Category Archives: Blogs and community

Blogs and community

Contents
Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP
Yahoo! MyBlogLog Closing 24th May 2011
Blog Action Day 2010 – #BAD2010
Theatre Blogger: 52 Venues in 52 weeks
Weather Photography Competition
The Critics and Social Media
Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum

Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP

Posted on 20/11 by Andy Roberts

I’ve just been using ManageWP beta – the web utility for managing multiple WordPress installations – to delete an obsolete plugin from several of my older blogs.

The functionality to delete or deactivate plugins was a much requested feature that was added to the many useful operations that ManageWP can perform for you just a couple of weeks ago, and it really does make this web service indispensable for anybody with more than just a couple of WordPress installations. I was recommending before, but even more so now.

The plugin I wanted to deprecate in my installations was called Viper’s Video QuickTags, very handy in it’s day for embedding youtube videos withing blog posts, but that functionality was added into the core WordPress code several versions ago, which renders the plugin redundant for me.

Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP Dashboard ‹ ManageWP — WordPress

Plugins and Themes

With ManageWP I could select “plugins and themes” from the sidebar, then chose All Websites, tick plugins, active, and search by keyword: “viper”. That gave me a list of five blogs that still had the old plugin active. I could have deactivated the lot in one fell swoop just like that, but I wanted to make sure all my old posts with videos embedded would still work so, without even leaving the ManageWP dashboard, I went to each affected individual WordPress dashboard in turn, and searched through the posts for the string “[youtube”, that being the way the old plugin recognised source posts needing to have the embed code added. I then removed the shortcodes from each end of the video identifier leaving just the youtube url on one line by itself, which WordPress now interprets as a request to embed video inline. Once the legacy code was removed, I could then deactivate and delete the plugin, leaving me with a nice feeling of having tidied up a longstanding loose end.

Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP Dashboard ‹ ManageWP — WordPress 1

 

Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP Dashboard ‹ ManageWP — WordPress 2

Posted in Blogs and community, Tools, video, wordpress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Yahoo! MyBlogLog Closing 24th May 2011

Posted on 24/02 by Andy Roberts

It’s a shame, I found the stats facility in MyBlogLog a nice and quick alternative to Google Analytics.

We will officially discontinue Yahoo! MyBlogLog effective May 24, 2011.

  We recommend Yahoo! Pulse as a service for you to see all your social updates from your favorite networks in one place.

Yahoo! MyBlogLog Closing 24th May 2011 Andy Roberts MyBlogLog 300x214

Andy Roberts - MyBlogLog

Posted in Blogs and community, web2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Blog Action Day 2010 – #BAD2010

Posted on 15/10 by Andy Roberts

The topic for Blog Action Day 2010 is water, and I’m just going to link out to some other entries from here, this time.

In 2009 I wrote blog-action-day-when-the-waters-rise

In 2007, the first blog action day, I explained that individual-action-is-not-enough

So this year I entered another song, Mondura Dam which according to the composer, myself, is bang on topic. It’s over on the Andy Roberts Podcast blog: Mondura Dam – as long as we have water and a piece about how to make cider using much less water to make cider than beer

This has been a post for blog action day 2010 tagged #BAD10

Posted in Blog action day, Blogs and community, Cider, Music, podcast, Politics, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Theatre Blogger: 52 Venues in 52 weeks

Posted on 01/10 by Andy Roberts

One way of standing out from the crowd is to commit yourself to a challenge that takes place over a period of time, and then blog about it every step of the way. In the film “Julie and Julia” a struggling writer who loves to cook decides to try out every single recipe from her hero’s recipe book, every night for a year:

Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.

How far will it go? – The Julie/Julia Project

Favourite Theatre Blogger

It’s in a similar vein to this that one of the theatre bloggers in London has embarked on a challenge called “52 weeks, 52 fringe venues”. I couldn’t name more than a handful of London fringe theatre venues myself, so I subscribed at once in order to learn more about the wider scene. I’m also recommending the blog on which the challenge is published – “Distant Aggravation” as my choice for favourite theatre blogger in Theatre Blogger Week.

Corinne Furness, who writes Distant Aggravation describes herself as a “writer and theatre maker” and has also written a post on Blogging by Numbers : On Why It’s Time To Listen (or a love letter to theatre bloggers)

Theatre Blogger: 52 Venues in 52 weeks Distant Aggravation 291x300

Theatre Blogger Week

Theatre Blogger Week is an idea from MusicalVerse which is due to take place for the first year on 25th October 2010, open to theatre bloggers world wide and tracked on the Theatre Blogger Week Wiki page.

