One week to go for the the next CotG and I thought I’d remind you that we have a theme and the theme is: Impossibilities.
At the moment I have received 14 submissions which tells me that by the end of the week I may have quite a few of them. A few of them can even fit the theme but only unfortunately one was explicitly crafted for this carnival.
Come on people, we’re talking about religion here. There’s certainly enough ideas to go around. Haven’t you had enough about Politics? I know I’m sick and tired of reading about Palin in the Atheosphere. Yes she’s an incompetent Cretinist. We get i already.
But I digress.
So this post is basically a reminder for the theme of the 102nd CotG. Lets see how it turns out.
If there’s one thing that online services like this provide is a voice for all the people who’s opinions would never be presented in the traditional media. When those online services take our voices away because they just feel like it, I say that it’s time to move on. They already have a shaky relationship with Atheists but this should be the last straw for many of us.
Like so many things in life, they need us, we do not need them.
Without people using Youtube, it wouldn’t be the online power it is today. I can already foresee that many people will say that Youtube is what everyone is using and thus you don’t have a choice if you want audience. Well, like partisan politics, this is only in your head and it hurts you when you do not realise it. You do have a choice, you just have to use it.
At the moment, many users are protesting the latest ban by reposting the removed video. This is all well and good but, and I hope to be proved wrong, Google is too big, you made them too big. They don’t give a toss. Especially for a few dozen vocal atheists.
Do you want to protest? Take your ball and go home. Make a public statement and invite your subscribers to join you. If there’s anything Youtube is taking note, that is market share. If they were to lose 50k users overnight, they might stand up and take notice.
But where should one go? Well, there are of course dozens of youtube clones out there (many of them considerably better than) but that’s also a problem by itself, for who’s to say that tomorrow that service is not going to start banning your videos as well?
This is why I’m proposing you use something a bit different. Namely Vuze
Image via CrunchBase
What is Vuze
Once upon a time, there was a BiTtorrent client called Azureus. It was the best of the bunch. Eventually they decided that P2P can also serve as a great way to serve content without having the immense costs associated with hosting everything on your own server.
They became Vuze
Now you have a service where the content is not held by them but rather by everyone who is using it. They only handle the portal/library and that’s about it. When you publish something to Vuze, you get to keep it as does anyone else who has seen it.
Yes, Vuze does retain the right to remove content from the portal as well but looking from where they started, I believe they will not be as trigger happy as Youtube, plus if things get out of hand.
Other than that, there are a few other very solid benefits to using Vuze.
You are not limited to posting Videos. You can post any kind of file you wish.
You can upload at any quality you wish, at any size you wish, at any length you wish. No need to split in 10 minute segments.
Did I mention that Vuze is a full fledged BitTorrent application? That means that you don’t have to use Vuze only but can use, say, The Pirate Bay as well 😉
Friends and stuff but with quite a lot of extras. One of these extras is that you can share interesting torrents with your friends over a secure connection. I.e. torrents that you found in the aforementioned Pirate bay, or even your own homemade torrents for files you have on your disk.
It’s free software. This means that it’s more ethical and it gets very fast improvements. Plus whatever happens, it will never go away.
So there you have one proposal. I’m certain others will have other services that are good as well but I tend to always side with the ones who have Free Software roots. Better for everyone that way.
Youtube has dropped the ball on Atheist heads one too many times now and unless people take a definite action, they’ll just keep doing it, similar to politicians who get elected no matter what.
And that’s my two cents on this.
UPDATE: It seems youtube has reinstated the Video. Apparently it was organised muslim activists who flagged the video for removal. If that is indeed the case, then Youtube needs to, at the least, give a warning to the ones that flagged it and, my personal suggestion would be to dissalow flagging from those people in the future. They’ve already proved that they abuse the system for their own agendas.
Glenda Watson Hyatt is a severely disabled person (Cerebral Palsy) who has used blogging through WordPress to expand her social life and get an online voice. Simply WordPress has changed her life and for this she has crafted the following video ((h/t Internetakias)).
[youtube]ajqq9bHomn8[/youtube]
If a person who can only use the computer through her left thumb can find WordPress easy enough to use then certainly all of you can do it as well.
So I am going to be your next host for the Carnival of the Godless and I am planning to make it a bit more interesting than simply having a list of links. I was a bit disappointed on how the 100th version turned out so I’d like to make something more memorable, something like the Pulp Edition. Of course I can’t really make such good art to go along with ((And I wouldn’t say no if anyone wanted to help with that)) it but I will at least try to make it as memorable.
