Technology Tales

Technical considerations regarding the discussion aspect of blogging

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 know what you are doing 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 who 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 reckon that the latter is probably the channel where most of the detritus travels and various anti-spam solutions 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 sticking 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 gets 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 I 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 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 were 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 is only an interim approach while I consider what the way forward will be.

Some nice things coming through…

While everyone is making good use of WordPress 2.5.x, development continues apace for future releases of the popular blogging platform and there are some goodies coming through on the functionality front. Google Gears are being brought into play for speeding up the administration dashboard; this started out being more prominent before being made more unobtrusive. The other big change has been an overhaul of the theme gallery and, if the theme is compatible, an overview facility has been added too. So WordPress is being tweaked and improved in the background to make 2.6 an interesting release.

Restoration of service

Unfortunately, due to a spot of hosting trouble, this blog was offline for a few days while I was getting things sorted out. Along the way, I learned a few lessons about web hosting that I’ll share soon. In the meantime, I’ll continue to set in place the last few bits and pieces that made the site’s precessor what it was.

Hosting more than one WordPress blog on your website

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 on several pages 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.

Alternatives to WordPress

Movable Type was the leading blogging platform before Six Apart disappointed their users with their licensing and WordPress came into being. Now that WordPress would seem to be king of the hill, it’s tempting to conclude that there’s nothing else out there for those wanting a self-hosted blog. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

These days, Movable Type is available as an open source entity and I have been giving it a quick whirl. Importing from a WordPress export file is very swish and a quick spot of tinkering gets you a running in no time. Getting the thing set up can be a little confusing because the processing is done by CGI scripts and they need to live in your website’s cgi-bin directory while the actual blog is instantiated in another location. Aside from that complexity, things are not that offputting and the style of the administration and content management dashboard could show WordPress a thing or two. It’s partitioning of trackbacks from comments is another useful feature in this world pervaded by comment spam.

Habari is another option that I have encountered and it seems like early days for this one. The first impression that struck me was its minimalist feel but it will do most of what you ask of it when it comes to blogging. Nevertheless, importing and exporting is one area that needs more development and its handling of themes is a matter that warrants more exploration on my part. In summary, it seems to offer most of your needs, even if there is nothing to make it stand out from the crowd at this time.

I encountered another alternative platform in the pages of PC Plus called Expression Engine. It is commercial software but there is a free cut down version available without some of the modules. There is a bit more to the offering than blogging but you have to buy it to get features like wikis, forums and the like. As it happens, the blogging capability in the free version is creditable and it seems that you can manage multiple blogs through the same interface, a feature that has potential when it comes to using the software as a kind of CMS. It cannot directly import from WordPress but a Movable Type export file is accepted without a bother. With regards to changing the look and feel of the blog, I found that editing the index and stylesheet files through the administration interface produced good results quite easily and quickly. Maybe creating a new theme might be a worthwhile project to see how one can make a blog’s appearance fall into line with the other parts of a website. After all, Ellis Labs claim that the software should work the way that you do.

I only have done a quick spot of fiddling with any of the above but there is potential for further investigations to see what else they have to offer. I am sure that there are other alternatives and the CMS Drupal comes to mind for its having a blogging module, even if I didn’t find the main CMS functionality to be sufficiently flexible for my needs when I last tried it (a new version made it appearance recently); overly complex CSS was one bugbear for me. Even with all the possibilities, I won’t be spending too much of my time exploring this area. Suffice it to say, it’s not a completely WordPress world…

WordPress update messages

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.

On Blogrolling.com

I was ambling around the web and came across a website that, while it appeared to be a blog, isn’t one in the vein of that to which we are accustomed. It does, however, have a blogroll and that is where Blogrolling.com comes into this piece. Blogrolls are very much a feature of the blogging (WordPress call them that anyway) world and act as a repository of useful links relevant to the subject of the blog. I also use them as a bookmarking station for myself and a way to return the favour when someone links to my blog. For a blogroll, you generally need a database sitting behind in the background or you end up creating a list of links in (X)HTML.

