Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Technical issues around social media. For the geekier-minded.
[fr] Mise à jour de WordPress. En espérant que rien ne casse. Vraiment.
There, upgraded my WordPress install. Was much needed. Did a little plugin spring-cleaning while I was at it. Leave a comment if you see anything wonky — I’m still fixing stuff, though.
And oh, no. I’m going to have to update Basic Bilingual. Which means I need to get SVN running on my MacBook again. Wish me luck.
Update: actually, Basic Bilingual still works, though it’s ugly in the admin. So I’ll leave it for now.
[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”}}}
[en] On February 26th I will be holding my first public blogging class (beginners) at the ISL.
The workshop I am holding tomorrow morning at LIFT covers the same material, but in English.
Mise à jour, 13.02.2008: ce cours est repoussé car la préparation de Going Solo ne me permet pas d’en faire la promotion correctement. Si vous êtes intéressé par ce genre de séminaire, contactez-moi et je vous ferai signe dès qu’un nouveau séminaire sera mis sur pied. Des cours pour particuliers sont également possibles.
J’organise un cours d’initiation aux blogs mardi 26 février 2008 dans les locaux de l’ISL à Lausanne.
Ce cours s’adresse à toute personne désireuse de découvrir ce qu’est un blog, pour son usage personnel. Pour plus d’informations, voir directement la page dédiée à ces ateliers pratiques.
Comme les lecteurs de ce blog ne sont a priori pas les personnes qui seront intéressées par ce genre de cours, je vous remercie infiniment de faire passer le mot auprès de votre entourage!
[fr] Une amie Serbe s'est vu poser un ultimatum par son hébergeur de blogs: 24 heures pour supprimer commentaires d'un autre blogueur et liens vers ses sites, ou voir son blog disparaître.
L'hébergeur en question (qui utilise WordPress multi-utilisateurs, comme WordPress.com) avait en outre désactivé la fonction d'exportation de blog.
On s'en est sortis comme on a pu (voir ici).
Mis à part le côté technique de l'affaire, il est absolument scandaleux qu'un hébergeur de blogs se permette d'agir ainsi. Certes, tout hébergeur est libre de "virer" des clients -- mais déactiver au préalable la fonction d'exportation des blogs, cela atteint des sommets de mesquinerie. A bon entendeur.
Edit: sur Seesmic, l'histoire en français et en vidéo.
Note: I’ve updated this post as I gathered information allowing me to see more clearly in this whole mess. Please read the comment if you’re going to jump in the conversation or blog about this.
Wednesday night, my friend Sanja from BlogOpen (she was my very kind and competent hostess) pinged me on IM. She had less than 24 hours to export her blog before her blog host shut it down.
It was a blog hosted by WordPress multi-user [Edit: not WPMU]. Easy enough, I thought. There is an export function. Unfortunately, when I logged in (the interface was in Serbian, but I can find my way through WordPress with my eyes closed), this is what I found:
Even if you don’t understand Serbian, you can see there is a missing tab. I tried calling /wp-admin/export.php directly, but the file had been removed.
Well, after a bit of poking, prodding and thinking, this is what I came up with (reminder: WPMU means that you can’t there was no possibility to install plugins and no direct access to the server):
I went into Options > Reading. I set the feeds to “entire post”. As there were 110 posts in this blog, I set the home page to display all of them, with a little margin for error. There were more than 1400 comments, so I set the maximum number of items in a feed to 1500.
Then I did three things:
/feed (an RSS dump of the blog posts)/comments/feed (an RSS dump of the comments)wget -r -l1 -w1 BLOGURL (thanks, John) from my server (also to save the images).The blog was saved. I couldn’t import the RSS dump of blog posts into WordPress.com, where I told Sanja to open a new blog account, so I quickly set up a regular WordPress install on my server, imported it there, and exported it in WXR format. Great.
Comments, however, are another story. If you’re in a hackish mood, any help would be appreciated.
We’ll probably have to deal with the images too once the blog has been completely wiped off the 381.com server — for the moment it seems like it was disabled, but the images are still there (see this one for example).
There, that was for the technical part.
Now for a personal comment. I find it utterly disgusting and shocking that a blog host owner would give people an ultimatum to leave and disable the export function in the blogging software. Sanja tells me that they had the export function until a few days before the ultimatum.
Of course, a blog host can choose not to host certain people. But trying to lock people in by disabling export of their own data is simply evil. If you’re kicking people off your system, you damn well better make sure they can take their data with them.
Edit, 27.01, 12:00: I’m happy to learn that it seems the disabling of the export function was not related to the ultimatum, and that the blog381 people were not actually trying to actively lock people in. However, it remains that it’s pretty delicate in a conflictual situation to tell people to “submit or leave” when they don’t have a way to export their data on their own.
So, people, please. If you need a blog host, choose a serious one. WordPress.com for example. Or Blogger. Or Typepad. Putting your precious blog between the hands of an individual is risky (weblogs.com, anybody? and if you remember, people on weblogs.com at least had the guarantee they could export their data…)
How did this happen?
I got some details about the situation, but a word of warning about that, first. The source material to this Serbian blogosphere drama is all in… Serbian. I’m relying here on what my friend Sanja told me about the situation, and I do not doubt her good faith. I know, though, that stories do have multiple sides, and that there might be more to the background than what I’m telling you here — but whatever the background story, it cannot justify the behaviour of this blog host.
From what I gathered, what brought about this crisis is a quarrel between two bloggers: Tatjana aka Venus aka Lang (Update: Tatjana is not happy that I’m linking to her and has redirected visitors to this site elsewhere; to see her blog, copy-paste the link http://www.laluve.com/ in your browser), the owner of the Serbian blogging platform blog381.com (not the Tatjana who organized BlogOpen!), and another pretty popular blogger. At some point, Tatjana decided to forbid the people using her platform from linking to this other blogger or harbouring his comments.
