Switching to WordPress

/ meta-blogging

I’d been using Movable Type for years, but had grown disenchanted with their dual-architecture of Perl+PHP. And I guess my life just wasn’t complicated enough. And I had the general sense that the Mandate of Heaven had shifted towards WordPress, so I’m using that now.

Making this page look as much like my old page as possible (with, I hope, some improvements) has been a good opportunity to learn about the software. I started by hacking on what must be the most complicated theme available, K2, which in hindsight was pretty dumb—I’ve pared away a lot its interesting bells and whistled, and added a few of my own.

Each platform has its pros and cons. WordPress has better management of static pages, and seems to have a more active developer community. Movable Type has some nice back-end tools that WordPress either lacks or can only offer via plugins. WP seems to have much cleaner and more effective spam-fighting tools (Spam Karma is pretty amazing). There’s a big conceptual difference between MT templates and WP themes—I’m more comfortable with the template idiom, so dealing with themes is taking some mental adjustment. MT’s tags are atomic—they correspond to a bare chunk of programmatically generated text. With WP, tags are function calls, in many cases producing formatted output with the format determined by an argument in the function. Getting at the atomic unit at all requires delving into the code to see what’s going on.

Somewhat to my chagrin, all my permalinks have changed in this process. And I’ve also lost all my folksonomic tags, but I knew that would happen. Come to think of it, I kinda knew that I’d lose my permalinks. But since the URL format is so very similar, it seems that someone who actually knows what he’d doing could probably write a ModRewrite htaccess doohicky to intercept invalid old URLs and figure out if they are near-misses for valid new URLs and redirect to those. Alas, I am not that person.

Big time

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You know you’ve made it when people think they can make money off you.

Austin Bloggers has been around as a loose community for years now, and is one of the older community-aggregator sites around. At last night’s meetup, two people attended because they see the community as an opportunity to make a buck.

One of these guys is not a blogger himself. He doesn’t have a blog. He does, however, have an excellent command of the most annoying buzzwords on the Internet today, which he flings around with unironic abandon as if this will impress us: his company is all “web 2.0” and “user-generated content.” Web 2.0 in this case apparently means “shiny” and user-generated content means “you fill up my site for no pay, and I make money off it!”

The other guy is a blogger, and has what sounds like an interesting blog, but again, he was there to sign up people for something that would benefit him: he’s developed a bit of code that bloggers can put on their blog-templates that will show a box with headlines from other bloggers in their community. This in itself is not particularly innovative (and has been implemented hundreds of different ways), although his has the interesting twist of putting together headlines from multiple sources. But the box always has a little link to a “sponsor” at the bottom. The sponsor has paid him money, he has given you this little code snippet, and in return, the sponsor gets to use your blog as part of a link-farm to get more google-juice. This guy at least had the good grace to realize that what he’s doing is slightly exploitative

Gosh, where do I sign up?

Old blog, new domain

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I’m back to using Movable Type, although I’m intrigued enough with WordPress that I may continue fidding with it behind the scenes.

One thing that really is new is my domain name—it looks as if that deal is going through. My old e-mail address should continue working for a few months, and there should be redirects for this and a few other subdirectories that should also last for that period, but now would be a good time to update your address book and bookmarks. Wherever you see “crossroads.net”, change it to “8stars.org” (or “eightstars.org” if you prefer—they both work).

Why 8stars? It’s an obscure visual pun. The Chinese character for rice, ç±³, looks like an 8-pointed star (in fact, the Japanese nickname for the asterisk is “kome-jirushi,” or “rice-mark”). You can see a stylized version of this character in the header of this blog—I’ve actually been using that mark for some time. I would have registered 8star.org, but someone else already had. So I went with the plural. 8pointedstar.org is just too damn verbose.

It is with some regret that I part with the old domain name: I’ve had it since 1994, and really thought I’d have it permanently. As silly as it may be, that domain name had become part of my self-image. There’s also a practical reason to regret it: having a durable e-mail address has allowed some people to contact me at that address even after many years of silence. The flipside, of course, is that I get an ungodly amount of spam. So there’s a silver lining. Plus, well, there’s the money. Not enough to retire on, but enough to make a significant difference in my retirement fund, buy a few toys, and go on a trip.

