When making a start in the world of blogging, there are so many things to consider that you almost need a trial run first to learn the lingo. In fact, getting up to speed by using a service like that offered by Blogger or WordPress.com seems a very sensible starting point. Even so, the business is like building a house in that you only really what you are knowing after you have done the deed and made all the mistakes. That is particularly true when you go down the self-administered blog route. For starters, it’s so easy to pick the wrong domain name or hosting provider. Selecting your blogging software is the next step but that may not be so tricky; WordPress does a reasonable job and there’s always Movable Type, Expression Engine, Drupal (yes, really) or Habari.

That mention of blogging software brings me to something that I encountered recently: commenting functionality. I am coming around to the idea that this is probably something that needs to be considered up front because of the nature of blogging. After all, anyone that reads The Blog Herald regularly should be familiar with the idea of blogging conversations and that means that the technology to make it happen should be easy for visitors to use and easy for bloggers to administer. However, the two can collide. For one thing, there are a myriad of choices available to the blogger and the blight of comment spam is ever pervasive and growing.

When it comes to comment spam, it is best to realise that there are two sources of responses to a blog post: visitor comments or trackbacks (pingbacks?) from other blogs. I am of the opinion that the latter is probably the channel where most of the detritus travels and various anti-spam solutionss are on offer to curb its spread. Names from the WordPress world like Akismet, Spam Karma, Simple Trackback Validation and Bad Behaviour come to mind. The former can also be used, particularly when the unscrupulous make use of low cost labour in low cost countries, and that’s when the thorny questions of user registration and CAPTCHA’s arise. There is something to be said for not going to extremes with these and just stick with less onerous rules and filtering on the server side.

I must admit to having staggering into forcing visitors to register prior to adding a comment and then making them log in thereafter. I think that it’s for security reasons but WordPress creates a password and then sends it to the person who is registering rather than displaying on a web page. That can create another problem: what happens if the email fails to arrive? In the last week, this has happened with a visitor to my hillwalking blog and there could be a number of reasons for the non-arrival of the relevant email. One is ironic: being an automated email, it is getting stuck in the spam filters of the recipient’s mailbox and so never gets to them. It could also be a bug with WordPress itself (I have raised a ticket and am awaiting what Automattic might have to say to it) or a consequence of some setting made by a hosting provider. All of that makes it hard to track down the cause of the issue but it kicks off other thoughts as to its resolution. One is to remove the needed for registration and logging in in the first place but there are third party services that may help too. The former has turned out to be the case for this blog and it seems to be performing well enough so it is an acceptable option.

When it comes to using third party comment handling systems, what needs to be considered is how well they work with your blog. For instance, I gave Disqus a quick whirl and soon realised that I needed to update the themes for my WordPress blogs if I was to use it on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, it worked fine but I was left wondering if it would have been better to have brought it in when I started a blog rather than part way through and with comments made using the existing WordPress functionality. There’s also Intense Debate and I am almost certain that there are more like it but I’ll be sticking with what WordPress offers for now. The theme for my hillwalking blog has been modified to allow prospective commenters to get in touch with me if they are having problems. That’s is only an interim approach while I consider what the way forward will be.

There was a time when I tested out a new WordPress release when it made its appearance but I now now keep tabs on development versions too. It helps me to be ready in ample time and avoid any ugly stuff appearing on either here or my hillwalking blog. On the surface, the changes made don’t seem so dramatic after the revamp of the administration interface that came with 2.5. Under the bonnet, a lot of bugs have been fixed and many behind the scenes features have been included for the first time. I’ll leave it for you to go to Planet WordPress or check out the relevant entry on the WordPress Development blog. You’ll find a Flash video tour of the latest version from Automattic below.

Of course, WordPress development doesn’t stop here and there are some considerable changes to the administration interface to come at some point if they ever make out into the mainstream from the crazyhorse branch. I’ll be continuing to keep an eye on how things go from here so as to be ready for whatever might be in the offing. For now, enjoy 2.6 but it’ll interesting to see where it all goes from here.

Yesterday, this blog got a bumpy ride from its hosting provider, Fasthosts. For several hours, it was down and there have been occasional errors returned since then. I’ll be keeping an eye on this but I hope that things stabilise sooner rather than later. There’s no question of moving things lock, stock and barrel at this time; patience is a very important virtue when it comes to these things…

An idea recently popped into my head for my hillwalking website: collecting a listing of bus services of use and interest to hillwalkers. Being rural, these services may not get the publicity that they deserve. In addition, they are generally subsidised so any increase in their patronage can only help maintain their survival.

Currently, the list lives on a page in the blog but another thought has come to mind: using WordPress to host the list as a series of log entries, a sort of blog if you like. Effectively, that would involve having two blogs on the same website it can be done. One way is to set up up two instances of WordPress and they could work from the same database; the facility for this is allowed by the ability to use different table prefixes for the different blogs so that there are no collisions. There’s nothing to stop you having two databases but your hosting provider may charge extra for this. This set up will work but there is a  caveat: you now have two blogs to maintain and, with regular WordPress releases, that means an extra overhead. Apart from that, it’s a workable approach.

