Categories
Weblogging

To my terraphile friends

I don’t know what it is about people who love gardens, but every time they leave a comment or send an email, or write a new post, I’m immediately uplifted and cheered by their writing. If more of us read gardeners, I think we’d all be happier.

As a thank you to my gardening and other plant loving friends–because this all is virtual and I can’t exchange cuttings with you, or offer you any fresh cherries or tomatoes–and in case you didn’t see this link– Sheila Lennon put together a page of links that has enough gardening weblogs and resources to make even the most dedicated terraphile blissful.

Is that a word, terraphile?

When I was taking a break from weblog writing, I still read weblogs, even commenting on some. I found that the political and/or historical posts either frustrated me or inspired me, the technical posts stimulated me, and the posts with photographs made me want to get off my butt and start going through some of my old photos.

But it was the posts by people writing about everyday life – movies, family, friends, sharing recipes and giggles, hikes and trips, and most of all, flowers – that made me feel good. Nothing wrong with just feeling good.

(Of course, a post like this requires photos. Lest you think that I won’t be posting photos much until I get my new camera, think again! I have about a thousand photos, never before published. I think I can find one or two, now and again, that will be passable enough to put online.)

Categories
Photography Weblogging

Port-a-bloggy

The issue of Missouri Life that featured my photo essay is out now, and the magazine did a wonderful job with the photo layout. I received two advance copies and it was difficult to part with these, but gave one to my Dad and one to my roommate. I have others on order for myself and a few friends and family members.

I haven’t been posting many photos lately because my digital camera has developed some interesting quirks. It’s not that it doesn’t work; it’s that it isn’t dependable, with lighting and focusing going in and out at the worst possible times. It’s a good camera, a great camera. But it’s been dropped on the ground at least twice, banged around in the car, and carried out into several major storms. I’m actually impressed it still works.

I took the following photograph of my Dad, after I visited in his new home last week. He finally agreed to move into assisted living, and now seems to love it. It’s a smaller place, with about 40-60 people, including several couples who have apartments together. It even allows cats, which surprised me. When I had a chance to glance at the menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I was even more impressed – this is not your typical cafeteria style food.

Dad

He has a one bedroom apartment, with a sitting room and kitchenette and nice bathroom. Strategically located throughout the apartment are intercom speakers and cords that Dad can pull if he needs help. He fell last week,and was able to pull the cord and get help immediately. I think this is reassuring to him, and he already looks much better than he has the last time I saw him – more alert, and involved in what’s going on around him. I’ll visit him again next Tuesday when the bookmobile visits the place and help him familiarize himself with how this works. He is a passionate reader, and since his hearing has been damaged by cancer treatments, reading is his main form of entertainment.

In addition to helping Dad get settled, I have resumed hiking. The following flower photo was from a recent walk, and I think, though I’m probably wrong that it might be a wild orchid. I don’t know enough horticulture to differentiate between flowers by characteristics.

The following photo was from another walk, and it demonstrates some of the lighting shift problems I’ve been having with the camera – going to the blue or to the yellow, rather than capturing the true colors. Even with a little help from Photoshop, I can’t quite correct it all the way.

As much as I like my Nikon 995, I need a new camera; one that can take images reliably (without interesting quirks) and at a resolution that publications prefer. Specifically, I’m aiming for the new Nikon D-70.

To raise money for my new camera, I’m starting a ‘port-a-bloggy’ business: helping people port to WordPress, move between tools, work with style settings, and even helping to customize people’s WordPress installation or other PHP/MySQL development work.

I recently helped Happy Tutor with some technical issues related to his site, and though he kept trying to get me to wear black leather and red lace, we managed quite nicely. I also helped American Street with stylesheet issues, as Kevin and the Street gang contemplate moving from MT to WordPress. This last weekend, I moved Doug’s site over from MT to WordPress, and added some customization to help him manage his comments.

