CogBlogged from ‘April, 2005’

Wow, another great WordPress characteristic– publishing entries from ecto to WordPress seems almost instantaneous! Previously, clicking “Publish” to MovableType was a minute or more of grinding as MT had to not only put content in the database, but crank through and republish indexes, entry pages, category pages, etc. With WordPress is just goes into the database and you are done. I am loving it.

Good writing. Personal viewpoints. That’s what its all about. Tom Caotes’ A Horseless Carriage provides a well written, personal perspective on the evolution of weblogs, but he writes not strictly about the history, and more on a broader definition This means that whatever you’re planning to use weblogs for, then you’ll fid them most naturally useful if you keep the individual at the heart of the enterprise. That means if you’re interested in knowledge management, or in community generation or in using them for publishing or whatever, then you should keep that idea of an individual voice at the centre of your thinking… But it’s all got to be about the individual. And my preferred way of expressing that is that a weblog is a representation of a person. I think that’s behind all of the definitions that people came up with before. I think that’s the core principle that [...]

Ok, chipping away more at the WP templates. One of my blog software critcisms is the notion that an “archive” listing is just a bunch of the posts in a category or date range all glued together (see “All Your Archives Are Wrong”). To be honest, I should poke more through the WordPress docs and better understand the template system, but I am more prone to hack away at the templates until they do what I like. So I just monkeyed a bit to get WordPress playing my way. First for the Date archives, edit the archive archive.php template, changing the portion that reads: <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <div class="post">   <h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"    rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">    <?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>   <small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>      <div class="entry">     <?php the_excerpt() ?>   </div>   <p class="postmetadata">Posted in <?php the_category(', ') [...]

My tirade of being an iPodless podcaster are no more! That’s correct, pod fans, I have a new iPod Shuffle, courtesy of my Mom in Florida as a birthday gift– I had put it on my list of “wishes”, so in her words: I don’t know what it is or what it does, but the nice young lady in Best Buy helped me pick it out. So I put it to use today on my bike commute in to work; no podcasts loaded yet, but I enjoyed my mix of crusty old 60s and 70s rock n’ roll. It’s so light, and simple to operate, especially in comparison to the iRiver I was borrowing from work. I like the iRiver for its recording functionality, so it reminds me of the last podcast I listed to on that device, the ETch session by Donald Norman on “Emotional Design”. It was hard [...]

Well, humph, Apple, is well, updating in a rather… um… “Redmondian” way. The OS X 10.3.9 update has done a few things to Safari (I still cannot find the supposed HTML editor, but viewing RSS feed URLs looks even worse in the browser window). But here is a real kicker. While updating my new blog feed links, I noticed the default WP theme uses the URL notation: feed:http://cogdogblog.com/feed/ and clicking that link in Mac OS X 10.3.9 presents this lovely pitch: Yuck. Bad form. Okay, it hardly affects most links, and I have adjusted my footer template to just link directly to the RSS URL. But what does this sort of alert box really do for Apple? I love my Mac, I love Apple design and products, we have Tiger on order, but things like this and the stupid QuickTime Pro registration box that pops up on my PeeCee (I [...]

I just wrote a itty bitty PHP script to deal with my 800+ imported MovableType posts- as far as my newbie eyes could see, the Permalink URLs contstructed from these were producing some 3 mile URLs because the format I used based on the post name. On new WP entries, I have options to create a “slu”, a shorter URL name used for Permalinks. The task was to walk the database and re-write the values for postnamein the posts table to a shorter string. The script merely reads in the current postname (basically the title all converetd to lower caase with “-” replacing spaces” from the table, split it into a pHP array based on the hyphen, and if there were more than 2 “chunks, e.g. “my-really-big-long-winded-blog-post-makes-a-long-url”, it updates the row in the database with just the first two pieces. It’s not the greatest approach, but our domain is long [...]

I feel like a gleeful, wet by the ears, just discovered blog software newbie. On one hand I hate starting over, giving up a system I knew insanely well, into a place where I am operating with 12 thumbs. Last night I jumped too quickly into the Theme land, so as WordPress is so easy to swap, I rolled back to the default, looks like everyone elses blog of Kubrick theme. But I could not resist, and rolled in my own custom header. I have a bit more learnin’ to do with the style sheet structure. Yes, I will add some static/fixed pages- I love that feature. Next on the priority list is to learn how to create shorter URL slugs- WP seems to only offer to create URLs out of the full titlew string, and there must be a way to tell it to use say the first 20 [...]

Wow. What can I write but a big, stinkin’ WOW. I literally spent the advertised 5 minutes to install WordPress. I especially liked the install steps: Where you expecting more steps? Sorry to disappoint you Using the instructions in the WordPress Codex, I was able to so easily import 867 MovableType entries, I thought it could not be true. Using the collection of suggestions, I exported the MT blog as a ginat 3 Mb text file. I followed the suggestions, and used BBEdit to convert the file encoding to UTF-8, uploaded to my wp admin area, and ran the script. Shazam! That was too friggin easy. The power, the interface, and the features I am just scraping at are exciting, almost like discovering blogging anew. I should have done this long ago! Anyhow, rather than try and get everything lined up, I will announce now over at the Movable Type [...]

I’ve been seeing references to something called “Web 2.0″ — was there some sort of Internet upgrade while I was sleeping? Am I out of date? (Note for new readers- this is sarcasm) I see folks are aiming to define it precisely. While I accept, support, participate in the notion that web content as we use/see it is evolving to something more than hand spun HTML static content (a good thing), but what the heck does defining a moving target get you? Does it mean all of the Web 1.0 is obsolete, like showing up for your high school reunion driving a Yugo? I don’t think attributes define things that cleanly- there are plenty of web content that is static, may have an ampersand in its URL (??), lacks RSS (it is great, but not everything needs it), etc that is still good, valid, interesting content. Or let’s not classify, [...]

I just added a new feature to this blog’s templates, likely the last tweak I will do as I am rather dead set on moving soon to WordPress (especially after seeing D’Arcy’s demo of the flickr gallery plugin). The new feature is a link along the front page and archive pages (and individual entries) where the line has links for comments, trackbacks, etc that says “IM this”. Clicking the link will open an iChat/AIM client chat window with the URL in the chat entry area, so all you need to do is pick a buddy to share the URL with. Stealing this from Preshrunk’s entry on “Feature Creep” (who stole it from someone else, go stealing!), it is a simple matter of a link that looks like: &lt;a href=aim:goim?message=http://www.blah.com/blog/the/url/for/this/post"&gt;IM this&lt;/a&gt; where in MovableType templates it looks like: &lt;a href=aim:goim?message=&lt;$MTEntryPermalink$&gt;"&gt;IM this&lt;/a&gt; Okay, this is pretty low on the potential use scale, [...]