Blogging about blogging
I’m upgrading the version of WordPress (the software that runs this blog) on my server. This is a periodically necessary process in order to keep up with security updates.
Some site features may temporarily disappear during the upgrade, and should re-appear once the upgrade is complete. It is also likely that there will be some problems during the upgrade process.
I haven’t been posting here for a loooong time: over a month, I think. So, what’s up?
In the past month, I’ve been doing the following things:
I mentioned previously that I had installed Ultimate Tag Warrior on my site. In that posting, I implied that I had Ecto for Windows working with UTW. The truth is, it only seemed to be working- in reality, Ecto was creating tags that UTW could work with, but it wasn’t able to read them back in for editing purposes.
It’s been a bit of a struggle getting it to work…
It’s old news for the big bloggers, but for me its somewhat novel- the sheer volume of spam comments to my blog is growing at an amazing pace. You don’t see the spam in my comments because I both use Akismet (the spam filter for WordPress 2.x blogs) and moderate all comments. But here is what I have observed on this very blog you are reading right now: (more…)
I spent a few minutes the other day following a series of threads about a disagreement between a website designer and a “famous” blogger. In summary: a guy paid for someone to re-design their website. Some people criticized the design, and the guy who paid said “anything that’s wrong here is my fault”. Someone sent him a
of a different way the site could have been done, and he posted it saying “there are some good ideas here, I think we might use some”. Then the designer resigned, and some people went ballistic.
When I converted my site to a “for real” blog using WordPress about a year ago after nearly a decade “pretend” blogging, it was like I’d moved into a nice, upscale neighborhood. The neighbors were friendly and reasonably intelligent, and everyone’s yard was tidy. The rare comments to my site were reasonably intelligent, and were obviously written by real people who were actual visitors.
Ecto is a great “off line” blog post editor, and I strongly recommend it for anyone who posts a lot to one of the types of blogs it supports. Version 2 of Ecto for Windows was just released recently.
I have become increasingly intrigued with the concept of “tagging” in blogs over the past year or so. Tagging is a way for someone posting a blog entry (or other web content) to include some sort of categorization hints in the form of keywords. Specialized search engines like Technorati can then use those keywords to present “similar” content.
Microsoft is on its second beta of Internet Explorer 7, and they really want people to download and use it. I’ve been telling people who are having problems seeing my website “correctly” to use Firefox since IE 6 is full of CSS and DOM rendering bugs. IE7 will fix most of those problems, and the Beta actually looks reasonably good.
If the site looks a little “broken” at the moment, that’s my fault. I decided it would be interesting to try a new(ish) option for WordPress called “widgets” which, in theory, will make it easier for me to customize the layout of my site. Before I can do that, I have to be using a widgets-compatible WordPress theme. The one I’m experimenting with now is called “WP-Andreas09“.