Category: Technical

Technical issues around social media. For the geekier-minded.

Bienvenue aux lecteurs de l'Hebdo [fr]

[en] A month without blogging! An article on blogging in this area was published yesterday by l'Hebdo. An excuse to give you a little news.

Je romps le silence radio (un mois sans rien publier, que diable!) à l’occasion de la parution de l’article “Blogueurs romands: L’esprit de famille” dans l’Hebdo d’hier (le voici tout joli en PDF avec photos).

Un mois! A quoi me suis-je donc occupée? Qu’y a-t-il de nouveau? Je pourrais faire trois piles d’articles, mais à la place, je vous donne une liste en vrac:

  • 3 semaines malade au fond du canapé sous le duvet avec beaucoup de DVDs
  • 5 saisons de X-files (cf. ci-dessus)
  • heureuse propriétaire d’un iPhone et d’un netbook
  • un sympathique mandat en cours pour la boulangerie Fleur de Pains (3 articles publiés à ce jour)
  • un espace coworking (l’eclau) qui roule
  • co-conspiratrice de Ada Lovelace Day, 1000 participants inscrits en moins d’une semaine
  • rédactrice en chef du blog de voyage ebookers.ch en français (pas encore lancé, on trime dur, juste là)
  • la poignée habituelle de cours de blog, demandes d’interview, projets autour de conférences
  • du retard dans les mises à jour WordPress, l’envoi de ma newsletter, le rangement de mon appartement, la rédaction de divers ebooks et histoires de 50 mots
  • un mandat intéressant repoussé ad aeternam pour cause de crise budgétaire
  • un projet de traduction d’ebook en cours
  • beaucoup de tweets
  • toute une période de “rien envie d’écrire” — c’est rare
  • déclaration d’impôts 2007 envoyée, enfin!
  • et hop, la sortie du fameux livre sur WordPress, co-écrit par Xavier Borderie, Amaury Balmer, et Francis Chouquet (relu par bibi!)
  • relooking du site de Café-Café (encore quelques détails à régler)

Bon, allez, j’arrête là. L’envie d’écrire me reprend, je dégèle le blog, je reprends le rythme. A tout bientôt!

Linking Flickr Images in Thesis' Multimedia Box [en]

[fr] Instructions pour faire en sorte que les photos de la boîte multimédia du thème WordPress Thesis renvoient vers leur page Flickr.

I haven’t had Thesis on my blog for 24 hours that I’m already messing with it. Oh well. So, one thing I’ve done and will explain in some detail is added tons of photos from my Flickr account to the Thesis multimedia box up right, with links to the original Flickr pages.

  1. I have shell access to my server, which makes life so much simpler. Once inside the rotator folder, all I have to do is grab the URL of the middle-sized photograph I want (All sizes > Medium) and wget it. For example: wget http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3252/2725414522_4a9b2887df.jpg
  2. On the Thesis Options page, I insert the Flickr photo page URL in the “alt” field for that photo. It’s pretty easy to deduce it from the filename. For example: 2725414522_4a9b2887df.jpg => http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/2725414522/.
  3. Following these instructions, I replaced one line in the multimedia_box_functions.php file so that the images would actually link to their Flickr page.

Voilà!

Redirections in WordPress [en]

When I moved the Going Solo site away from WordPress.com (which did its job well, btw) so that I could jiggle it around and make the Lausanne and Leeds events into separate sites, I ended up with a whole bunch of URLs like http://going-solo.net/programme which actually referred to the Lausanne event, and needed to point to http://lausanne08.going-solo.net/programme.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know that I’m not shy to go and fiddle around with my .htaccess file, but I’m also getting increasingly lazy as the years go by. So, here are two WordPress plugins (well, one isn’t strictly a plugin, but let’s not get tangled up in semantics) which can come in handy:

  • Redirection plugin: use this when you just need a 301/302 (prefer the latter) redirect/move — if you head to http://going-solo.net/programme, you’ll see it at work. It has a handy interface to let you manage all your redirects, and also does 404 logging for you. I’ve discovered (and fixed) quite a few broken links since I installed it.
  • “Redirect to” page template (thanks, Mark): this is actually a page template which does nothing but redirect somewhere else. I use it on the main Going Solo site to create navigation tabs to Lausanne and Leeds which redirect to the other sites. Create a page with the right title, select “Redirect” as the page template, and add a custom field named “redirect” with the destination URL as value.

Have fun!

Angst: My Categories are Still a Mess [en]

[fr] Mes catégories, c'est toujours le chenit. J'ai les outils qu'il faut maintenant pour faire le ménage, mais il me manque l'essentiel: quelles catégories un monstre comme CTTS devrait-il avoir?

My categories are a long-standing source of worry.

They were created in an unenlightened effort to “go ontological”, when I switched to Movable Type. By the time I switched to WordPress over four years ago, I was already thinking about cleaning up my categories (lo and behold, the birth of Batch Categories — I didn’t waste any time, did I?)

My categories are still a mess. WordPress has had native tagging for a while now (I’ve happily retired the Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin), Rob has taken over Batch Categories, so it now works rather than just sit there in lists, and Christine from the Internet has written a nice Tag Managing Thing (which seems a bit broken in 2.5.x but might still work).

So, I could use the category to tag converter and get rid of all my categories. I would feel much lighter. Then I can use a combination of Tag Managing Thing and Batch Categories (which allows search by tag, and, actually, I see it now, allows not only addition of categories to selected posts, but tags, so maybe I don’t need Tag Managing Thing for this, and this sentence is a bit long so it’s going to end here, sorry) to re-create nice categories for my blog.

But as always, here is where I stall. What categories should a monster like CTTS have?

Want to listen rather than read? It’s here:

Trying the Seesmic Video Plugin [en]

[fr] J'essaie le plugin seesmic pour mettre de la vidéo dans mes articles. Il paraît qu'on peut laisser aussi des commentaires vidéo!

When I visited Seesmic in San Francisco, Loïc told me they were working on a video comment and posting plugin.

Here I am, trying it out.

{seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/NrZQ4aKmSu_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”My First Seesmic Video Post with the WordPress plugin.”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/0i66jwr6zE”}}}