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Wordpress as a Wiki July 15, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, Wiki , 12comments

Wordpress version 2.6 is now out on release and the video below shows some detail of the new revision control which gives authors some of the functionality of a Wiki on top of the most popular blogging platform.

From now on, a history of post versions is retained in the database together with the date stamp and author details, so that different versions can be compared and if necessary reverted. That’s one of the main essential features of a wiki taken care of. With self registration and a granular level of administrative privilege already built in, it should be possible to set up a Wordpress installation which is fairly open for public editing, just like a wiki. All that’s left  to be added in order to give mediawiki a run for its money is a nice and simple way to link across between posts, by reviving the concept of CamelCase WikiText perhaps. Then there’s section editing, edit summaries and recent changes and the whole method of navigating from the post as published to the wysiwyg editor in the dashboard especially if this involves login along the way.

But the news is big because version 2.6 has just taken an enormous leap forward towards becoming something even more powerful. The idea of WordPress as a Wiki content management system is firmly on the agenda.

More WordPress foibles May 11, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress , add a comment

This is a post ostensibly about “WordPress Foibles” which, on reading it just before posting I suspect may be more about “Andy Roberts Foibles” than anything else. If you don’t enjoy messing about with WordPress then it might not be at all helpful, but if y0u do, then you probably already know this stuff. Anyway I started so I’ll finish….

WordPress Logo

I was making some changes to a WordPress self-hosted blog recently, a modification which ought to be quite straightforward to implement once the design is decided, but I temporarily got myself into a bit of a pickle. I’ll document it now for future reference. You see, I like to use themes that present horizontal navigation tabs, which in WordPress tend to be created automatically by some skins, according to the presence of pages in the WordPress content structure.

WordPress Pages and Page Tabs

But sometimes I might need to have a page that doesn’t show up on the navigation.

Or I might want to have a navigation tab that leads to somewhere that isn’t a page.

So I bodge it a little by using redirection for the latter and “Invisibility” for the former. Invisibility used to be an option for pages I think in previous versions but these days the “Post Status” options are “draft” “published” and “private”. Private works the same way as invisible, so that a page can function perfectly well on the public face but without being listed under “Pages” and without making a visible tab for the page in the header. There’s a bit more to this because pages can also have a parent page, and only a very few themes make use of a hierarchical page structure to show nested pages as dynamic navigation lists, and those I tried out failed to do so effectively. So I have a page called “invisible parent” to which other pages can belong.

The Problem

My problem occurred when I need make a change to the settings in Options / Reading. That’s where you can set the Front page to be static rather than the blog, and also where you then have to designate a nominal page to act as a container for the actual blog part. I changed the blog part from being on the “news” page to a new one I’d created called “blog” and saved the option. The blog part worked fine, but later I realized that my static front page had disappeared. It was displaying the blog as well. For a while I was nonplussed. Not only couldn’t I understand what was happening but it also seemed for a minute that the old static frontpage content had completely vanished. Panic!

The Explanation

In the end I discovered that the drop down selection for the location of the static page had reverted to “- Select -”. And I rediscovered my content hiding in a page which I’d created ages ago called “about”. So all I needed to do was to select the “about” page from the drop menu, right? But that page didn’t appear as an option. Oh no! Why isn’t it there? Because I’d made it belong to an invisible parent Doh.

WordPress Dashboard

the Solution

*Make the invisible parent temporarily visible, so that the offspring appear as options for selection in

Options / Reading Front Page displays: a static page - select -

*Select the page from the now complete list

*Update Options

*Make the parent invisible again.

So what?

In documenting this process I’ve learned a couple of lessons, or at least made them more explicit. One is that I still sometimes miss real programming languages and get frustrated by having to find workarounds when restricted by others fixed logic. The other is to rediscover a problem solving technique which involves taking something apart a little, in order to set it up better when its put back together again. Like solving a rubik cube, when you have it 95% completed sometimes you have to undo a couple of layers right back to 60% before getting everything in place to reach the 100% solution.