So here’s what we’re going to do:
1. It’s going to be thematic
The theme in this carnival will be something a bit fitting to this blog’s name: Impossibilities.
Submissions dealing with Absurdities, Oxymorons, Inanities and even horrible facepalms are all going to be given the limelight in the version of the CotG. That does not mean that anything not dealing with these will be rejected but any post that belongs to the theme will be immediately pushed to the top and will have more care given to it’s presentation
So if you have something ready on this subject, go right along and send it. If not, well now is the time to spend some effort to make a better edition 😉 If you site down for a bit and think about it, I’m certain you’ll have many ideas on this subject. But please, I know it’s tempting but don’t swamp me with Sarah Palin related submissions 😉
2. It’s going to be storytold
I really want to avoid just posting a simple collection of links with a very short description as is what seems to be happening in almost all recent CotGs. That’s just boring. Thus, I’m going to attempt and weave an actual story out of the submissions sent. This is why it’s doubtly helpful to have sumbissions that fit the theme, as such will be easier to weave into the story.
I already have a rought concept of how it’s going to go but the actual story will be decided by the kind of submissions I have to work with. Stories that don’t fit the theme, I will try to use as well but I may end up just posting them as links at the end if I can’t see a way to include them.
I’ve already started getting submissions which is something I didn’t expect. I was hoping I had the time to write this post before people started sending. Due to this, feel free to send a replacement post if you have something more fitting to the theme but I would also ask you to spread the word a bit so that more people are aware of this.
Let’s hope this works out. Cheers for impossibilities.
Last.fm is one of the top, if not the best music service out there and it’s something I’ve been using for quite a while now. While last.fm includes things like groups, friends, forums and other aspects of a social network, your activities in these was never provided. In the latest version these activities (new friends, loved songs etc) were shown in the form of a little block in the sidebar but unfortunately there has been no way to grab that for use in Complexlife.
I knew there is a way to get these activities somehow as Friendfeed does show you when you love a track but having asked directly about it in the forum, I was told that getting this in a feed was just not an option.
Fortunately web-mastered stepped up and created a yahoo pipe which grabs the last.fm latest activities API and returns it as a feed. Very useful but unfrotunately I noticed that it wasn’t exactly in the format I needed. If I used that in Complexlife then you would only see the title (a generic “New activity from <username>”) and having no date info in the feed, b0rked the sort by date of Simplepie.
Thus I had to modify the pipe in a way that
Made the content become the title of the post (removing any html which might break Complexlife)
Provide the date in the RSS so that the item can be sorted
Creating the title
It took me a while to figure it out, but making the content become the title was the easiest part of it all. Since yahoo pipes provides a handy renaming function, all I needed to do is tell it to rename the content as the title
Renaming the content as Title
The first part copies the whole content as the date field. I will later use this get the date. The second part renames the current content to the title so that it is displayed in whole. If I didn’t do it, I would get only part of the content displayed with elipsis after 30 characters or so.
Now I need to remove all the html code the activity stream has in. As it includes links to my profile as well as to artists and tracks, this would break the link complexlife puts for each row. The only way to remove the unecessary parts is of course through regular expressions and yahoo pipes gives exactly that function.
Removing the unnecessary parts from the content
This part actually goes before the renaming/copying as I remove various parts I also don’t need from the date field. Thus when I copy, I save duplicating the work.
The most interesting part is the previous the last field, wherein I tell it to remove all html tags (anything between < and >) and all their settings (i.e. target=”_blank”). Thus I’m left with the title in plain text.
Creating the date
This was a more tricky part as not only does the last.fm activity stream API consider it a good idea to put the date on the content but it also puts it in as a relevant entry to the current date.
Putting the date in the correct field was the easy part as all I needed to do was copy the content in the date field and remove everything except the date. As right before the date there was a fullstop, it was fairly simple to use another regex to delete anything until the last fullstop
With a little regex magic, anything except the date is gone
The more difficult part was to make the relevant fuzzy date to become something that is expected to be in an RSS feed, which is something very specific in time and format. Fortunately, I noticed that there is a specific module that does exactly that: Date builder. How convenient.
Unfortunately this module accepts only strings so I could not really parse my whole feed through it unless I had a loop. Oh wait…
With a loop I can make all date items in the correct format
Sweetness. Unfortunately one problem remains which is that because the date provided is always fuzzy, I end up getting a rolling date for the item each time the pipe is run. For example, an item which has a date of “one month ago” today will point to Aug 28, tomorrow on Aug 29 etc. There’s not much I can do about it other than wait until (and if) last.fm deems it worthy to give us a proper feed.