If you’re interested in moving from MT to WordPress, want some customization of your WP weblog, or other PHP/MySQL or stylesheet help, let me know. And if you’ve been helped by my technical writings in the past and want to contribute a little to the camera fund, I would grateful. I’ve added links to both my Amazon and Paypal accounts in the sidebar.

Once I have the new camera in hand, I can resume filling my pages with bandwidth destroying images. Isn’t that something to look forward to?

Categories
Burningbird Weblogging

Source updates

I am regenerating the documentation of the PHP for my site and should have replacement pages up tonight. The pages will include my Talkback feature and comment editing. They won’t include the counter post technology, which I’ve removed.

I want to congratulate Jay Allan for winning the Six Apart contest. He deserves recognition for his hard work and I’m glad to see he got it.

This reminded me, though, that those who contribute plugins for other products, such as WordPress, also deserve recognition for the hard work they do. So I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to those who have provided documentation, plug-ins, or even inspiration for my own tweaks, including the WordPress development and documentation teamChris Davis, Mark from Weblog Tools CollectionCraig, and Carthik.

I gather that August 1st is WP Patch Day where plugin authors pick a bug to fix in the core. Though I’m working on converting the Redland Unix libraries to Windows in order to create a PHP extension (and having a bitch of a time with it–nothing to do with the Redland code; it’s my own rusty Visual Studio/C skills), I’m going to see if there’s a bug left to claim. And then that will be it for me.

Categories
Weblogging

Giving you control over your words

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am in the midst of taking what has amounted to an overly large first article for American Street, and attempting to edit it down for publication later today. Though the article is no longer than a good New York Times article, I’ve found that even among those who support the weblogging ‘long form’, there is limit to the number of words they’ll tolerate in one weblog posting. Perhaps this is for the best–less is more. Or as Shakespeare would say:

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.

As soon as the ruthless editing job is finished, I’ll post a link to the finished product. Or two or three.

In the meantime, I’ve also been a busy camper adding two major modifications to my site, both having to do with commentary.

There is an increasing trend lately to turn comments off completely; or only leave them on a brief time. This growing backlash to comments is due, in part, to problems with comment spammers or the hit-and-run Google bashers. However, much is due to the general abusiveness that occurs in comments that seems to be on the rise.

I have found that good, selective moderation mechanisms will help prevent most, if not all, the problems with the random Googler and the comment spammer. Unfortunately, though, this won’t help bring back intelligent and relatively civil discussion. Is turning off comments altogether the answer? What can we do from a technical perspective to deal with the growing hostility in comments?

I have formed a completely unfounded and without any data to back up the validity hypothesis. I think that the very nature of the comment mechanism can lead to some of the hostility.

We want to write in reaction to what a person has said, but we’re given a little bitty box to do it in. This makes it difficult to have a good feel for what we’re saying, even with preview. Then, once posted, we can’t go back and either edit or remove a comment we may come to regret. Whatever else we are, we’re human and humans react. Rather than providing technology built on the assumption of best or formal behavior, provide a mechanism that is built on the assumption of average or typical behavior.

That’s my hypothesis – the mechanisms and environment encourages quick and emotional reactions, and this leads to flamewars. The next step is to test it. Rather than join with others and turn comments off, I decided to experiment with the format. Where these changes will lead, I don’t know. But it will interesting to watch.

The first change I’ve made is added the ability to edit or delete a comment after you’ve made it. The only requirement is that you must do so using the same IP address you used when you made the comment in the first place.

Once you’ve left a comment – and it can be something simple like ‘hello’ to start – you’ll see an option called “Advanced Editing” on the comment author line; clicking this opens up a separate page with a very large comment box and buttons to help with inserting HTML markup into the text. I call this page, the Marius Modification Page named in honor of Marius Coomans who inspired these new modifications.

In the comment edit page, you can edit and re-edit the comment as much as you’d like, or even delete it, if you would prefer. Once deleted, that comment is gone; from the database, as well as the page. I will not keep comments around that others want removed–like some form of digital blackmail that I can bring out again and again to use to beat the person about the head. There’s been enough of this in the past.