Posted in Blogs and community, Wiki | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

Weather Photography Competition

Posted on 04/08 by Andy Roberts

Weather Photography Competition Pools of Sunlight By Worms Head 300x225I’ve just heard about the British weather photographer of the year competition and decided to enter myself. This provided me with a nice opportunity to look back through my photographs of the summer on Flickr to see if I could find something appropriate. I browsed through my pictures of rain and a few summer seaside scenes and then lost a bit of confidence. I have pictures of light, pictures of scenes affected by weather but nothing I could really call specifically “weather photography”. My thoughts turned to extreme weather – tornadoes, floods, ice storms etc but I don’t seem to have witnessed many of those recently, not with a handy camera ready anyway. Then it occurred to me I was being far too literal in my interpretation of the competition requirements:

…to find the best amateur photographer of the British elements. Judged by top professionals and experts in the field of photography and weather, 12 finalists will be chosen for the flair, technique and originality they use in capturing British weather.

I’ve got it down to two photographs that might fit the bill here, the first is a picture of sunlight shining through gaps in the clouds over the sea near the Worms Head, Gower, South Wales. If you click through and look at the large or original sized photo I think it looks quite stunning, and it was quite an unusual weather pattern to observe for me, even if it might happen in such places more regularly than I imagine.

Weather Photography Competition 19210781 beb570aa3d

The second picture I’m considering is one of the dried up lake bed during an extended period of drought.

The patterns made by the drying out process in the mud make interesting shapes, and this one looks a bit like a map of Australia, a country where drought is a more familiar problem than southern Britain.

Weather Photography Competition 251424872 5be1520a6a

Whichever I decide, (suggestions?) or maybe I can submit both, you can have a chance to vote for me if you feel like it there, but probably more likely and preferable anyway, would be to enter one of your own weather photographs in which case do please leave your link in the comments below.

Posted in Art, Blogs and community, Flickr, London bloggers, UK | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

The Critics and Social Media

Posted on 24/11 by Andy Roberts

In 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.

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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 Critics and Social Media theatrereviewguardian

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.

The Critics and Social Media 3055233851 5b1c7c6289 o

So I’m just kind of brainstorming what’s going on here:

  1. Why is there such a gulf between the opinions of the journalist professional critics and the public?
  2. 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.
  3. Critics have also retorted, somewhat snobbishly, that the appreciative audiences are merely victims of not very subtle propaganda or marketing manipulation.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?
Posted in Blogs and community, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum

Posted on 02/08 by Andy Roberts

As the use of twitter continues to spread despite the restricted service and downtime, a commonplace event for communities is to start compiling lists of links to each other’s twitter accounts. These are handy for anybody who hasn’t already built up their network because you can quickly add a bunch of people who are all involved in the same interest or practice. Acting as a kind of jump start into twitter for groups, it feels like a community indicator of some sort.

If the community is based mainly on a web forum or email list then it can start with a message from one member who is a twitter enthusiast, that turns into a long thread with the same message re-quoted and a new line added at the bottom. That’s not ideal, but it works for a while and builds up a volume of attention to the activity.

Over on one bloggers’ forum we tried compiling the list of member’s twitter links and putting it into a new service called “dropio” where anybody could upload new files and links, but that service proved problematic.

When the same process broke out at E-mint, a community for online facilitators, ‘community managers’ and moderators it wasn’t long before somebody – Ed Mitchell – said “Definitely a wiki job, this one” and so here we have the ….

E-mint twitter list on DARwiki

The advantage of having the twitter list on a wiki is that you can link to what will be always the latest version and that members can easily add themselves or make corrections.

If it’s a person-centric or blog-centric community such as Darren Rowse’s pro-blogger readers, the twitter list is gathered from the comments left on an invitation post and then published on the blog.

If the community is forming in a friendfeed room then there’s probably no need to compile a twitter list at all because the aggregator sort of does that automatically in that each member’s tweets are in their own streams and twitter links in their services page – which stands in as a profile page on friendfeed.

What other formats and processes have you seen out there for gathering twitter lists?

Posted in Blogs and community, Tools, web2.0, Wiki |

Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about Blogs and community on the DARnet Blog