Tag: Blog

Blog Comments

Looks like there is some competition for your blog comments. Disqus and Intense Debate are both offering plug-in’s which really will change how your blog comments look and feel. User profiles, threaded comments, comment rating and even a forum for your comments are offered by both. I’ve not tried either as I would have two main worries.

1) Where are the comments held and could I move to another service with ease or just back to WordPress?

2) Spam!

Ultimately one of these (there are other services too) will start to dominate and maybe then I’ll take a look. It would be great if some of the bigger sites like Digg or BBC supported one of these services so you could have a standardised commenting system to use on any site. Certainly Intense Debate seems to have the most features, including OpenID support but their name is really bad. One to keep an eye on.

WordPress 2.3

Upgraded to 2.3 this morning. Considering the back end changes to table structures it went very well and successfully imported my tags from UTW. A couple of plugin’s are borked due to the changes and I needed to tweak the template a bit but we’re there now.

So glad i did this first thing as Halo 3 has just been delivered. Expect some impressions and screens later today.

A bit more than a tweak

So while looking around for inspiration and trying to hack together my idea’s into a new theme, I found IAMWW w2 which did everything I wanted to do but with more style. So after some hacking to take out bit’s I didn’t like and adding support for a few plugins I do like it’s now here and live on the website.

As it’s late and I’m absolutely stuffed (mmm….Mother India) there may be a few rough edges and there’s still a few tweaks to make and some changes to the archives and about pages but it’s essentially threre and slightly less sparse than the last theme which as Graham pointed out tonight…any more minimalist and it would be invisible.

Tweaks and stuff

I’ll be doing some site tweaks over the next few days, might even get most done today while waiting for Sky. I hate waiting. Anyway, tweaks? Where?

Well, if all goes well the feeds should now be re-directing to Feedburner. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but never really found the time. I’m tempted to splice in Digg and del.icio.us links but that will probably be in a separate full fat feed. Aplogies for the one or two that pick up the blog via the feeds – things may be a bit screwy or old posts will be re-posted.

In fact that full feed would end up looking like my tumblelog. Which itself has a feed. More and more I’m thinking of moving to something solely like that rather than having the blog and a separate aggregator elsewhere. I’ve seen some posts recently on turning WordPress into a tumblelog – I may hack some more this week than I anticipated.

So that should remove some duplication. I’m also going to reign in the different websites I post/use/talk on. First to go is Twitter. Account was deleted this morning, blog plugins removed, Twitterrific removed. If blogs are all about boring and mundane topics then what does that make Twitter? It may just be that the service isn’t for me but it was just another website I was subscribed to that held my content and everyone else’s rather boring twitters, including the new fad of twitting when they had blog posted. Nothing like a bit of self promotion. There will be a few others dropped over the coming days (Linked In and a couple of other similar sites – that’s why I never responded to your invite Roy – I knew I would get round to removing myself).

It’s been niggling me since my account was defrauded that there’s probably too much info on the web about me. Annoyingly thanks to Google and other search providers it can be difficult to remove once it’s been spidered. So thats probably the main reason for removing. Paranoia is spreading.

Speaking of identity theft, I see on the latest electoral roll that there is a tick box to remove yourself from the edited electoral roll. This is the roll that is bought by companies. Great idea I thought and another small step in protecting identities. Pity the letter all my personal details came in regarding the electoral roll was not delivered to us but put through the wrong door. Fools. Irony. Someone, somewhere is having a laugh.

Mint Eggs

I use Mint for tracking my website visitors (all 3 of you) and it’s pretty fascinating to see the searches that bring people here, people from all over the globe. However I’ve only just realised that there are a number of commands, mostly hidden I think, that allow you to dig into Mint just that little bit more.

Peppermint Tea, a site that pulls together all the latest peppers for Mint has a list of the known commands. Errors and benchmarks are particularly handy for those misbehaving peppers. However it’s the Easter Eggs I loved.

Mint

I’m sure someone will see it as a waste of code and that more time should be spent fixing bugs…..pah! Give me an Easter Egg any day. Anyway, some interesting stats for this site. Internet Explorer visits have dropped to 53% with IE7 making up 60% of that total. Firefox is still slowly gaining at 37% and since moving to the Mac Safari has moved from 2% to a whopping 5% – none of that is me by the way. One stat that hasn’t changed is operating systems though – Windows users still makes up the vast majority of visitors at 89%, Mac with 10% and Linux with 1%. I guess that reflects reality pretty well.

The biggest surprise is how many visits are from users with small’ish screens. 1024*768 is the res for 43% of visitors, with 1280*1024 coming in second on 30% although the top stat is reducing quite quickly over time. Maybe I was a bit quick to move to a wider theme?