Rubik Cube

Movable Type and WordPress January 25, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, tools, Wiki , 8comments

Victor Acquah wrote to me asking about blogging software. I can’t answer his request to recommend a blogging tool which has a robust wiki module incorporated into it. I use a combination of WordPress and MediaWiki but does anyone know of a good “Bliki” combination?

To explain why I migrated my own blog from Movable Type to WordPress a couple of years ago  I said that my Movable Type blog was hosted for me by an organisation which now no longer exists, so a move to my own domain was a sensible step to take.  At the time, MT was the best blogging software available, but it was overtaken by WordPress several years ago.  What is the current situation though?
WordPress is getting ever more popular but there may be signs that the core code  is getting slightly over ambitious, with successive new releases breaking established plugins and themes. People are sometimes frightened to upgrade.

And Movable Type 4 has been developed, released as Open Source with maybe some of the fancy features from Vox incorporated, but I don’t have direct experience of that.

If you were a new blogger with no baggage or archive to lug around, starting completely afresh what would be your choice of platform and why?

WordPress for Dummies October 23, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress , add a comment

Newly written and available for ordering now (out Monday 29th October 2007) is Wordpress for Dummies - and no, it isn’t all about blogspot.

“Create a hosted, self-hosted or multi-user blog, explore plugins and more”

So who is the author, Lisa Sabin-Wilson? According to the flier, Lisa operates E.Webscapes Design Studio, where she designs and develops blogs foe clients large and small. She has worked with WordPress since 2003 and speaks frequently at conferences. But never mind that where is her own blog?

It’s here: Justagirlintheworld.com

Back to WordPress for Dummies, it promises to show you how to:

Hopefully not by listing all the options and going through the menus item by item.

Cool. First find out what is meant by a “template tag”, then which are the common ones, then let’s try and understand them. Sounds like an advanced option which should come much later than some of the others below, or else a problem with nomenclature. The word “tag” is problematic where WorPress is concerned in a number of contexts.

Manage comments? Ok.

That’s all the basic covered then. Find, choose, download and enhance themes perhaps?

Ah the template tags again. So this is a dummies guide to PHP hacking as well, then.

The more the merrier.

It sounds well worth the ten and a half quid for WordPress for Dummies doesn’t it, or I believe there is also a download version. Obviously all of the information in the book can also be found through trawling the web, countless blogs and forums about wordpress but sometimes it’s useful to have a visual quick jump into a topic. Here’s the amazon link again:
WordPress For Dummies® (For Dummies)WordPress for Dummies

Experimental Wordpress plugins deactivated September 23, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress , 1 comment so far

I just deactivated two experimental WordPress plugins.

With both of these I soon felt uncomfortable with the idea of automating the insertion of hypertext links into an article, which is after all, a piece hand crafted author written text even if it’s only a blog post. I think it clashes with the perception of the author’s voice coming through the text when the deliberate insertion of a link can happen alongside some others which are machine generated and therefore differently motivated.

This means I also have to consider very carefully the use of SH-Autolink which is a simple time saving search and replace type of hyperlink generating plugin. For that one, I need to tweak the php code so that only the first instance is hyperlinked in each post containing that string. That will be better than having to avoid using my source phrase more than once, which kind of undermines the whole point of being able to just write and let something else take care of the commonly linked phrases.

I’m now going to try and avoid temptation to test any more experimental Wordpress plugins until at least after the upgrade to version 2.3 has settled down, with all the backward compatibility problems threatened by that procedure.

MyBloglog, Romlet or BlogRush? September 16, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress, blogs and community, web2.0 , 6comments


In this post I am going to review three similar on-blog widgetised linking services. All three are currently in my sidebar here, displaying links of one sort or another and tracking visits. I also use the excellent Facebook application “Blog Friends” but that works a bit differently, and was covered earlier.

