Wordpress 2.7 and the Redirection Plugin January 1, 2009
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress , 3commentsI’m in the process of upgrading blogs to Wordpress 2.7, mostly without any serious problems. The biggest disappointment so far has been with Redirection Plugin, which is a fairly crucial part of the overall system.
I knew there had been a big upgrade to the plugin because I’d run the auto update on a WP 2.6 blog, and the newer version seemed over complicated for what I do, so I thought I’d be able to upgrade the WordPress whilst retaining the older version of the plugin.
The trouble with that route is that the dashboard interface on WP2.7 doesn’t seem to be compatible with the options tabs in the older plugin, so I resigned myself to living with the newer plugin version. It didn’t translate the old redirections table into the new format so I reverted. Then I tried again with a fresh install of the latest plugin, without any legacy data. It didn’t create the default modules and groups and failed to allow me to create them either.
So as far as I’m concerned, the latest version of Redirection doesn’t seem to work at all with WP2.7
The old version still works as far as honouring existing redirections and creating new ones, but the dashboard is crippled so that the logs cannot be accessed. That means the handy 404 error monitoring, which by the way is less usable in later versions, is inoperable.
Investigations continue…
Greenfinch arrives December 29, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wildlife , add a commentI just spotted a greenfinch, which is a common enough British bird, but it’s the first one I’ve seen in my East London garden. The number of species now visiting has at least doubled since I moved in here, last century.
greenfinch pic by Neil Phillips
What I’ve come to realise is that even though we are in an inner city type borough the actual location is right at the tip of a thin wedge of more or less continuous green space which acts as a funnel from Epping Forest. Having a few large trees around makes it a last refuge for non-urban wildlife.
Elche Palm Gardens with Surprising Water Feature Sculpture December 28, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London, spain, video , 1 comment so farElche is a city inland from Alicante on the South East coast of mainland Spain. It’s also the place our favourite Elche Spanish restaurant in Leytonstone is named after. This video features a sculpture in a section of expansive palm groves, actually within the Priests Gardens (Huerta del Cura)
The sculpture is made of vertical shiny metal rods arranged in a spiral rising from a rotating plinth which gives the impression from a distance of a waterfall or fountain. The video accentuates this by being recorded next to an actual fountain, providing the soundtrack.
How Not To Use Online Communities December 7, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, internet, listservs, online facilitation , 6commentsI’ve just read a message on the ukcider community email list which warrants a response on the meta level about how online communities can be a fantastic resource for research and tapping into a multitude of volunteer information and advice, but only when approached in the right way. Journalists are usually the worst culprits, depending on the domain, and PHD candidates can be a bit single minded too, but anybody could fall into a similar trap and end up disappointed so I’ll try to provide an explanation of how to communicate with online communities and how not to do it. First the quote:
I joined this newsgroup because i have an interest in making
cider … and I have found the advice gained very useful. ..the other reason for joining is that I have just completed a book about cider (I am a photographer)
When I first joined, two years ago, I posted on here, explaining that
I was doing a book and wondered if anyone could help (with suggestions
for good people to visit and shoot)…. I was looking for interesting
producers, pubs, orchards etc all over the country. I didn’t receive
a single reply from anyone on this group to that message and had to do
all my own research.
The key is to think of an online community as an ongoing conversation. It isn’t just a noticeboard where you can put up a post card for passers by. So you need to ease yourself in gradually, rather than with a fanfare and grand announcement. After a brief introductory post, you may receive a welcome or two, or you may be completely ignored. That’s a random and normal response so there’s no point in getting offended. A group of people is incapable collectively of being “rude” by not responding to any particular individual, and people naturally are more inclined to reply to others that they have already got to know to some extent. So don’t get downhearted in the first few days (or weeks depending on the pace) after joining a new community. Keep on joining in occasional conversations whenever you have something useful to say and after a period people will begin to notice you. Then when they do start to reply it will be as if to somebody they have already been talking to, because they have. Unfortunately though, some people just never seem to get this, and they continue to try and turn every group conversation into a 1-to-1, often appending the suggestion to reply off-list as well, which can be interpreted as somewhat selfish.
Should you expect an online community to go away and do all your research for you just because you have deigned to post a request? Most people would not have such expectations but from time to time, such is the good nature of people in general, it will actually happen, and stories about how easily online communities can be mined, picked, deployed and harvested add fuel to the reputation. As the ‘owner’ of a lively googlegroup I even get people trying to save themselves the bother of even joining, hoping I will ask their research questions for them and then pass on all the answers. If they come from a print media or broadcasting background they often demand a telephone interview, thinking that simply dropping their phone number into an email is enough to drive information and resources in their direction.
Reclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron software December 2, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, meta-blog, web2.0 , 6commentsHow significant is SweetCron for lifestreaming and Web2.0
Every now and then some new idea or process or thing pops up that isn’t a slow burn, it jumps out and says “Hey, this is the way to GO”. Friendfeed was one such, and further back WordPress, Flickr, MediaWiki, Furl etc etc. Today I was introduced to the latest and have to blog about it right away, it’s called sweetcron.
Bee Tweets about Sweetcron lifestream software
So this tweet from my friend Bee on Twitter caught my eye earlier this evening.
“have just downloaded Sweetcron and installed it on my server to create my lifestream http://barbaradieu.com/lifestream/ …”
Intrigued I took a quick look and instantly understood that this was something important. A piece of opensource software called sweetcron that allows you to run your own lifestreaming site is exactly the missing piece to all of this blogging, microblogging, web-2.0-ing and friendfeeding messy business.
No longer is it necessary to leave all your own writing and other content scattered about on websites owned by other organisations large and small, where at the drop of a hat they might suddenly introduce lots of adverts, go selfishly no-follow like Wikipedia (and now Friendfeed too), start charging a membership fee or get taken over by google, yahoo or whoever.
Sweetcron is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
I was delighted to see that the sweetcron software Bee installed to make the lifestream site is Free and Open Source, just like WordPress, so I determined to have a go myself straight away.
Google brings up the site http://sweetcron.com/ which could have been guessed. Its by a developer called Yongfook who self proclaims to be an internet Z-list celebrity.
I put in my email address to join the public beta and received an email confirmation request. On reply I got the link to download the software, view documentation and join a googlegroup support list. Great, I like that.
Andy Roberts blog is born
Meanwhile I registered a new domain - andyrobertsblog.co.uk
I can’t believe that’s the first Andy Roberts domain I’ve ever bought, but the whole story about why it’s been problematic was documented 8 years ago on the Andy Roberts FAQ
Anyway, I pointed the new domain at my Hostgator account and within minutes the DNS had resolved and I was up and running. All that was left was to set up a mySQL database, upload the sweetcron software and edit a couple of config files to put the database and domain details in. Literally 5 minutes work if that.
I’ve reclaimed some of my own feeds already, and I can now add any others just as easily to my own site as to Friendfeed, Lifestream.fm, SecondBrain or SuperGlu etc.
What’s still missing in Sweetcron
Sweetcron is not yet a mature product, and there are some holes that need filling. One is perhaps to allow comments to be hosted alongside the items in the stream. At present it is suggested to use Discus for that.
Another is that the title tags in each permalink are duplicates for each element from a single feed. That’s not very clever but can probably be fixed in third party themes and plugins which will no doubt start to appear once the enormous advance that this sweetcron way of hosting lifestreams represents is more widely appreciated.
Should you set up a sweetcron lifestream blog?
Personal brands are often overlooked but have a habit of becoming important to whatever it is that you do, eventually.
Things are only going to get tougher for all of these Web2.0 applications companies, and in my opinion, whether you already have a self hosted personal blog or not, the sooner you get started and set up your own sweetcron lifestreaming blog on your own domain the better. Reclaim the feeds!
Sweetcron Video by Yongfook
The Critics and Social Media November 24, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, social media , 2commentsIn the creative world, the views of critics have traditionally been held to be of some significant influence. A few bad reviews could kill off a promising new project.
It was also possible for the public to ignore the critics and vote with their money, or build a reputation through word of mouth, but for everybody involved it’s like paddling against the stream when the critics are against you.
Social media such as blog comments, forums and comment-enabled media sharing sites would appear to hold promise to have the effect of bringing the critics opinions under the active scrutiny of the masses. But is it happening yet?
Take the Guardian for example. They have a series of blogs with comments enabled and many of the main writers do indeed engage there to some extent. There’s even a dedicated theatre blog which covers regional and international theatre but the main West End Reviews are published on the news site without comments.
The other newspaper websites are the same.
It’s interesting because Linda wrote a roundup of Imagine This Reviews on our own London Theatre Breaks blog. Imagine This is a new musical which had it’s preview press night in London’s West End last week. The critics reviews were nearly all bad, but the blog garnered a series of positive and well written “user generated” reviews that seem to urge others to defy the bad reviews and go and enjoy the show.
