lifebsideben

I’ve been trying in spare cycles here and there to deeply integrate a WordPress-based blog into prince.org, for the staff (myself and all the moderators) to be able to muse on new policies, changes, whatever. We have a forum for that currently in the message boards area but that’s not the most effective way to disseminate stuff, as a lot of folks don’t actually read that forum, and there’s nothing that calls out new posts there (or differentiates the moderator-authored ones from the general question/complaint posts).

It was an interesting coding experiment to dive into WP’s guts a bit and figure out how to do this properly. I like the final solution; essentially the latest WP code gets dropped into /blog/ on the site, and a custom theme and plugin are symlinked in when I deploy the site, from my codebase. I don’t need to change a single line of WP code, and I get integration with my own session management/user database/authentication, a completely custom look and feel, and a nice administrative panel. I think added a new homepage module (in the upper right) to help guide some traffic to it (since I think postings there are really relevant to all visitors), which was trivial since I have a standard methodology for that. Overall I really think it’s a big win, and for probably less than a total of 10 hours work, with about 25% of that being CSS (which I suck at).

If you want to see how it turned out, head on over and check it out: the prince.org staff blog.

Tags: blogging, coding, princeorg, wordpress

I was surfing for some movabletype vs wordpress comparisons based on a discussion at work (I’m firmly in the WP camp due to the extensive plugin and theme work I’ve done for the prince.org blog, but still curious to know what’s up in the MT world), and came across this entry from Dustin Diaz discussing it. The most telling part was actually one of the comments, from Molly Holzchlag, who wrote the Teach yourself Movable Type in 24 hours book:

Dustin, did you hear me shouting in enthusiastic agreement when I read this post? I’m sure you did.

While I still fight spam, WordPress has made it a lot easier to do so. And yeah, I might have written a book on MT, but I was so fed up with the product that the very week the book came out I switched to WordPress.

I agree that MT has some nice features. But I’m very happy I switched all told.

Now, granted this is from 2 years ago, and things can change a lot in 2 years, but damn, that sucks when the person who just published a book about your product changes their mind and enthusiastically jumps to the competitor. Must have been an akward book tour

Tags: blogging, Books, diss, wordpress

[tags]TextMate, apple, software, coding, blogging, emacs, Ruby, rubyonrails, wordpress[/tags]

I’ve been trying out [TextMate][] for a couple of weeks on the Mac. So far, I’m really impressed, and very likely to fork over the license fee (around $75). Which is really quite a lot for an editor when you consider the wealth of good editors already out there, and free, not the least of which is Emacs, which I’ve been happily using on and off for hmm, probably 15 years at this point. Sure, I’ve forayed into the Visual Studio IDE when I was developing on Windows, and used the Borland (text-mode) environment when I wrote a lot of Turbo C++ before that; I’ve toyed with Eclipse as well more recently. But Emacs ports on the Mac aren’t too great (including stability issues), and TextMate pretty much seems to be written with an Emacs state of mind with regards to extensibility, etc. It even has some Emacs keybindings lurking in the default configuration.

But what got me on this kick was playing with [Rails, or RoR, or Ruby on Rails][rails], the almost sublime web-application framework built on [the Ruby language][Ruby]. It seems a lot of the influential RoR community, are Mac-heads and use TextMate for developing code. The Ruby support in TextMate is quite good, and there is special ‘modes’ to use Emacs terminology (’Bundles’ to use TextMate terminology) just for Rails as well. And they’re very nice.

My essentially frothing at the mouth praise for Rails and Ruby can wait for another post, although let me say they are both quite excellent, especially if you keep in mind the problem domain, and don’t think of them as C++ or J2EE replacements. (But PHP and typical Java web app replacements, well that’s another story… and I recommend reading [O'Reilly's Beyond Java book][Beyond Java] to get it.) The interesting bit is how much having an excuse to feel out the editor and understand some of the hooks and extensions available for it, have made me really understand how it can empower me. I guess it was always that way with Emacs as well, although the alternative was something edlin-ish (I don’t think the Prime I first started using it on had a vi port, even.)