Another option is to use WordPress MU. That would cut down on the maintenance but there are costs here too. It’s need of virtual hosts is a big one. If my experience is any guide, you probably need a dedicated server to go down this route and they aren’t that cheap. I needed to do a spot of Apache configuration and some editing of my hosts file to get my own installation off the ground; I don’t reckon that would be an option with shared hosting. Once I sorted out the hosts with a something.something.else address, set up was very much quick and easy.

Apart from a tab named Site Admin, the administration dashboard isn’t at all that different from a standard WordPress 2.3.x arrangement. In the extra tab, you can create blogs and users, control blogs and themes as well upgrade everything in a single step. Themes and plugins largely work as usual from an administration point of view. With plugins, you have just to try them and see what happens; one adding FCKEditor threw an error while the editor window was loading but it otherwise worked OK. I had no trouble at all with themes so all looks very well on that front.

Importing and editing posts worked as usual but for two perhaps irritating behaviours: tags are, not unreasonably, removed from titles and inline styled and class declarations are removed from tags in the body of a blog entry. Both could be resolved by post processing in the blog’s theme but the Sniplets plugin allows a better way out for the latter and I have been putting it to good use.

In summary, WordPress MU worked well and looks a very good option for multi-blog sites. However, the need for a dedicated server and the quirks that I have seen when it comes to handling post contents keep me away from using it for production blogs for now. Even so, I’ll be retaining it as a test system anyway. As regards the country bus log, I think that I’ll be sticking with the blog page for the moment.

I recently updated the icon that appears beside this blog’s address in the address bar and bookmarks menus of some browsers. I gave it a go in GIMP but I seemed to get no joy. I pottered out on the web to discover what I might have done wrong only to find Dynamic Drive offering online favicon.ico creation. Out of curiosity, I decided to give the thing a whirl and download the result to upload onto my web server. GIF’s, JPG’s PNG’s and BMP’s with a size less than 150 KB are accepted and it did work for me.

It was a year ago that I set this blog in train. Then, I was exploring the possibilities offered by WordPress.com. After some months, I decided that I wanted to make my own decisions rather than have them so I went independent in June. Between those dates, some big launches took my attention: Windows Vista, Office 2007 & CS3 come to mind. All the while, my experience of UNIX, Oracle and other such matters kept growing more and more. In the latter half of the year, I finally made the leap from Windows to Linux on the home computing front, a decision that taught me a lot and one that I don’t regret. Other subjects featured from time to time as well and my musings on web development and blogging made their appearance too. 2007 was a packed year on the technology front and 2008 is only just getting under way. There’s a Vista laptop and I am already picking up ideas for posts, though I am not going to force them out like I might have tried to do last year. 2008 may be a spot more leisurely but I hope that it’s just as interesting.

On my blogs, I use the Bad Behaviour plugin to keep spammers at bay. It usually works very well so imagine my surprise when it started kicking me out when I tried logging into the system. I started to wonder what happened to my IP address… It now turns out that the repository being used by the plugin got moved by its author and that was the cause of my predicament (and his: he locked himself out of his own blog too!). A new version was duly released to fix the issue and all is well again. It is a tale that emphasises the important of regression testing to check that you don’t change anything that you shouldn’t.

On Saturday, my hillwalking and photo gallery website suffered an outage thanks to Fasthosts, the site’s hosting provider, having a security breach and deciding to change all my passwords. I won’t bore you with the details here but I had to change the password for my MySQL database from their unmemorable suggestion and hence the configuration file for the hillwalking blog. To do this, I set up Quanta Plus to edit the requisite file on the server itself. That was achieved by creating a new project, setting the protocol as FTP and completing the details in the wizard, all relatively straight forward stuff. I have a habit of doing this from Dreamweaver so it’s nice to see that an open source alternative provides the same sort of functionality.

According to Google Analytics, visitor numbers for this blog hit their highest level one day last week. I suspect that I might have been down to a mention of two of my posts on tuxmachines.org. Thanks guys. Feedburner activity has been strong too.

That brings me to another thought: the web seems a good place for Ubuntu users to find find solutions to problems that they might encounter. I certainly found recipes that resolved issues that I was having: scanner set up and using another hard drive to host my home directory, all very useful stuff. When I last played with Linux to the same extent that I am now doing, the web was still a resource but it wouldn’t have been as helpful as I found it recently. I suppose that there are people like me posting tips and tricks for computing on blogs and that makes them easier to find. That’s no bad thing and I hope that it continues. Saying that, I might still get my mits on an Ubuntu book yet…

I have all sorts of messages littering my blog dashboard this morning telling me to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.1; I suppose that I’d better set to work with upgrading then. However, this is never something that I do without first testing on my offline blogs. And then, there’s the need to save some tweaks to WordPress source code ahead of time. I know that I could create my own plugins but that involves finding the correct hooks and it’s a subject for another time, anyway.