Final stat’s – 44% of visitors are from the UK, PSP Warez is the most common search and GTA Liberty City Stories – Custom Soundtracks is the most visited post.

New Clothes

I’ve finally got round to implementing my own site theme. Although I’m not entirely happy with it and it still needs some tweaking on certain pages it had been unchanged for two weeks on the test site and with time looking to be limited over the next month or so I thought it was time to take the plunge.

The main idea behind the theme was to keep things simple, increase white space and drop the graphics. I’m far preferring sites with little or no graphics on them so that was my main aim. At the same time I wanted the theme to be a little wider than most others to take advantage of my desktops and also those of most of my visitors (thanks Mint). Cross browser compatibility was also important as more than 50% of the real visitors to the site are on IE and around 10% on Safari so I wanted to make sure it looked much the same across all platforms (thanks Parallels). It mostly does with some tweaking still to do to suit IE6.

I’ve also dropped the number of plugins I have installed and load times have been greatly reduced. The about page probably takes the most time although a misbehaving last.fm plugin has been disabled which helps. I’ve also created a tumblelog site which is acting as a ‘lifelog’ pulling together a number of feeds. I’ve been very impressed with Tumblr and with new functionality being added frequently and paid for features in the pipeline I can’t see me dropping it. Indeed I’ll probably register a new domain just for the lifelog.

So there you are, hope you like it. I can’t promise it will stay for long as I can be pretty fickle about what I like and dislike but it will do for now and at least meets some of the objectives I set out with. Now I just need to resist the temptation to constantly change.

Style

Bit of a lazy weekend has been had although there’s a few things worth noting. Firstly, Casino Royale on Blu-Ray looks fantastic. If you’ve got a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player (all 10 of you in the UK) then this is a must own title. I’m enjoying the PS3 for movie playback so I’ll be picking up the remote which will get a lor more use than the 360 equivalent. Only annoyance is the remote is Bluetooth rather than Infra-red so I can’t program it into the Pronto.

The new Bond has moved to the Bourne style of movies and low and behold if there isn’t a Bourne Ultimatum trailer available. Really looking forward to this and hope it meets the same high standard of the last two.

More style can be found in the new trailer for Forza 2 (cheers Graham). Around one month to go for this must have 360 title that can’t fail to be good – can it? There hasn’t been a decent racing game on the 360 since PGR3 (Test Drive unlimited is a sims game rather than proper racing – harsh but true) so i can’t wait!

I also decided that I would start hand crafting my own site style a good while ago but that stalled after a couple of days so I finally got round to putting some time into it this weekend. A new app from Panic may help (Coda) but it isn’t even revealed until tomorrow so that will have to wait. I’m finding it all a bit frustrating at the moment but I’m getting there…slowly. I’m guessing at my pace it will be a few weeks before I have something to show for my efforts. At the moment I’m aiming for white, minimal and little or no graphics or ajax. It’s time to get simple.

Trialling .Mac at the moment and it’s great for keeping the two Macs and their apps in sync (calendars, address book, iGTD, Transmit and Yojimbo). The trial lasts for another couple of months before I have to hand over any cash but it’s likely thats another £70 to the Apple temple which is a tad annoying as .Mac doesn’t offer much disk space – this is an area Apple could address for not much money. It would be great if the £70 bought 40Gb of disk space to back up to and share.

WordPress…stuff

If you use WordPress and your on version 2.11 you MUST upgrade as soon as possible. A hacker managed to insert a security exploit into the 2.11 files. Although this only happened in the last 3-4 days it makes sense to move to 2.12…NOW. The dev blog has all the details.

The 2.1 upgrade contained a lot of fixes and changes. One that I hated was the feeds no longer displayed full text if you used the ‘more’ tag. Bah. I hate feeds that are truncated or contain excerpts. Defeats the purpose of feeds in my opinion and…well…it just sucks. Thankfully there’s a plugin – where would we be without plugin authors filling the gaps?

Another plugin I’ve recently added is the Dunstan Style Error Page. This generates a far more helpful error page for those links that might no longer exist or typo’s on blogs elsewhere.

Searching in WordPress is fairly weak but the Search Everything plugin allows you to turn on searching for comments, pages, metadata and even attachments. Hopefully this will be added to WordPress core as it’s been an asked for feature for a long time.

Final new addition here is the DoFollow plugin. It’s not new but I installed it after reading Dougal Campbells post on why he had only just installed it. Made total sense so it’s here now too. Again this really should be an option in the core.

There’s been a lot of bashing of WordPress recently but I still think it’s a great platform with an active community around it. Contributers will come and go but hopefully a more active and aggressive release schedule will see some features being more frequently released.