Blogrolling.com offer another option: placing your links at an external website and including them on your webpages using a piece of code to pull in the information. RSS, JavaScript and PHP are among the methods on offer from Blogrolling.com; I used PHP when I gave the service a whirl on one of my offline blogs and that really does give you a lot of customising power over and above using CSS. That’s not to say that there aren’t customisation functions on offer from Blogrolling.com, I found a few of these distinctly useful: ordering of links in a blogroll is just one. When it comes to categorising your links, you don’t get the category option but you do get to create as many blogrolls as you want so there is a workaround; moving links from one blogroll to another is mouse intensive but straightforward. Also, because you are reading each blogroll in turn, you have the ability to order the categories as you want them. With WordPress’ category approach, ordering categories involves widgets and plugins or getting your mits dirty with some code cutting. All in all, Blogrolling.com seems to offer an intriguing and useful service.

Trying out WordPress 2.3 RC1

The final release of the next version of WordPress is due out on Monday and, because there are sure to be security fixes included, I have been giving the release candidate a go on my offline blogs. 2.3 is another major release so I have been doing some preparation.  In fact, WordPress have a blog entry dedicated to such things for this release. Thankfully, I think that my hillwalking blog should emerge unscathed by this upgrade; I still need to have a go with an offline version of this blog.

The special feature in the new release is tagging and it is good to see that it has had no impact on legacy set ups. I had the same reservations about 2.2 with its inclusion of sidebar widgets but the backward compatibility was enough to see me through without any hiccups. Tagging is not something that I see myself using with categories fulfilling much the same type of role; I am unconvinced by the idea of tag clouds, the type of thing that it powers. However, there are some useful extras here and the filtering of posts by edit status is one of these. Having pending review as a publishing status sounds like a tweak that I might use to allow myself a cooling off period before I publish a post for all of the world to see. Revisiting something with a fresher pair of eyes might stop typographical howlers from emerging into public view…

Update: Another 2.3 feature discovered! I have picked up on multiple category widgets by virtue of the fact that category styling disappeared with the upgrade of the offline version of this blog to 2.3 RC1. Adding "-1" to the relevant CSS class definitions soon sorted things out. It does support the idea of testing before implementation even if no other unexpected changes were spotted. I still am not sure why anyone would have multiple category listings, though.

Twelve months of WordPress

It was on this date several months ago that I moved my hillwalking blog into the world of WordPress. It’s a self-hosted WordPress instance and has been for all that time. Because of the move, I was taken into the world of MySQL, a world that intrudes still to this day. Most of the time for the migration was spent setting up a theme to fit in with the rest of the website of which it forms a very important part. The matter of importing all the old posts took up time too, especially when it came to fixing glitches with the XML import. Still, it was all done within a weekend and my website hasn’t looked back since. More people now have a reason to visit, and the blog may even have surpassed the photo gallery as the site’s main attraction. I kept up the old blog for a while but have dispensed with that by now; I was keeping both blogs synchronised and that became a tiring manoeuvre. Another upshot of the whole experience is that I have become more aware of the UK outdoor scene and learnt a thing or two too. It might even have encouraged me to go from day tripping to multi-day backpacking, a real-world change that is well removed from the world of technology.

My type of blogging

A recent article by Lorelle VanFossen on The Blog Herald got me thinking about my blogging journey and what I have learned about myself. My brush with reactive blogging has taught a number of lessons. The first of these is that I just cannot keep up with others; someone always gets there first. Another lesson is that taking on a topic of the day takes up loads of time when it lies outside my area of expertise and I spend a lot of that time researching the topic. What follows from this is that if the post doesn’t flow from me, it either takes up a lot of time or it doesn’t happen at all. Yes, I have been known to bin stillborn posts due to loss of interest or where things just wouldn’t come together at all.

Following all of this, I have come to the conclusion that I am a proactive blogger. That said, I still need to get some bursts of inspiration from somewhere. For instance, my hillwalking blog always experiences a burst of activity after I have been trekking in the outdoors; such encounters never fail to produce something that is worth sharing. In the same vein, anything you find here is likely to influenced by what I have encountered in the technology world. Yes, news items do provide ideas for posts but it is in more leisurely way rather than the frenzied approach of some. And like the hillwalking world, such inspiration does have it peaks and troughs.