And now my new shiny feed is in exactly the format I need to have for Complexlife to use it. A little hacking later and version 0.9.8 is ready to go. The last.fm activity stream is finally lifestreamable 🙂
After the recent exciting events I thought it is time to attempt and convince the guys behind Intense Debate to open up their code to the Free Software community and as a result reap all the known benefits such an action will produce.
Image by pt via Flickr
After the recent exciting events I thought it is time to attempt and convince the guys behind Intense Debate to open up their code to the Free Software community and as a result reap all the known benefits such an action will produce.
I’ve been thinking of proposing something like this to them for a while but with all the recent alpha testing, convention-going and all the rest they were doing, I thought it might just fall through the cracks. However their acquisition from Automattic embolded me to go ahead and propose it.
I absolutely think that such a move will be an extreme success, both in terms of popularity and development. Currently they are being outfeatured by their main competitor, Disqus who has already managed to rollout the version 2 of their wordpress plugin and also have various other necessary features like trackbacks (including trackback agnostic platforms like blogger).
Opening the source will also allow all the ideas that are currently waiting on the backburner to be worked on by anyone interested to have them. IDC can then just keep control of the commits and with two or three dedicated developers totally outrun everyone else.
There are of course more benefits other than fast development. For one, they will finally be able to put their wordpress plugin in the Plugin Codex so that we can get automatic upgrades. It will also open up the system to people with very specific needs who cannot currently use it. Those people could simply install it locally and tweak it for their own uses without taking up valuable support time.
So if you like this idea, go ahead and vote it up. All you need is a Get Satisfaction account and to click a button. Show them how popular this will be.
I would also love to hear any other ways you can think of that liberating the source will help. We can then use those as extra reasons for them to switch. Of course, if you have reasons why this would not be a good idea, also speak up. Lets discuss it 😉
Automattic is one of my favorite companies. Not only because they make the best blogging platform but because they are doing it through free software and good ethics. When IDC announced that they would be using Akismet for spam control, I was glad. Now that I know that they are wholly under the umbrella of the Automattic group, I’m stoked!
IDC has already shown amazing support for WordPress. Their new plugin (which I’m testing in the Alpha version) already has awesome features that make your comment managing so much less of a headache. Now that they have the people with the definite wordpress knowledge backing them, the features and integration can only grow better.
I’m getting more excited just by thinking of the possibilities.
One thing that I’m certain will follow from this, is that we are finally going to have ID Comments on WordPress.com. As other have said, the default comment system of wordpress is in dire need of an overhaul. While definitelly superior to blogger’s (not only in comments), it is still lagging behind in necessary features for a good discussion, one of which is good threading.
Unfortunately, due to the limited nature of WordPress.com, it meant that individual users could not install either IDC or any of their competitors but now that Automattic got them, we can all foresee what will follow. WordPress.com is about to get (even better).
The only way blogger can now keep up, is if Google acquires Disqus, which I don’t find as very far fetched to tell you the truth. At least then blogger might get a decent commment system at last.
So, for all of you who have not yet jumped on the IDC bandwagon, especially if you’re self-hosting WordPress, there’s no better place than now to join.
Unfortunately for now, IDC has gone back to invitation only so if you want to try, let me know and I’ll try and get you a code if you can’t wait 😉
The most interesting parts is the Feeds option which allows you to import your favorite feeds into zemanta and have it find posts available there, that are relevant to your content. By using the friends function and simply adding you twitter contacts (yet another reason why you should join the twitter atheists) you can simply select the ones you want to follow. Plus, mybloglog became more useful now 😀
With the huge amount of atheist blogs, this is certainly going to come in handly in facilitating interlinking to others in the Atheosphere (whereas before you just had to have something available). Now I can easily start writing something about ethics, and get some stuff from, say, the Atheist Ethicist to add.
The other one I like is that you can now filter you image results. This was sorely needed as you very often have an idea on what to put as a image but zemanta does not give you the option. This has finally become better than photodropper now since it is both faster, and you get previews and you get to see more sources than simply flickr. Plus, you can tell it to only grab your own stuff if you have a flickr account 😉
I’ve just discovered a little plugin, Zemanta ((h/t sudobash)), that claims it can make my blogging easier and I was wondering how true that might be. Thus this post, which is party a test to check the capabilties.
Apparently what this plugin does it that it finds related pictures, tags, links and articles to your post content and proposes them for you to use. I am already using the Photo Dropper Wordpress plugin which can find for me Creative Commons licensed content in flickr that is related to my post, but Zemanta promises to take this a step further.
Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase
I’ve just discovered a little plugin, Zemanta ((h/t sudobash)), that claims it can make my blogging easier and I was wondering how true that might be. Thus this post, which is party a test to check the capabilties.
