found I loved what I read: her beautiful flowing style of writing, the mixture of commentary and the personal, the links. I remember seeing the little icon “made with Blogger” and following the link to Blogger.com. I signed up as soon as I realised how easy blogging was, and never looked back.

A year later I started using Tinderbox instead. I love the power of Tinderbox: it lives on your personal computer instead of on an external server (Blogger was often down when I wanted to write). You can organise anything in Tinderbox, and you can use multiple views of your notes: spatial, colourful, hypertextual as well as conventional outlines. I kept notes for my thesis and for my blog together, marking some for publication in the blog and others as private, and had templates that controlled the HTML export so those notes I wanted public became entries in jill/txt. I’m not going to stop using Tinderbox.

But to me blogging is about the network. And MoveableType is utterly a network tool. It lives on my server and I have control over upgrades and plugins and so on. It has integrated comments, so I won’t need those external javascript comments slowing down my system. (Mind you, it was a great service, and absolutely for free. It was only slow because it was so damn popular.) But it’s the TrackBacks that have sold me. TrackBacks aren’t yet common enough to be quite what they could be, but the potential power is enormous. Also, MoveableType make their software open enough that dozens of plugins are continually being developed for the system, and many of those plugins are to do with links and connections.

I’ll be continuing to use Tinderbox for my personal notes, and for themed groups of notes where I expect to export some of the content to HTML. Tinderbox is much, much better than MoveableType for organising the connections between your own notes. MoveableType excels at connections between sites.