24th May 2007
This whole Web 2.0 thing is producing an embarrassment of riches for those wanting to share their thoughts on the web without having to go to the effort of developing their own websites from scratch. A decade ago, Geocities was pioneering the idea of web communities but, without the infrastructure and tools that we enjoy today, it and its kind were ahead of their time.
In these blogging days, life is a lot simpler, which means that temptations exist. Temptations like those caused by garish animated GIF’s in the late nineties, a lame attempt to spice up otherwise dull websites. Returning to the present, it is plug-ins and widgets that could convey the excess.
With WordPress, the plug-ins are more “behind-the-scenes” sorts of affairs, but it is so easy to accumulate several for stopping comment spam and keeping an eye on web traffic, to name just two applications, and so on that you need to be careful that a bag of nails does not result. In fact, I am now considering the rationalisation of what I have got while the number remains in single figures.
WordPress 2.2 adds widgets to the list of temptations; while WordPress.com already has these, the number is small, and you can be sure that that will explode now that self-hosted WordPress blogs get the functionality. The trouble with these widgets is that you need to be adept with CSS so as not to end up with an eyesore akin to those seen a decade ago, though theme authors can help with this. I am not activating widgets on my hillwalking blog because I have many other (better?) things to be doing.
Another thought on widgets: the tag cloud widget previously held in captivity at WordPress.com surely must now find itself in the wild, a worrying prospect given how rubbish they can appear. However, Jakob Nielsen et al. shouldn’t get too concerned, as trends that go too far scar the memory and preclude their return. Just consider those animated GIF’s…
17th May 2007
WordPress 2.2 made its debut yesterday and, after a spot of cautious testing, I upgraded my hillwalking blog to use it. The reason for the testing was that self-hosted WordPress blogs can now have what WordPress.com blogs have had for a while: built-in widget capability. It was this that upped my level of caution, but the changes weren't as drastic as I had feared: you need to amend your theme for widgets to be supported, and not having done this causes no untoward effects. Making themes widget compatible is something that Automattic describe in a helpful article on their website. Other than this, WordPress 2.2 doesn't cause much upheaval and, apart from pieces of JavaScript snagging on occasions in Firefox, all seems well. I am still sitting on the fence as regards those widgets, though...
1st May 2007
While I don’t know whether it’s me or not, I seem to remember there being a Register link on the Meta widget that you see here. Anyway, its absence prompted me to go doing a spot of fiddling to (re)introduce it. My motivation for doing this is my preference for allowing only registered users to post comments so that I don’t encounter too much comment spam.
Speaking of widget functionality, it did take me longer than it should for me to work out how to configure widgets; the button in the widget with lines in it does the trick. Once this twigged, I built a register widget from a text one so that you can get an account with the WordPress.com empire and use it for blogging or commenting as you choose. Registering here allows comment posting on any WordPress.com blog.
Speaking of widgets, the latest WordPress.com ones allow bloggers like me to use tag clouds and even convert archive and category lists to drop down menus. I am not sure about tag clouds but making a dropdown menu of the monthly archives certainly took my fancy, as you can see here.
7th March 2007
My other blog is experiencing what feels like a deluge of comment spam. All that I can say is thank goodness for Askimet. And that is with visitors having to subscribe in order to post comments. It seems that a way has been found around that. I did have a spurious user with obdolbin.com as their website address and got rid of them but the flow still continues. Blogger does seem to have a way around this: entering the letters from an image to stop bots from doing their thing. Maybe we'll see WordPress doing the same?
Update: It seems that the torrent has now slowed to a trickle. Maybe getting rid of the spurious user has worked after all and it just took a while for the effect to kick in.
24th February 2007
Solo Technology has posted about a nice extra available in the Visual Editor in WordPress 2.1. Hit ALT+SHIFT+V in Firefox and ALT+V in IE, gets you an extra row of buttons adding more editing options. He is currently trying to add a button to the main bar for doing the toggling.
P.S. While on the subject of blog post management, I have been playing around with w.bloggar, and I have to say that it works well; with a spot of persuasion, it even edits WordPress blog pages. The only things attempting to spoil the experience are the odd instances where odd characters get added to blog posts or characters in posts get misinterpreted. I'll try to add more in time.
1st February 2007
Though it seems strange to say it, I am making good use of Word’s blogging capabilities. Having had WordPress.com’s blog editor mangle one of my posts – incidentally while using Opera as my browser - is the cause of this turn of events.
When setting up new accounts, there are a number of presets available to be used to work with major blogging providers such as Blogger, WordPress, and Typepad. This is not all, though, as it is possible to hook up to other blogs in a more generic fashion. In fact, I have able to hook up to my other WordPress-powered blog; hosted on the same server as my personal website and with all the associated programming and scripting handled by myself. Where you have a number of accounts set up in the application, a drop-down menu appears in the post so that you can select the account to be used.
Speaking of dropdown menus embedded in the post, you can add categories to a post from the blog server’s own collection, and you can have more than one in any post. This feature is a boon, as is the ability to edit posts that are already on there, yet Word only seems to show a subset of all the posts on the server, about 20 I think, rather than each one. Another caveat is that you need to use a separate window for each post, or you’ll end up overwriting posts in error. Whether this is a result of RSS feed settings or is intrinsic to Word itself remains something that I have yet to discern. As it is Word, formatting, insertion of objects such as hyperlinks and images is very much part of the package. That said, uploading images via this route was not something that I tested until I was writing this post, but it seems to work well.
Apart from the irritations discussed above, I did find Word crashing a few times, but no data got lost thanks to its seemingly excellent file recovery capabilities, a definite counterpoint to some of my experiences with Word’s file recovery feature in previous versions. Eventually, the Office Diagnostics tools kicked in to see if all was well and, after carrying out both hardware (memory, hard drive, etc.) and software checks, an installation repair was performed. Let’s see if this resolves the issue. Even so, the crash repair and diagnostics were not something that I had seen to the same extent in previous versions of Office, and they did look pretty impressive.
In summary, Word does seem to be a good blogging tool, but I wouldn’t use it on its own because of its inability to download a full list of posts for editing. A blog’s own interface will remain necessary for that. Also, Word is far from being the only “offline” blog editor out there, and I am tempted to have a look at the likes of BlogJet and w.bloggar.
28th January 2007
I have had a look at how the posts from this blog are listed on Technorati and most if not all the titles are coming through as "Permalink". I was going to try WordPress.com support, but they are off for the weekend. A trip to the WordPress.com forums was then in order and a few helpful folk put me right on this one: apparently Technorati uses the permalink titles when extracting post summaries from WordPress.com blogs and in the Andreas04 theme that I am using, these are all hard-coded as "Permalink". I have left the theme's author in on this and going to try WordPress.com feedback tomorrow. In technical terms and from what I can see, the fix needed is as follows: change title="Permalink" totitle="Permanent Link: " in the single.php, page.php and index.php files in the theme.
25th January 2007
I have registered the domain technologytales.com for this blog yesterday and have since got the DNS configuration completed. I used Easily.co.uk for the registration; they also host my other domain name and have done so since I first registered it. Easily allowed me to transfer to the WordPress.com namespace servers and $10 secured the rest of the setting up and $10 every year at renewal time with keep things in place. There is more about doing all of this on the WordPress FAQ.