Category: Weblogging

Upgrading to WordPress 2.5: First, install Drupal

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 11, 2008

Anil Dash had a clever and humorous, as well as telling, guide titled, A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide. His advice?

As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.

I wasn’t even aware that a 2.5 upgrade was on the horizon until I read Anil’s posting. Why on earth do the WordPress people embed a link to the WordPress weblog in the Dashboard if they don’t use it to give people a head’s up? Especially since I gather this upgrade is making some major modifications. Modifications that will probably trash some of the changes I’ve made to XHTMLate WordPress. I am now faced with a decision: do I upgrade to 2.5, and continue to XHTMLate? Or move to Drupal? Or increase my pain, and use both?

Moving to another tool sounds about as much fun as having dental implants. However, now is the time to make this movie if you’re considering it. Though using minor version numbering, from what I can gleam, WP 2.5 is a major upgrade.

For me, the logical move is to Drupal. The tool has just come out with a major new version, which means I don’t have to go through major upgrade blues for a long time. I’ve written in the past about the tool’s support for both SVG and RDF, as noted in the keynote at DrupalCon (thanks, James!). And now Laura Scott writes on the number of women involved with the Drupal development, which I did not know about. Probably because of problems with visibility of women associated with open source, generally. According to Laura:

Part of the problem lies not in macho coding culture, but rather in the woeful state of computer and software education in our schools. Most of the people involved in open source are there in spite of their formal educations (or lack thereof). Computer work is pretty much taught only in Computer Science departments, which usually are subsets of Mathematics departments. Despite the fact that nearly every student will be working with computers in whatever field they enter, they likely will never have even one class where they study any sort of computer science or algorithm theory.

…

Is it any wonder that women especially are not likely to end up in an open source software community? As I noted before, the leading women involved with Drupal came to it from other vocations and educational backgrounds.

I’m not surprised about women coming in from other vocations. I’ve long thought the problem with the Computer Science degree programs in college is that there are Computer Science degree programs in college. I was pleasantly surprised, though, about the significant women’s involvement in Drupal. This involvement becomes yet another reason to make a move to Drupal.

All appreciation to Laura for her kind words about yours truly, I doubt I’ll have any visible impact on the growth of Drupal, and Matt at WordPress will attest to the fact that I can be a real pain-in-the-butt to have as a user. To be honest, I think Drupal, itself, with its forward moves into semantics and SVG and related technologies, and the community around Drupal are what will have a positive impact on the growth of this tool. Enough to be a threat to WordPress? That’s a silly way of looking at it, because there’s plenty of business for WordPress AND Drupal, and yes, even Anil’s Movable Type. Everybody has different needs.

But, oh, I hate having to go through yet another tool switch.

Manilla->Radio->Blogger->MT->Wordpress->Drupal.

In the meantime, if you are a WordPress user, heads up, as change is coming at you. And if you see strange happenings around here…well, come to think of it, you always see strange things happening around my web sites, so, never mind.

Weblogging

Stormhoek: Shiny, happy people do Grapes 2.0

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 10, 2008

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Talk about webloggers being had…

Frank Paynter had a couple of odd posts about Stormhoek, the South African wine made famous by weblogging.

It would seem that Stormhoek was really nothing more than a concept in search of a vineyard in 2003, and now that some level of success has been reached, is scratching the vineyard. Or is that the true story?

According to another story, something calling itself “Stormhoek” in South Africa is trying to raise capital, by again depending on social media. This time, instead of hosting a dinner with free booze, the folks are asking people to buy a vine:

First, buy a vine. Then ride on the coat tails of Stormhoek’s powerful marketing campaign: blog about your purchase, send out a press release, tell your existing customer base about it. You will be aligning yourself with a feel-good story, that has a proven viral marketing value, and at the same time you will be doing some very, very good for the local wine industry.

But who is the real Stormhoek? And how powerful is that “viral marketing value” if the prime instigator behind the campaign is in Texas, snacking on Bar-B-Que, lecturing on marketing on a trip sponsored by the people who seemingly own the Stormhoek name, but not a drop of the grape?

From Grape Wine News:

The Stormhoek website is handling the situation with what one must assume is panache, and a continuation of its mastery of internet communication, by almost ignoring the financial collapse of the brand’s owners. It’s blog format has brief, downplaying coverage, wedged between rather longer entries on a marketing guru and a cartoonist. ‘While the issues are being sorted in the UK’, it says with rather splendid airiness, ‘back at the vineyard, we are busy thinking about harvest and the more mundane things we need to do to get wines made and in the hands of customers around the world.’

mundane things we need to do to get wines made… Like, having grapes?