But here’s my first words on this: TextMate is excellent, so far. Ruby (and Rails) are as well. I feel excited to be exploring this stuff.

and p.s., this blog post was written and edited from within TextMate using the ‘blogging’ bundle and [Markdown][], via the [PHP Markdown Extra][] plugin for WordPress! About all it needs now is to support the [Ultimate Tag Warrior][] plugin, and I’m never using WordPress’ writing interface again… from my Mac anyhow. (**Update** it seems you can still get the main tagging stuff to work if you turn on ‘embedded tag support’ in UTW and then use the SimpleTag format. Cool! Thanks to [this blog post][vimposting] about posting from vim of all things, for the hint!)

[vimposting]: http://coopblue.com/blog/2006/06/posting-to-wordpress-from-vim-with-tags-and-markdown/
[Ultimate Tag Warrior]: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
[Beyond Java]: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/beyondjava/
[Ruby]: http://www.ruby-lang.org/
[rails]: http://rubyonrails.com/
[TextMate]: http://macromates.com
[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
[Wordpress]: http://wordpress.org/

Tags: apple, blogging, coding, emacs, Ruby, rubyonrails, software, TextMate, wordpress

I’m trying to figure out where to post entries when I do happen to do so, which is a pretty rare event anyhow. Here, or at 360°? WordPress pretty much kicks 360’s ass at the moment when it comes to editing tools, so I suppose I’ll keep posting the majority here. But, 360 is all Yahoorific, and more at my fingertips while working. I guess I shouldn’t blog from work much anyhow

Well, in the meantime, just a few interesting links… Mac serial number decoder–find out when your Mac was made.
As a guy at work would say, this is totally ringing the bell on the nerdometer. Some guy made Mac OS X Engineer Trading Cards. Yeah… but I have to admit his Ajax-style commenting system rocks. Pretty sweet effect, if a tad useless. Well, I like the submit-without-refresh bit, but the live preview bit is not too useful IMO.
One more: dissecting WordPress themes, seems handy.

Tags: apple, blogging, DHTML, wordpress, Yahoo

Well, I really tried to get to the ArtFutura show at CCCB on time today, so I could see the panel discussion on weblogging. I ended up missing almost all of it (thanks Transports Metro Barcelona! Thanks RENFE! I appreciate all your confusing-ass signage and refusal to speak in Spanish, only Catalan!) Anyhow, mostly my fault. Instead of walking 1 mile downhill to the FGC train station and taking a 25 minute ride downtown, it was a 30 minute bus ride, walking uphill 1/2 mile, and then waiting for a big ol’ train, long ride into Barcelona, and then a metro 2 stops to downtown.

SO I finally arrive, and the Q&A session is underway. Anil from TypePad/SixApart is there, as is Meg from Blogger, and a Spanish guy, and someone from BoingBoing. From best I could tell, this is definitely not the author of the stuff I enjoy reading on BoingBoing… but she seemed competent for the few minutes of moderation I saw. Meg was given to rambling, and tried to make some point about linking to sites in different languages that was vaguely incoherent. Anil was well spoken as always (disclaimer: he’s a personal friend so I’m likely biased), but the whole panel looked like they could use a good night’s sleep (and I understand this is the case.) I won’t judge the whole thing on the 10-15 minutes I saw, and much of the audience seemed pretty into it, so I’m guessing the overall S/N ratio was high. Next time I’ll learn to navigate the bus system better, and actually see the whole talk, or something.

Watched the presentation from some guys from the UK who did Bjork’s last video, pretty nifty CG animation. Three young guys, it was depressing a bit. But they seemed geniunely creative, so props to them.

Finished off the night with a good Pakistani meal with Ubaldo and Lisette, yum. That makes the mistaken commute hell almost worth it

Tags: blogging, Spain

Up front: I apologize for the meta entry.

