I mentioned recently that I’ve started using Google Reader to cope with the dozens of blogs and other feeds that I read each day. As Art pointed out, Reader has a feature whereby you can tag individual items as “Shared”, and they will then show up on a publicly-accessible page. I’m taking this one step further, and adding a sidebar item to my blog that shows the last 10 few items that I’ve shared. Enjoy!
Category: Admin
Bizarre blog factoid
Almost a year ago, I posted a blog entry linking to a short MP3 recorded by Alec when he was in hospital in Lille, following his motorcycle accident. Ever since then, this MP3 has represented between 20 and 45% of the data served from geoffarnold.com. Last month, for example, it was retrieved 558 times for a total of 944MB. During the same time, Google Analytics reports that I had 2,007 visitors who visited 2,827 times and generated 4,239 pageviews – but none of these retrieved the page that linked to the MP3.
So who’s fetching Alec’s podcasts, I wonder? I can’t be bothered to dive into the HTTP logs, but I am curious.
Upgraded to WP2.2
I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.2. The only issue that I ran into was that the Category Cloud widget didn’t work until I upgraded from 1.1.1 to 1.3. Otherwise, it was completely painless: deactivate plugins, unpack the distro zip on top of the existing files, run the upgrade.php script, and reactivate plugins. ((Remembering to jot down which plugins I was running before the upgrade…)) No, I didn’t make a backup, although perhaps a zfs snapshot would have been prudent….
As to the new features: having sidebar widgets built-in is nice, and the drag-and-drop widget editor now works properly in Safari. On the other hand, I’m not sure about the new preview mode: it’s more accurate, but I miss having the HTML and output on the same page. We’ll see. Having full ATOM support is most welcome, and overall I think that 2.2 is a clear step forward.
Recent connections….
You may notice a few additions to the side-bar of this blog. While I don’t want to add any advertising, I do want to promote the causes I believe in. So there are now links to Stop Honour Killings, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
I’m also linking this blog into the atheist blogosphere. Geoffarnold.com is now part of planetatheism.com and the Atheist Blogroll. We actually need a better visualization approach to clusters of related blogs – planet-style aggregators don’t scale, because stuff scrolls off too quickly, and linear blogrolls definitely don’t scale beyond a couple of hundred. Something like a tag cloud with AJAX might be the answer.
Just a little test of a new WP plugin
I tend to use footnotes for article attribution and stuff like that, and realized that there must be an easier way than banging out the HTML markup by hand. ((Of course muscle memory does most of the work.)) So I’ve just installed Simon Elvery’s footnotes 0.9 plugin, and this post is intended to check it out. Text to be footnoted is introduced with “space-openparen-openparen” and ended with “closeparen-closeparen”. ((Obviously I’m not going to simply type in that text, because the plugin would process it. And I’m feeling too lazy to look up the HTML entity codes for parentheses.))
So let’s see what it looks like. (/me clicks “Save and Continue”, and inspects the preview.) Not bad. Ideally the footnote text, and even the numbering style, should be styled using the CSS, but that would involve more installation complexity; right now this is simply a single PHP file installed in wp-content/plugins
. I might tweak the markup to add <small>
and </small>
((Some HTML entities don’t need to be looked up.)), and to reduce the vertical spacing.
UPDATE: After seeing the author‘s comment here, I upgraded to the latest version ((currently 1.4)) of the plugin, which has all sorts of nice configuration options. Thanks, Simon – and perhaps you could edit the old blog entry to indicate that the 0.9 version has been superceded! Google has a long memory…
A fresh look
I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1.1, and while I was in the mood I decided to update the look and feel. Ever since the WordPress “widget” mechanism was introduced last year, theme designers have been cranking out some really beautiful styles, and I spent a happy hour browsing through the latest offerings. Eventually I picked MistyLook by Sadish Bala, and customized it with a header clipped from a photograph I took of a stormy Boston skyline as seen from Brookline. I wanted a simpler, cleaner look, and I think this works well. My one concession to fashion was to replace the traditional “category” list with Lee Kelleher’s “Category Cloud Widget”.
My WP setup
Art wanted to know which WP plugins I used, and why. Here’s the current list:
- Akismet 2.0: Checks comments against the Akismet web service to detect spam. Everybody should be using this.
- Bad Behavior 2.0.5: Detects and blocks spambots based on a temporal analysis of their behaviour.
- Snap Preview Anywhere 1.1: A little AJAX tool that generates web page previews when you mouse-over links. Opinions are divided, but I like it.
- WP-CC 0.1.2: Handles the Creative Commons licenses – but since the page footer is slightly broken in the current theme, you don’t see it at work right now.
- Sidebar Widgets 1.0.20060711: Lets me define the sidebar in terms of a set of widgets that I can re-order, drag-and-drop, individually reconfigure, and so forth. The next three plugins depend on this.
- Category Widget Replacement 0.4: Customizes the category widget.
- Drop-down Archive Widget 0.2: Self-explanatory.
- Drop-down Links Widget 0.1: Self-explanatory.
When I get around to it, there are a couple of other widgets I want to configure, including the one for del.icio.us links and Christian Maniewski’s I Read Straight which is supposed to simplify the presentation of “what I’m reading”. (Right now I simply plug generic code from the Amazon.com Associates Central link-builder page into a text widget, which means that I have to hand-edit the ASINs.)
That’s it. Hope it was useful, Art.
OK, the upgrade seems to have worked – but be careful
I think this blog is back to a working state now after a slightly worrying upgrade process. Those of you who plan to upgrade tp WordPress 2.1 need to be careful. In particular, if you use the Sidebar Widgets feature, you must pay particular attention to the order in which you deactivate your plugins. I’m not exactly sure what I did, but I usually run about a dozen plugins, and halfway through the process of deactivation the WordPress dashboard stopped working. Oops. I worked around the problem by going into the httpdocs/wp-content
directory and renaming plugins
as Xplugins
. Then I unpacked the new distribution, which overwrote the existing WP files and created a new plugins
directory. (WP 2.1 ships with a new version of the Akismet spam-blocker.) Next I ran the upgrade script, activated Akismet, and verified that baseline operation was correct. Only then did I restore my old plugins from Xplugins
to plugins
, activating and testing each one. I didn’t restore those plugins that I wasn’t planning to use. (Before I began the upgrade, I printed out the Plugins dashboard page, so that I could see exactly which plugins were in use.)
The only other oddity was that I had previously organized my blogroll using a set of pseudo-categories that didn’t show up in the category list. Somehow the upgrade process merged these pseudo-categories into my main category list. I took the opportunity to recategorize my blogroll, and everything looks OK. I decided not to reactivate a few features that weren’t much used by my readers – things like registering for comment notification. Let me know if you run into any problems.
There are some nice features in the new release. The one that is most immediately obvious to me (as a Mac user) is that the HTML formatting controls which used to work only in Firefox now appear in Safari. Comment and post management is also substantially improved.
UPDATE: One last warning. If you use the “bookmarklet” technique [a fragment of Javascript invoked via a browser bookmark] to blog from your web browser, you’ll need to replace your old script with a new one. Delete the old one from your bookmark bar, then log in to the dashboard, choose Write, and scroll down. Then just follow the instructions.
About to upgrade – things may be temporarily weird
I’m about to upgrade geoffarnold.com from WordPress 2.0.6 to 2.1. While I’m doing this, I’ll have to disable a bunch of features, so things may look a bit weird for a while….
Upgrade
I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.6. If you notice anything (unintentionally) odd, please let me know. (But try shift-reload first, in case you’ve just got a stale cache.)