So I’m just kind of brainstorming what’s going on here:
- Why is there such a gulf between the opinions of the journalist professional critics and the public?
- I’ve seen comments before which accuse the critics of perhaps being jaded through reviewing so many pieces that they can’t really appreciate them in the same way as the public any more, and that’s a process which makes sense.
- Critics have also retorted, somewhat snobbishly, that the appreciative audiences are merely victims of not very subtle propaganda or marketing manipulation.
- It’s also perfectly possible that the blog commenters are not all rank and file theatre goers themselves but could be relatives of the cast or even financial backers with a vested interest in talking up the show.
- Who reads newspaper critics anyway! Google provides the instant answers these days, in the form of an assortment of reviews from which we have to decide for ourselves which is relevant, but how do we make that decision?
SearchWiki from Google is LIVE November 21, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , 3commentsSearchWiki is Google 2.0
Searchwiki just started rolling out around the world today, so now you can log in to Google Search and when you see search results pages you don’t like - you can edit them.
Vote individual results up or remove them, share your edits and see others’ edits for the same page.
Is SearchWiki a Wiki?
Not really.
How will this affect the standard Google search results over time? Nobody knows.
here’s a video from Google that shows how SearchWiki works, but as yet it’s still a little unclear as to how the sharing of edited Search Wiki pages will happen.
How to use Google Search Wiki
SearchWiki is simple enough not to warrant a screencast tutorial probably, but here’s a link to the Help page How to use Google Search Wiki
How to switch SearchWiki off
You might not want to see buttons and clutter in your search results so how can you use Google search without the new functionality and revert back to the plain vanilla version? Well one way is to log out from your Google account, but you find you have to log back in again whenever you want to use one of Google’s other useful web applicatios such as Gmail or Analytics.
There is a Greasemonkey script at how-to-disable-google-searchwiki which will give you the appearance of being logged out even when you are logged in, if you think that’s a good idea.
Is The Mixing Desk Getting the Balance Right? November 20, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music , add a commentThe job of a sound mixer is to get a clear signal from each of multiple channels and then put them together to make a coherent whole, perhaps varying the mix constantly as the complex inputs change, contributing to the developing moods of a performance.
It’s an important role because each individual member of the audience will have different ideas and preferences as to which elements should be amplified and which muted, depending also on where they are sitting. So the mixer has to have ears everywhere, taking the overall auditorium into consideration without compromising creativity.
HMS Illustrious at Greenwich November 9, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a commentUpon alighting from the Docklands Light Railway at Cutty Sark, Greenwich on Friday the view of the Thames was dominated by a huge warship.
HMS Illustrious is moored in the Thames off Greenwich for a week to help with the Royal Navy’s participation in Remembrance Day commemorations in London. This year is the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
HMS Illustrious was also used as a platform for the November 6TH Fireworks display which by all accounts was quite spectacular, being accompanied by the dramatic sounds of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.
Photo derived from one by Simon Starr
Can Countries go Bankrupt? November 4, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : economics , 1 comment so farThe IMF has a $250 billion bailout fund for use in emergencies to lend to countries that could go bankrupt, but this is not enough to cope with today’s mounting crises so some of the rich oil producing states are being asked to contribute to an extension fund.
Ukraine accepted a 40 billion dollar loan from the IMF to avoid bankruptcy, Romania is currently negotiating and Iceland has already taken drastic measures after the collapse of its financial sector. Belarus and Hungary are also on the critical danger list but the UK and Switzerland have serious national debt and currency problems as well.
Iceland has enough natural resources to survive in some way outside of the global financial system but The UK should be especially worried, as one of the main importers of goods in Western Europe. UK national borrowings also tend to be in other currencies so the debt balance will almost certainly increase as the pound sterling weakens against both the dollar and the euro, after printing and lending out huge sums of money to avert the banking and finance sector crisis.
When Gordon Brown the UK prime minister went to tell the Eurozone leaders how to restructure their banking industries along the lines of the UK model this appeared as a great act of economic statesmanship, but I bet Sarkozy and Merkel had a quiet word in his ear about the UK ditching the pound and joining the euro zone eventually. The big question would be at what rate? The present rate doesn’t look too great, having fallen from 1.5 Euros to the Pound down to 1.25 over the past year or so, but as the financial crisis gets worse over the next few months the worsening terms could end up looking look more like a collapse and rescue operation rather than a dignified merger.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