I spent a bunch of my employer’s time reading blogs today. Which is really depressing, because a lot of people either have way more fucking time than I do, are way smarter than me, or both. I won’t start linking it off here, but wow, a lot of intelligent stuff swirling around to be read. Not all of it mind-blowing, but overall, consistently, intelligent. And links aplenty. These folks surf a lot more than I do to find this stuff, or get paid to blog, or ??? One guy wrote that blogging has essentially rekindled his faith in the internet as a medium. I wouldn’t go that far, but it has its compelling aspects. I’m looking forward to seeing Anil (from Six Apart) in 10 days or so when he comes to Barcelona–he always has a thoughtful take on things, and is definitely one of the blogerati (second apology of the post: for writing ‘blogerati’.)

Even people I regard as semi-idiots have a good rant on occasion. Urgh. Maybe it’s just me, today, being in the morass of the disaster which is my workplace situation. I guess this diversionary lack of productivity makes up for (one of?) those late nights fixing stuff that I suppose, as a contractor, I could have billed for but didn’t. Final apology: the self-pity contained herein. I’ll go ingest some sugar or something.

Tags: blogging, work

with my sincerest apologies to Ice Cube and his classic “Jackin’ for beats”…

gimme that site, fool
it’s a full-time jack move
b-bside yo homie make that page load
and i’ll jack any typepad, yahoo
that’s the name of the suckas i’ma redo
ain’t got no busines model
but drop PHP, break ya off somethin’ proper

OK, so I’ve had a really hard time motivating myself to work on prince.org lately. There’s 34 open bugs/feature requests in bugzilla, and a few small things I just want to add. But for some reason, it’s tough to sit down and do it; maybe partly due to the heat in Barcelona now. Yeah, that’s it. Well, anyhow, I’ve been thinking what to do with some of my other domains, including princefans.org, I’ve been trying to come up with something, not just another portal/forum/?. I still enjoy that, but it’s 90% done how I envision it, in the org already. I wanted to clone Craigslist for Barcelona in EN/ES/CAT languages when I was moving here, but found out it was already done, and really well, at that. I thought of blogs, since I’ve toyed with them for so long (paid LiveJournal account for 2 years, then tried MT, b2, …) Honestly, typepad is the friendliest so far, which is what I need to encourage me to actually use it. And that it’s hosted is a plus, otherwise I’ll just tinker with the code and not blog. Many readers might consider that a plus, however

One of the moderators (well, really ex-moderator) from prince.org IM’d me today about a thread she started discussing the “reputation” of the org. We chatted about how “out of control” it seems to be. I think this almost always happens, with “almost anything goes” forums. Adding more moderators (which I am going to do) will help, but anything with such a large, diverse group of people with varying opinions, will devolve into chaos. We’re not quite there, and I don’t think it’ll ever get to the point of total anarchy, but it’s worrying at least to her. To me less so, but she’s perhaps more in touch with the site contents than I am–I actually don’t read it too much. Point is, I think this is endemic to large communities built with the “message forum” paradigm. I believe the blog paradigm for communities has inbuilt limits to this destabilizing effect, and I’m really interested in investigating it further.

In short, I am excited about the prospect of providing a typepad-like site, for Prince fans (because that’s the group I have access to, and a suitable domain doing nothing, and a lot of creative energy in those folks). I’m certainly not aiming to steal TypePad’s business, or make something nearly as involved. A simple experiment in community-building via blogs. There are some technical challenges that are vaguely interesting, too. Not sure whether I’ll make another blog for that project, or comment here, or even do anything. Hopefully the good people of typepad won’t mind me jackin’ some of their ideas. If someone gets really into it, I’ll just push the user toward them anyhow, I think.

Vaguely related anecdote: my wife (when she was my girlfriend) met Ice Cube, when he was just blowing up. His first solo CD was out, and it was the bomb. I played it to death, and he was in town for a show. My wife was walking in midtown (New Center area) with a distant cousin, and ran into him. She actually got his autograph for me on a napkin. It says “To Ben–stay up! Ice Cube”. I think I even have it, still, packed away somewhere. Funny. I’m glad to see his career longevity, seems like a really smart guy.

Tags: blogging, Music, princeorg