Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Wordform: New Update

Recovered from Wayback Machine.

I just modified comment moderation to put a placeholder comment into the thread for a moderated comment, but the placeholder only shows if:

The IP address of the original author matches the current user’s IP address.

The current author’s name and email (from cookie) matches the comment author’s name and email.

-or-

The current author’s name and url (from cookie) matches the comment author’s name and email.

The placeholder won’t show for others, or be included in displayed comment count. This should let the person know that their comment is being moderated.

I also added a test on the overall state of the weblog moderation, and a note is posted just before the comment form if the entire weblog is under moderation. Between these two modifications, there shouldn’t be any confusion about why a comment isn’t showing.

There was also a hard coded weblog table reference, which I’ve fixed. I had also moved fullcomments around before the distribution and have now fixed the URLs accordingly. These are in addition to patches sent, and other corrections I’m making, and several new metadata functions added.

Friday I’ll package these items up individually for those who have downloaded the alpha-01, in additon to providing a alpha-02 release. This should make it easier for early downloaders to apply fixes.

I really appreciate the feedback, fixes, suggestions I’m receiving–makes the process so much more fun. I have a question, though: should I drop the dynamic background image from the admin and/or floating-clouds theme? Perhaps go with one image, and then provide a package of additional images for those who want them?

(And if someone knows of a good, free JPEG compression utility online or downloadable to a Mac, please let me know.)

Categories
Technology Weblogging

First alpha release

Following the open source mantra of “release early, release often”, I’ve uploaded the first alpha release of Wordform. You can access it from SourceForge.

You’ll want to backup before using this, and install the application in a database separate from your production environment.

You’ll need to edit config.php to match your database information and also add in the siteurl for the URL of the weblog. If you move the installation, you’ll need to change this value.

The install files are in /admin/install and are pretty simple. If you’re making a copy of your existing WordPress database (not using your production one, of course), it should upgrade fine. But this is early alpha, so anything goes.

For creating static files, set the static subdirectory to world writable. To have the system manage your .htaccess file, make it writable by the world.

I recommend this release only for developers and those experienced with early releases. You can add bug reports at SourceForge, but if you have installation problems, you might want to add a comment here or send me an email.

A more stable release will go out at end of week, and I hope to make new releases weekly, as well as use the CVS facilities. When I release at the end of the week, I’ll release a separate package with just those files that have changed between alpha-01 and alpha-02.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Cleanup

I’ve ported all of my weblogs to Wordform and it went nicely. I’ve been doing clean up on the files, some separation of processing and presentation, and finishing up the metadata extension, but Wordform 1.0a should be ready for download in next couple of days.

The files will be changing in alpha release. I’m still in the process of separating the data and the processing layers, and I’m sure there will be bugs, and perhaps even new functionaliy. However, I’ll provide a special install to upgrade alpha and better testers, without having to replace their modified templates.

The feeds were a little screwed up, but should be fine, now.

Home stretch. Rah. Home stretch.

Categories
Weblogging

Dabblers and enthusiasm doesn’t make it so

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Doug from Creative Karma sent me a link he found at Stefan Tilkov to a writing that’s been making the rounds of weblogging: Maciej Ceglowski’s Dabblers and Blowhards. In it Maciej takes on Paul Graham and his popular book and series titled, “Hackers and Painters”, and does so in a manner both pointed and funny. In the process, Maciej also exposes so much of the hyperbole and hooplah that underlies much of the “hip talk” that pervades our environment:

I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of shlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the “what is a hacker?” essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider’s view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

…shlock writing onto the Internet. There is, indeed, an abundance of schlock, or jumping up and down writing on the internet; writing where metaphorical descriptions of the most mundane of categorization is stretched–thinly!–to cover the next, best version of the web. Where solid science and technology and even common sense is pushed aside in a breathless rush to discover something, anything, new in the one aspect of technology that seems to provide us so much gratification–the almighty link. It is a joining of words to cover a big, black space on the chalk board saying, “a miracle happens here”.

It’s not that I begrudge anyone their enthusiasms; it’s just enthusiasm does not, by itelf, make good technology–no more than computer hacking makes one equivalent to a great painter.

Anil Dash also focused on these elusive transitive equalities that seem to thread their ways through so many of the ‘jump and down’ conversations; while I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, I found the following to be appealing:

* Loud != Persuasive
* Gets other people to stop talking != Persuasive
* Writes a lot != Writes well
* Funny != Correct
* Similar to me != Correct
* Well known != Respected
* Rude != Honest
* Polite != Honest
* Fast != Smart

I haven’t done justice to either Anil’s or Maciej’s writing, and *recommend you read both whether you’re a technologist or not. These writings really aren’t about technology so much as they are about those who walk the talk, and those who just talk.

*With one caveat — not all painters want to get into women’s pants…because not all painters are men or gay. And we can safely assume the same about hackers. Or:

painter != male
hacker != male
blogger != male

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Three big changes

In the last 24 hours, I managed to get three major components of Wordform finished. Go me.

The first was the external application-via-plugin dashboard that allows user-selected filler. With this you can use one or more plugins to provide whatever you want within the dashboard area. For instance, I currently have a list of updated posts through my Feed-on-Feed installation, as well as a list of updated posts from the Burningbird weblogs.

The second was getting the Meta option to work. If you access the individual posts or pages within the site, and there’s metadata defined for them, the RDF/XML is returned. I still have to finish the interface for adding the data, but it shouldn’t be complicated. You can see my test cases at http://weblog.burningbird.net/me/rdf/ and here. I’ll add code to create a link to the files in the header, and another option whereby if you pass in ‘meta’ rather than ‘rdf’, you’ll get an HTML table of the information, in human viewable format.

With this functionality, if anyone wants to provide metadata support for a specific vocabulary, such as Creative Commons or the Vegetarian schema (yes, true schema), all they have to do is create a plugin that provides the HTML for the form fields (to enable the user to fill in the blanks on the statements) and make some simple API calls to process the data. From the advanced editing page, an option listing all available schemas (as plugins) is provided and clicking on one opens up the form to grab the data and update the database. Once metadata has been created for a page or a post, attaching a ‘/rdf/’ or ‘/meta/’ to the permalink for either returns the formatted data.

No more worries about putting the data into comments in XHTML. No more worries about combining data from different schemas, since it’s all RDF/XML.

The final option I finished today was fulltext, which you can see in the last post.

Still lots of work to do, but these were the three big infrastructure items left. Onwards.