Blogrush is the newest, being released only yesterday, and at the time of writing it’s temporarily broken.

blogrush

I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is the oldest and best established. I like it for the simple idea of displaying visitors faces, which can creep up as a loose sense of community eventually, and also for the three column layout of the stats page. It flows naturally from left to right, showing where visitors came from, what they viewed, and where they left for.

mybloglog stats

For a quick glance analysis, this is so much more intuitive than for example Google Analytics. Disadvantages are that it can often take three clicks to make a reciprocal visit, navigating the pages at MyBlogLog itself. With practice you can get this down to two clicks, by paying careful attention to the links as illustrated below:

click here

ROMlet


I was invited to Romlet beta via MyBlogLog with whom they are really a direct competitor.

ROMlet is a brand new blog widget that incorporates the best aspects of a brag badge, stats counter, bookmarking tool and popularity booster. JOIN THE COMMUNITY now and then sign up take part in the beta release!

ROMlet
As a beta product, it’s not at all clear where ROMlet is headed for now. The service is so simple that it hardly seems to do anything. The so-called “brag badge” is a collection of icons which give out a certain amount of referral stats data, which is not really something that I consider adds value for my visitors, nor particularly for myself. I did have a little trickle of traffic when one of my articles was popular enough to appear on their front page for a while, but if the service becomes at all well used then I would expect this to be an increasingly rare occurrance, thus undermining its own success. So all a bit baffling really, and I’ll probably take it off in due curse.

BlogRush

Blogrush is the newest, currently getting a lot of attention from marketing bloggers, which betrays the origin of the service. There’s a multi-level referral scheme which is supposed to favour early adopters so if you are interested in these type of things then it’s best to get set up with BlogRush sooner rather than later. The only danger I perceive is that with all the multi level marketers jumping on board from the off, the service could well prove Hugh’s Law to be correct right from the start.

Conclusion

Hmm, do I need to write a conclusion? It’s fairly clear that MyBlogLog is providing a lasting service which slowly helps to build some level of blogging community and relationships, as well as the handy stats. Linda pointed out that in some ways it’s a shame that these automated and uncontrolled systems have taken over from the manual blogroll to some extent, and I can see that personal choice may be diminished. With Blog Friends, you can choose to filter your reading of friends of friends blogs ( I’d rather read my friends‘ blogs unfiltered ) and with BlogRush you can choose which category to associate with, and you can also choose to take it off altogether - something which is very easy and non-destructive with widgets for Wordpress 2.2

Free link love with every comment August 11, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, Wiki , 4comments

Inspired by Tino Triste, I have decided to remove the rel=”nofollow” tag from the comments links in this blog, to reward people who leave relevant comments.

The world wide web was designed precisely to to be made out of of sites linking to each other and this principle is used to determine the strength, relevancy, and popularity of a site by Google’s page rank algorithm. Then due to blog comment spammers and robots, Google and other search engines decided to introduce the rel=”nofollow” tag, which basically means that a link with that tag has no weight for search engine rankings at all. Wikipedia took up this option readily, and unfortunately so did Wordpress in the default state. But comment spam did not decrease significantly, in fact it has probably increased regardless, so it seems unnecessary to penalise the genuine comments, or for that matter the useful external references on Wikipedia.

So I switched it off.

How? I thought I could just edit the comment module of the theme but it’s embedded far more deeply than that. So I used Kimmo Suominen’s DoFollow 3.0 plugin

Writing an About page August 8, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, theory , 4comments

I had a bit of time to myself with an offline laptop recently, whilst Linda was using my main computer to record an interview podcast as it happens. So I decided to write a reflective “about” page for the blog. The main purpose was for myself, trying to get some focus on where the blog is currently situated, in terms of topics, appoach and sense of audience, and where it might be going next.