Apparently what this plugin does it that it finds related pictures, tags, links and articles to your post content and proposes them for you to use. I am already using the Photo Dropper WordPress plugin which can find for me Creative Commons licensed content in flickr that is related to my post, but Zemanta promises to take this a step further.
Currently it comes in the form of either a browser or a server plugin. The first form would be appropriate for someone who does not want to load up his blogs with extra scripts and generally blogs from the same place always (say, home). The second form, for which I went for, is better for someone who might blog from 2-3 different locations.
As I’m using it, it looks quite good. I especially like the automatic tag suggestions, and while there are other plugins that can do the same, it’s good that you don’t need 4 different installations. The only thing that wasn’t obvious is that you need to save your article at least once before suggestions start coming in. However once they start, they update every 300 words to give you stuff more relevant to what you are typing in.
So I think I’ll keep it. I’ve already installed it in various of the blogs I manage and I think it will be especially useful for people who just don’t have much time to look around for images or think of tags.
In this article I want to write an easy, step-by-step guide on how you can transfer your blog from a free account hosted in Blogger to a Dreamhost powered WordPress installation. I’m writing this now as my memory is quite fresh from my recent migration and hopefully this will come useful to others who might be thinking of doing this themselves.
Select “Host a Domain” as the other choice is just to get a new domain name through Dreamhost
In Step 2 Select the yearly option as it’s the most sensible for someone with a low budget.
In Step 3 You don’t need to select anything unless you plan to run a lot of heavy scripts and have a bit of traffic.
In Step 4, Uncheck Google Apps if you want to use Dreamhost’s custom options. This is a good option if you just a WordPress blog for now. You can always turn it up later.
In Step 5, leave it as it is, and type the domain name you would like and a username for your ftp access.
In Step 6, fill your information in.
In Step 7 type dbzer0 to get 20$ off or dbzero@gmail.com if you want to be extra nice to me 😉 Check the Box and go to Payment
Go through the payment stuff and wait until you receive the “DreamHost Account Approval Notification!” email.
Follow the email link and put your credentials to find yourself in your Panel.
Setting up your domain
You’ll find yourself in the Overview pane. From here you can follow various links to manage your stuff. Start by clicking the Manage Domains button (Also found in the sidebar under “Domains”)
If you created a new domain in the previous part, you should see it now in the list. Press the “Edit” Button next to the “Delete” button in the middle.
In the next screen the only things you should change are the following
Switch your PHP version to 5.x. PHP 4.x is obsolete and you’ll run into problems with plugins and the like if you keep using it.
Further down where it says “How do you like the www in your URL?” don’t leave it as “both”. Select the “remove www.” as this will help Search engines find you better.
Press “Change fully hosted setting now!” to complete this step.
Installing WordPress
Now that our domain settings are ready, lets go ahead and setup our WordPress installation. Start by heading over to One-Click installs (from the sidebar it’s under “Goodies > One-Click Installs”
Click “Install new software (Advanced Mode)” (Easy mode is similar hosting it on wordpress.com)
Preparing wordpress to be installed
WordPress should be already selected so simply scroll down. You should see an image similar to the screenshot on the left.
In “Install to” you should see your domain. Leave it as it is, unless you want your wordpress site to a subfolder of your domain (ie /blog/). However I don’t recommend this. First because you can later on configure wordpress to show your posts under something like that and secondly because you’ll have to create some kind of splash or home page on your domain root for people falling there. This will probably be different from your site and won’t be counted in your wordpress stats.
In “Select database to use” you should have the option to write your own database name. The default probably will not work so change it to something obvious for you. An example is yourblogname_wp_db
In Hostname, you can just leave it as it is.
In Creating a user for the database, you can simply create the same user as for your ftp access so to cut down on things you have to remember. You’ll probably never use this anyway so it’s easy to forget if you put something new.
Press “Install it for me now”. it will load for a bit and then the page will reload and on the top you should see something similar to this:
Within 5 to 10 minutes, you should receive an email telling you that your installation is ready.
Setting up your WordPress and importing from Blogger
Our Blog Waiting
Now that you’ve received the funky Dreamhost email follow the handy instructions within.
Go to the install link and create your first user.
Login to your site
That’s it. Your first wordpress site is now ready 😉
Lets proceed to import your blogger site now
Go to Import (follow the link in the email or in the admin panel head to “Manage > Import”
Click on Blogger
Click Authorize
Click “Grant Access” in blogger.