Comments hosed

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I’ve learned that comments aren’t working, for some extremely arcane reason that I have been unable to diagnose. I am preparing to switch to WordPress.

Later: Not exactly sure what I did, but comments are working now. Still contemplating a switch to WordPress.

Putting tagging to work

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I’ve previously noted the conversion of my sideblog to del.icio.us, partly so that I can take advantage of tagging. The whole tagging phenomenon has caught fire among the blognoscenti because it provides a quick and dirty–and effective and flexible–way to categorize content.

Technorati, the blog search-engine, has added a tagging facility–it finds del.icio.us entries, flickr photos, and blog entries with a given tag. In order to make these tags explicit, Technorati lets blog authors insert a rel="tag" attribute into a link in order to be treated as a tag by Technorati, though what many bloggers do not know is that as long as their software supports categories and/or keywords, and they are publishing feeds containing this data, Technorati will figure it out from that.

I’ve started assigning keywords to my posts, and am including all that data in my feeds. I’ve also decided to take advantage of Technorati’s tagging thing by creating direct links to its tag directories for each of my keywords. I’m still using categories as well, but I’m not creating Technorati links on category names–somehow it doesn’t quite feel right. Perhaps an information architect could diagnose my taxonomic malaise–all I can say is that tags are feel like they should be used to discover communal links; categories feel more idiosyncratic.

Anyhow, the result of linking to Technorati’s tag directories is something vaguely akin to trackback–it lets you see what other people are saying about the same subjects. It’s still somewhat primitive, but it’s a start.

It occurred to me that it should also be possible to extract links from a blog entry, search del.icio.us for that URL, find how other people have tagged it, and use the most popular tags as the blog entry’s tags, resulting in consensus tagging without even trying. There are some problems and interesting ramifications to this approach: 1) not every link I might use will be in del.icio.us; 2) I might not want to use the consensus tags; 3) the consensus tags will change over time–this, in my opinion, is the most interesting and most problematic part of the idea; 4) I’d have to do more programming work, and I’m lazy.

Pardon the dust

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The upgrade to MT3 has been going less than smoothly. I’m starting from scratch, with a new blog and old data. I’ll gradually be adding back in features of the old blog.

Spammed

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I just got hammered by a trackback spammer (I wonder if that recent Register article had anything to do with it). Trackbacks are offline until I get this sorted out.

Later — updated to MT3

Getting with the program

/ meta-blogging, net stuff

Del.icio.us is a “social bookmarks manager,” or in plain English, a web page that lets you keep a list of interesting websites. What makes it interesting is that it lets you use tags to classify your links a rough-and-ready sort of way (this kind of undisciplined tagging is now sometimes called “folksonomy”), lets you see links from other people with the same tags (or any tags) and shows you how many other people link to a given URL.

I’ve been keeping a “hit and run” blog for some time, and this fulfills the same role for me as del.icio.us would, but I had been unwilling to switch over two del.icio.us for a couple of reasons: 1. The data doesn’t live on my machine; 2. It’s not easy to control the presentation–it is possible to republish your del.icio.us links on your own page, but you’re kind of stuck in terms of presentation. There are ways to get at the data programmatically, but that involves programming, and that means work, and I’m lazy.

But I finally decided to sit down and figure it out (as a way to avoid something even harder: my current translation job). Somebody has already provided a library of PHP tools for messing with del.icio.us, and I know just enough about PHP to get myself in trouble. Here’s what I did [caution: entering geek mode]

…

Getting with the programRead More »

How I use Movable Type

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Since Mena asked so nicely, here’s my setup.

My MT database has seven blogs in it:

  1. This blog–this and the next two would probably count as a single blog under Six Apart’s current licensing;
  2. My “hit and run” blog;
  3. My “longer articles” blog;
  4. Instructions for making firedancing equipment. This isn’t very bloggy, but it was more convenient to do this in MT than all by hand;
  5. The Honyaku Home Page. This has five authors (though only two others, aside from me, are really active). Also not very bloggy, but MT is a good enough CMS for the purpose;
  6. Jenny’s personal blog;
  7. A test blog.

I’ve thrown up a few other demo blogs here and there under this install, but those have all been temporary.

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