(Frankly, I disagree with those that say the Internet is forever. Nothing is forever. Forever implies that nothing ever changes; that which is born never dies. Beauty has at its soul, change. The most brilliant words, the most priceless creations, the most profound thoughts, will fade over time. It may take a thousand, or even a millions years, but they will fade.)

I don’t know what this advanced editing capability will do to weblogging conversations. I think people will like being able to edit their typos; but there’s nothing stopping a person from making volatile remarks that others will respond to, and then they later go back and change or remove these remarks. That’s the risk to this type of experiment.

The second change I’ve made is a little more unique. Instead of just posting a comment, you can now write an entire post: to agree, refute, or even extend the original writing. These ‘counter posts’, as I’ve called them are genuine weblog posts – capable of getting comments and trackbacks, and having their own permalinks. They won’t show up on my front page; instead they’re listed at the bottom of the associated essay, right above the trackbacks and other comments. If there is enough interest in these, eventually these counter posts, and their associated trackbacks and comments will have their own sidebar entry.

The counter post editing page is a full page, with lots of room to write. You can save your work while you’re editing, and preview the page as many times as you want. However, once published, that’s it – no edits on this one. It’s a permanent post and the only way you can edit it again is if I change the state of it for you.

Once published, the counter post connected to whatever original post inspired the writing. When a person clicks on the link for it, the post opens into a separate page no different than any of the regular posts. The author can turn comments on or off; same for trackbacks. People can also reference the URL specifically.

This is one I will monitor, very closely. I would welcome agreement, disagreement, or even an interesting segue –but I won’t welcome sales pitches, ego stroking, or people using this space to get nasty at others. The whole point on this modification is to remove the artificial constraints of the current commenting medium in order to see what this does to the resulting conversations. The modfiication isn’t there to bring out the worst in people.

(Though do feel free to experiment with it in this post – please let me know what breaks.)

None of the code for these is available yet because both options are beta. I am experimenting with different text plugins and may add new features to both modifications. I am also, as a precaution, making nightly backups of my weblog database just in case something goes wrong.

Once tested, debugged, refined, and assured of their security, I’ll release code for both. These are drop-in modifications, and easily implemented in other weblogs.

update 

The counter post functionality has been edited to allow the original author to edit or delete the new post, as long as they reference the post from the same IP address.

Categories
Weblogging

Tweaks and talk

If this had been MT I would have been hammered with comment spam tonight. I added a little watcher on my logfile, and when it receives so many POST commands in a period of time, it sends me an email so I can monitor what’s going on.

It looks like I had about 500 POSTs, but nothing came through in a comment, because the POST is going to the wrong file. It was interesting watching though. Scattered amidst the spam POST attempts were referrer spams. The comment spammer is using a variety of proxies; the referrer spammer is using an open proxy from a Texas school district.

I’m also getting a lot of hits from Google for the phrase, “Google Email”.

Between all of these are hits from Googlebot, MSNBC bot, Yahoo bot, and various RSS aggregators. The Web never sleeps.

I re-implemented my Backtrack feature at the end of any posts that trackback to other weblogs. The only problem is, as I found in the last post, that WordPress doesn’t implement the “?__mode=rss” aspect of trackback. So now I have to decide the direction to take the tech. Should I add in the rss mode, and submit it as a change to WordPress? Or do something different with Backtrack? Regardless, I think I’m about due for another documentation update of my changes.

Speaking of changes, Marius Coomans wrote a note in Jonathon Delacour’s most recent post (which wiki fans will enjoy reading) about his dislike of the small comment boxes. He gave me an idea that I’m now in the middle of implementing. I was glad of this little inspiration, too, because I was beginning to think I didn’t have anything left to tweak with my weblog.

Since I brought up Backtracks and trackbacks, earlier, I wanted to mention that John Dvorak liked my ping from the last post. No seriously! He wrote me a note with Ha Ha. He deleted the ping, of course, but I did get the Ha Ha.

Which all you old time gardeners will recognize as a garden structure, usually consisting of a border or boundary that doesn’t block the view, but still keeps out the sheep.