You will now see all blogs you are managing in blogspot. Click on the “Import” Magic Button and wait a few seconds to minutes (depending on your old content)
If you’re using feedburner (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?!) go to your feeds, then to your blogger feed, and click “Edit Feed Details”. In the “Original Feed Location” replace your old blogger feed location with the new wordpress one. This is always in the form of http://yourblogurl/feed.
If you’re not using Feedburner, first go and create a feed for your wordpress installation. Then go to your old blogger blog settings > Site Feed. In the “Post Redirect Feed URL” put the new feedburner feed you just created which has your new wordpress feed as its source. This will transparently migrate all your old readers to your new location
Write a new post on your blogspot blog that you have moved and point to your new location. Once we setup your plugin installer, we’ll set up your blog to automatically redirect each post to your new location.
That’s it. You have now successfully migrated from Blogger to WordPress 😉 In a next post I will explain how to migrate Intense Debate Comments as well, since the wordpress importer does not grab those automatically.
There’s one last thing that you might want to do which is to inform your readers that you’ve changed location
Finishing touches
Currently you should have created your wordpress site and migrated from blogger but you are probably at a very basic state. You should at this point configure a few options to make your life and look easier.
Settings
Settings > General
Put a Tagline for your site. This will both be shown on your theme but also probably be seen by search engines as well.
Configure your time so that the times you schedule and post are the ones you expect
Settings > Discussion
Under “Before a Comment Appears”, uncheck “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” This will reduce your management overhead.
Under “Comment Moderation” increase the number of links to 3 since it is not uncommon for a non-spammer to include to links in the same post.
Settings > Permalinks
Here you should set your permalink structure. That is the way your posts will look at your blog. While you can leave it as the default ?p=123, this generally looks ugly, is not rememberable and search engines don’t like it.
Many people select the date based permalinks but I personally do not like that choice. This kind of setup is only appropriate for newspapers really. The only ones who should be using this are the ones who are writing an actual journal.
My advice to you is to use a either a custom structure or a category based one. In a custom structure, you can use the simple /%postname% option which will make all your articles show on the root (ie http://dbzer0.com/this-is-a-post ) or put something in front to make it differ from pages. I prefer /blog/%postname% but it’s up to you.
In a category structure, your posts will show under each category which is nice but if you tag sometimes in more than one category, an article may show under an undesirable one.In any case, whatever you choose does not need to be permanent. Even if you change your permalink structure in the future, wordpress will automatically redirect links going into a post that has changed location correctly so don’t agonize on making the perfect choice now.
Plugins
Plugins are the most exciting part of having your own wordpress installation. I’m not going to go into much depth but I want to mention how to set your installation up to allow you to install and manage plugins from the wordpress admin interface (instead of setting up ftp connections each time). Unfortunately we cannot avoid using FTP the first time.
Use your favorite FTP client to setup a connection to your server. I recommend the excellent fireftp which you can use without installing software on your PC.
Setup your connection in your ftp program of choice. In Fireftp:
Select “New Connection”
Find your webserver name in the
Find your server name. You can find this in multiple locations:
In the automated emails your received
In your dreamhost panel by going to Users > Manage Users and looking at the “Machine” column
At the dreamhost panel, clicking on “Account Status” on the top and looking at “Your Web server”
In server name, put your server name followed by .dreamhost.com (e.g. dodo.dreamhost.com)
In user name, put the user your created for your account
In Password, put the password you created. If you do not remember it, you can change it from Manage Users again by clicking on “Edit”
Press OK.
Connect to your server. You should now be in a folder where your domain exists as a subdirectory. Enter that directory and then navigate to Wp-content > Plugins.
Using your ftp program, upload the plugin directory into your wordpress Plugins directory we navigated before. In Fireftp:
On the left-hand side of the split-screen, navigate to the place where you’ve extracted the zip file.
Make sure that your right screen is showing the contents of youblog.com/wp-content/plugins (you should be seeing other folders and .php files like wp-cache/ and hello.php)
Select the directory and click the little arrow pointing to the right between the split-screens.
Wait until the job is complete.
Go to your plugins admin page (Top right)
Scroll down to where it says “Inactive Plugins” and activate the One-Click Plugin Updater. This will make your plugin page show a little differently. Namely you should see yellow bars next to various plugins.
That’s it. Now you have the ability to install new plugins and themes without using ftp and without even downloading and extracting files on your PC. Just follow the instructions that you can find in the “One Click Updater Miniguide” in your Dashboard.
So that’s it.
Hopefully this guide will help any of you who are thinking about self-hosting but don’t want to trust me or want to learn to do it yourselves.
If you see anything I forgot or something I should include or make simpler, let me know.
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