I’d been sent via Linda’s Furl, a link to lifehack.org so I thought I’d try using the questions and prompts in that artice. I think they worked quite well as stimuli, although no doubt I’ll need to tweak the page from time to time, and rethink it altogether in a much shorter time than I usually expect! Anyway, it’s up on the web version of the blog, accesible from the rightmost page tab in the blog header. That has a url of http://distributedresearch.net/blog/about and may become a landing point where new visitors arrive to see if the blog has anything of interest for them. I’m going to reproduce it below for the benefit of those reading via RSS or email, which frankly should be most people these days. You can always come back to the blog itself to leave a comment :-) Since writing the about page, I’ve just seen Stephen Downes’ article “How to be heard” which could also form the basis of a good “about” page or rebranding. In fact if you read both links first then you’re almost guaranteed to produce an even better one than this:

Who is Andy Roberts?

I am a blogger and wiki-er, an explainer, researcher, musician, online community professional with both a technical and creative background. I work from home in London, UK and hope to move pemanently onto a narrow boat in a couple of years. I’ve been fascinated by online groups for ten years, joined hundreds, started many, facilitate a few, but I don’t always fit in easily with norms and expectations so I’m active on my own spaces as much as others. I love WordPress and MediaWiki.

What is this blog all about?

DARnet blog is a vehicle for tracking my journey through internet life, as well as a shop window into my work and learning. It adapts and changes as do I, so the content can be somewhat random or clearly focussed, depending on the period.

My main theme is the process of change, particularly in the context of distributed communities of practice, using the method of action research and applying the theory of social objects.

I’m trying to tell the world that these amazing ‘new’ phenomena are governed by universal laws of change, although complex, can be understood and guided to some extent, and are every bit as real and human as offline communities.

Because I am situated in the UK, you will also find posts related to some topical news and events and my participation in the vibrant London internet startup and social media scene. Homeworking and changing the nature of work is at the forefront through my work with pajamanation, and there’s a separate page for my acoustic music making.

Why Does Your Blog Exist?

See myblog story

How Does Your Blog Work?

Sometimes I don’t post for a week, sometimes twice or more in a day. Comments are open and encouraged with no registration required. Upon commenting, you get a chance to subscribe by email to future comments on that post, so a that a conversation may ensue.

Who Is Your Audience?

I hope the blog is of interest to anybody who knows me through the various social networking events and sites, to facilitators and moderators, geeks and homeworkers, newbies and net veterans, at home and abroad.

I read three hundred RSS feeds daily but the blogroll in my sidebar only contains links which have some relevence to the DARnet blog, mainly individuals.

As far as I know I’m the only blogger writing about communities of practice combined with action research, object orientated sociality and a dash of marxist dialectics. I’m passionate that good theory is important, and try to communicate my ideas in a clearly understandable manner with an informal yet grammatically correct style.

Why Should I Subscribe to Your Blog?

If you subscribe for a long enough period, you will receive unique insights and discoveries, technology tips and developments as well as an unfolding story about the new web entrepreneur lifestyle. All written in an accessible style with illustrative but not gratuitous graphics, and occasional podcast or video.

Oh you pretty urls December 17, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, blogs and community , 1 comment so far

I finally got around to fixing the permalink structure on this blog today, by implementing “pretty URLs”. Wordpress caters for this very well, but I had problems with the way my hosting service deals with .htaccess files, trying to force script me into making directories password protected. I also wanted to make sure that existing links to the old numbered permalinks wouldn’t get broken by the process of renaming to the like of “http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2006/12/07/tornado-hits-london/” from what used to be the ugly URL: “http://distributedresearch.net/blog/?p=192”

For those reading via RSS or aggregators, the process may have caused the 10 most recent posts to be repeated as unread, I’m sorry about that.

Oh, and there’s also a speech synthethiser “podcast’ version of the text in each post, courtesy of talkr which Linda asked for on Acting to Improve. It’s an interesting experiment listening to a mechanical female voice trying to read what I’ve written but I’m not sure if I should keep it. What do you think?