Update

According to a UK trade publication, Off License, Hugh Macleod and the two who owned the original company that went bankrupt, Orbital, will be continuing the marketing campaign. There is no mention of the fact that the Stormhoek “name” is no longer associated with any actual vineyard. Or at least the new owner of Orbital’s assets, Origin’s Stormhoek is not associated with any vineyard.

One must be excused for displaying a sour face when hearing about the “success” of the Stormhoek marketing effort, after trying to wade through the mess that is Stormhoek. However, I won’t make a comment on the lack of transparency associated with this issue, because I’ve been reliably informed that the players associated with Stormhoek never promised transparency. It was another Web 2.0 pundit who promised transparency. The Stormhoek Web 2.0 pundit promised something that isn’t as interesting.

I frequently get my Web 2.0 pundits mixed up. It’s a failing of mine.

In the meantime, may I suggest a local wine? It’s not as chi-chi clever, but at least you know you’re paying for the grape, not the meme.

Second Update

An older article on the origins of Stormhoek confuses the issue of what is “Stormhoek” even more. Money quote:

Deal with it quickly and diffuse the situation politely. After a while the trolls will get bored and go home.

Weblogging

Bye Dare

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 5, 2008

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Now that’s really unhappy news this morning: Dare Obasanjo is quitting his weblog. Dare’s been around weblogging as long as I have, and I’m sorry to see him go.

Dare’s always had challenges with what he could write in his space. He’s an outspoken person who doesn’t hold back criticism, even about his own employer (Microsoft). In addition, he’s also the son of Olusegun Obasanjo, so anything he writes, or doesn’t write, bounces against a global political wall–not to mention it would creep me out to know I’m regularly read by most of my family members.

I can understand him saying, whoa, enough. But I’ll still miss him.

Technology Weblogging

WordPress at the top: not

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 28, 2008

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The biggest mistake I ever made was to install WordPress at the top level. The second, was to use “smart” URLs.

My site was restricted due to bandwidth overlimit this morning, something that shouldn’t have happened. When I checked my stats, one site, proxyit.com, was hammering my bandwidth. Checking the recent visitors list, this domain was grabbing my feed every minute, except it was grabbing the Burningbird feed, which was then redirected to the new combined feed, at http://burningbird.net/feeds/atom.xml.

This feed, created by the aggregator, Venus, hadn’t changed, but with the redirect, it was coming up fresh and sparkly new. Now, that doesn’t excuse the fact that this site was accessing it every minute, but I’m not sure that my twisted convoluted redirects to feeds wasn’t at least partially responsible. To make matters worse, I used an inline SVG object yesterday, which shouldn’t tax bandwidth limits overmuch…unless your feed is being hammered.

(Not to mention that using SVG inline absolutely killed my entry at Planet RDF…)

Of course, when I redirected my Burningbird main feed, /feed/ to atom.xml, this redirected all other variations of /feed, including /feed/atom, /feed/rdf, and so on. Not just for Burningbird, but all sub-domains, too. So I had to add more redirects, which attempted to bypass WordPress’s programmatic management of URLs. I had to so many redirects in my sites to get feeds to serve correctly, I wasn’t sure who was getting what. So I’ve removed all of them.

One of my site changes is to remove WordPress at the top level. I’m replacing it with a page generated by Venus that combines all feeds from WordPress installations in sub-domains. Each sub-domain gets its own WordPress installation. Some will get the full installation, and others will get my new semi-forked version that I’ve named Curmudgeon WordPress. Curmudgeon WordPress is a WordPress installation that has had all the reader interactive bits, such as ping back, registration, XMLRPC, and comments, and their associated includes and admin functions removed.

When I get all this finished, no more RDF feeds, no more RSS feeds. You get one feed for each WordPress installation, an Atom feed. And you get one overall feed generated by Venus, name and location TBD, generated once per day.

In the meantime, feeds may be a problem. My bandwidth may be exceeded. Yada yada, you know the rest.

Weblogging

A note on comments

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 2, 2008

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I noticed increased rumblings in Planet Intertwingly against anonymous commenters. I maintain a short lease on anyone commenting who doesn’t provide a real email address or who I don’t know, primarily because I don’t know if the person is putting an innocuous comment in to bypass ‘must have approved comment’ security for later spam. Other than that, though, I’m not adverse to anonymous comments.

I have, however, put all comments into moderation. I’m still attempting to make the comments XHTML-bullet proof, and ‘bad’ characters or markup in a comment breaks the page for everyone. With moderation, I can catch such breakage before it hits the published page. When I feel I have robust filters in place, I’ll turn open comments back on.

In addition, comments about spelling or grammatical errors, as well as those noting problems with the site technology, while appreciated and welcome, won’t be published. I consider comments of that nature more of a private note to me.

Yes, the SVG clock now reflects your time, not mine.