Blog Posts

WPMU Tweakage for ucalgaryblogs.ca - Part 1

I said I’d share what I’ve done in setting up ucalgaryblogs.ca, and instead of waiting for The Mother of All Blog Posts, I’m going to break it up into a few parts. In Part 1, I’ll talk about some of the mu-plugins I added. Some are really cool, some are just shiny…

Basically, start with a fresh copy of WordPress Multiuser. I’m running 2.6 on ucalgaryblogs.ca. Then, add the following bits into the wp-content/mu-plugins directory.

Pimping the WPMU for ucalgaryblogs.ca

I’ve been slowly tweaking the WPMU install that drives ucalgaryblogs.ca - it’s not quite ready for prime time, but it’s darned close.

It’s now got:

• multiple blogs per user, and multiple users per blog
• subdomain hosting for each blog (i.e., myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca)
• domain mapping - want to use your own custom domain? want myblog.com to point to the blog you’ve got at myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca? there’s a setting for that, and then you just have to tell me what domain you want me to tell the webserver to respond to.
• multilingual admin interface. English. French. Spanish. Chinese. Klingon. Well, I still haven’t found the Klingon.po file for WordPress, but once I do… shakesfist
• over 100 themes, most of which are customizable. Want a photoblog? Got it covered. Newsletter? Done. Research project? Sure thing.
• 500MB of upload space quota per user. This could be increased if needed.
• Sitewide tag cloud and archives - want to find out who else is writing about mitochondrial RNA? Just hit the tag…
• Blog directory listing all blogs in the system (currently, some test blogs, and the UC Dinos Football Blog! WOOHOO!)
• A handy-dandy blog manager bar at the top of all pages - if you’re logged in, it gives you easy access to anything you want to do. If you’re not logged in, it gives you an easy place to login from, from any page on the ucalgaryblogs.ca service.
• Lots of other great WordPress goodies, like podcast serving, editing from your iPhone or iPod Touch, great visual editor for posts (with spel chekker, too!) and collaborative blogs with multiple authors.

But, there are still a few things on my todo list before I consider it fully ready for prime time:

Postman - Teaching as a Subversive Activity

I’m working through Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman. I hadn’t read it before, and am seriously kicking myself for that. Some quick notes and quotes from the first couple of chapters. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1968, published in 1969, and reads as though it was crafted in 2008.

3 problems that require schools to remake themselves into training centers for subversion:

Communications Revolution or Media Change:

geotagging in Aperture with Maperture

I’ve been geotagging many of my photos on Flickr, but it’s always bugged me that the geolocation metadata was not available in my Aperture library - geotagging only happened after posting photographs to Flickr, and that metadata was essentially lost from my library.

That just changed. Now I’m using the awesome new Aperture geotagging plugin Maperture, adding latitude and longitude data directly within Aperture before uploading to Flickr etc… That means I get to keep my metadata.

3100km

I passed the 3100km mark on the ride home this afternoon. 3100km ridden on my bike so far in 2008. Seems like a strange milestone - but I’ve now ridden more as of August 12 2008 than I did in all of 2007.

I thought I pretty much maxed out riding last year. But I started riding earlier this year, and have taken a slightly longer route along the Bowmont Natural Pathway to avoid some street riding. And I have ridden almost every single day since mid-January (except for maybe a couple of sick days and miscellaneous days missed due to travel etc…). If I can keep up the pace, I should be able to hit 4-5000km by the end of the year. That’s a LOT of carbon saved…

one week with mollom

I switched to mollom for antispam on my blog one week ago, using the wp-mollom plugin. I wanted to give it a week so it’d get a fair shake, and figured anything had to do better than Akismet and SK2 were doing on my blog.

There was an initial warming up period for the first couple of days - I didn’t realize this, but apparently my blog attracts a particular dialect of spam that is different from what had been seen by mollom before. After teaching it about these silly spammers (most appear to be based in eastern Europe, and use fragments of text from my own blog posts and comments to appear legit) mollom started to do pretty well.

fracking spammers

I’ve found several comment-spam campaign management applications mentioned in my blog’s referrer stats. Most appear to be from Turkey - is that the new hotbed of spam?

And, so far, all appear to be .aspx applications.

Is there a positive correlation between jackass cretin spammers, and MCSE-accredited web developers? Coincidence? Or is .aspx just the current fave platform of brainless L337 Skrypt Kiddies?

Just imagine if all of the energy spent trying to blast comment spam onto blogs, and spent trying to prevent said comment spam blasting from being successful, was instead directed toward something positive. Like curing cancer. Or feeding the hungry.

2007/365 photography project poster

I finally got around to hanging the poster I had made of my 2007/365photos project. It turned out to be a bigger task than I’d originally thought - not the hanging, but the finding a place to hang it, and then getting the poster there.

The poster is 3’x4’. That’s a big poster. It didn’t register just HOW big that was when I placed the order at Qoop.com - I just picked the biggest option. But that’s a BIG poster. I don’t have any place in my home that’s big enough to hang this (without family conflict, anyway), so the only place left was in my office. And the only space large enough to hang this sucker is behind the door. Great. Now there’s a place to hang it - I just had to get it onto campus. The poster had been sitting in the shipping tube for almost 2 months at home, waiting for a time when I’d be driving to campus, or taking the bus, or running an errand near campus so I could drive it there. That never happened, so I stuffed the tube into one of the paniers on my bike and brought it to work this morning. With over 2’ of cardboard cylinder sticking out the top - almost as tall as I was on the bike :-) (didn’t get any photos of that, thankfully…)

Bad dialog design

I bought Tetris for my iPod Touch today, but it keeps crashing before I can actually play it. I reported a problem through the App Store, and was rewarded with this gem of a dialog box:

work with the tool, not against it

I have a recurring pattern when implementing a project. I start simple. Then things get complex. Then I start overthinking, overdesigning, overengineering things. And they start getting really, really cumbersome, awkward, and unmanageable.

I’ve done this with every development platform I’ve used. WebObjects. Rails. PHP. WordPress. Moodle. Drupal.

Yes, even Drupal.

So, again, I need to remind myself.

Work WITH the tool.

NOT against it.

Or, if you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong. If things are designed properly, using the most appropriate approaches, more often than not things become quite simple. Easy, even. If something isn’t easy, it’s being done wrong.

on campus blogging at the university of calgary

I currently run two separate blogging services on campus, and think both actually have their place and so continue to maintain and manage both a community blogging service running on Drupal, and a more individual blogging space running on WordPress Multiuser.

weblogs.ucalgary.ca is the Drupal-powered community blogging system. It’s got the organic groups module enabled, with access control configured, meaning people can easily login using their campus LDAP credentials, create groups, and publish content knowing that only members of the specified group(s) can see it.

Found a spamroach's den

The referrer logs for my blog just turned up a tool used by someone who is apparently a commercial spam publisher to track various spam campaigns. Interesting.

What’s more interesting is that the tool appears to have no login. It’s an open form on the internet. We all know what happens to open forms on the internet - SPAM! It’d be a shame if the campaigns got jammed up with garbage content…