Here is the warning she posted on the community forums:
Vlasnik blogova
http://bruh.org/ludizmaj/,
http://www.blogoye.org/pecina/,
http://www.blogoye.org/Mudrosti/,
http://www.blogoye.org/sujeta/
(ima verovatno jos ali ne mogu da trazim)
je ovom blog sistemu naneo stetu laziranjem glasova oko izbora za najblogera (na kom je on bio ‘pobednik’), ‘miniranjem’ sledeceg izbora, sirenjem neistina, traceva, vrbovanjem novih blogera sa tri osam jedan sistema, a sve u cilju da se naskodi ovom sistemu a poveca sopstveni traffic i “ugled”.
Za one koji nisu dovoljno informisani i sve ostale koji su slusali ili nisu, samo jednu stranu price od gore pomenutog, necu dodatno iznositi nikakve detalje, niti vise imam nameru da se borim sa provincijalizmima pojedinih ljudi koji su bili ili jesu na neki nacin u komunikaciji sa blogom381 i njegovim korisnicima.
Slobodna volja svakog od nas da pise kako i gde hoce, ali oni koji se odluce da i dalje pisu ovde nece moci da imaju linkove ka ovim blogovima niti komentare vlasnika istih.
Ukoliko imate zelju,nameru ili potrebu da ostanete na ovom blog sitemu, obrisite linkove i komentare gore pomenutog blogera u roku od 24h.
Translation (Sanja was a bit tired, so forgive the wobbliness):
The owner of these blogs
http://bruh.org/ludizmaj/,
http://www.blogoye.org/pecina/,
http://www.blogoye.org/Mudrosti/,
http://www.blogoye.org/sujeta/has caused damage to this blog system by faking votes for the election of “The best blogger” (where he was “the winner”), and was undermining the next election by spreading gossip, lies, and recruiting new 381 bloggers, with only one aim: to damage this community and increase his own blog traffic and “reputation”.
For those who are not informed well enough, and all others who were listening or didn’t, only one side of the story of the person mentioned above, I will not give any additional details, nor do I have the intention to fight with provincialism of some people who were or in some way are connected to blog381 communication and their users.
It is the free will of each of us to write how and where we want to, but those who decide to keep writing here, will not be able to have links to these blogs or comments by their owner.
Those of you who have the wish, intention or need to stay on this blog system, should delete links and comments of the blogger (mentioned above) within 24 hours.
Sanja learnt about this because the owner of the blogging platform left a comment on one of her posts (not the most recent) to let her know about it. Given that the “other blogger” in question is a friend of Sanja’s, she wasn’t going to comply.
Other bloggers have also seen their blogs deleted, or at least de-activated (actually, before the 24-hour limit was up). A dozen or so, says Sanja.
If you want to chime in on the “political” side of this story (particularly if you’re involved in this story or a direct witness), you’re welcome to use my comments. However, I ask (as always) that everybody remain civil and refrain from personal attacks (commonsense blogging etiquette, y’know).
Update: It seems that since Sanja’s blog was deactivated, the whole blogging platform has been shut down, with a message that people can e-mail the administrator to get an export of their blog. This message was not there during the ultimatum period.
In a comment to this post, Tatjana aka Lang asked me to remove the link to her blog, http://www.laluve.com/ , which I had placed upon her name. As I have refused to remove it (linking to the people involved in this story is perfectly relevant, and on the web, you can link to who you want, anyway), she has set up a redirection which sends visitors from this site straight off to CNN. So, I’ve left the link in, of course, but provided you with a handy copy-paste if you want to go and visit her all the same.
[fr] Deuxième version de mon plugin pour insérer automatiquement une feuille de style impression dans n'importe quel thème WordPress. Il y a maintenant un panneau d'administration qui permet d'éditer le CSS directement depuis WordPress -- et le CSS en question a été enrichi.
The little print CSS plugin I threw together the other day has had a little upgrade already, and is also now available in the WordPress plugin directory.
First, Kjell Knudsen was kind enough to add to the very basic CSS file I provided with the plugin. It’s now a little richer and should support K2, for example. It’s still open to improvement, so don’t hesitate to link to your propositions in the comments! Maybe at some point I’ll be able to offer more than one stylesheet with the option to choose between them.
Option? Oh yes, option. Because, you see, Print CSS now has an option panel. I’m pretty happy, because it’s my first plugin with an options panel, and I’ve been thinking I should learn how to do that for some time now. The options panel doesn’t do much, however: it simply allows you to edit the print CSS file through the WordPress admin area (if the file permissions are right — chmod 777 or something).
I’d like to extend all my thanks to Yaosan Yeo, who wrote the MyCSS plugin. I heavily lifted the code for the admin panel from it, as it does essentially the same thing: allow the user to edit a CSS file. I’m really loving MyCSS by the way, even if there is a little capitalization glitch in it, because I’m always adding CSS to my themes and it’s a real pain to copy-paste it all over the place each time I switch themes (or from one blog to another).
Off you go now, check out Bunny’s Print CSS in the WordPress plugin repository!
[fr] Un récapitulatif de mes publications du mois de décembre. Principalement (vous trouverez le détail dans la partie anglaise de ce billet) des articles au sujet de Going Solo, de mes activités professionnelles, des bidouillages WordPress et quelques sujets divers.
Contrairement au mois dernier (mes excuses plates pour cela, d'ailleurs), j'ai publié un certain nombre d'articles en français. En voici la liste:
Si vous vous sentez d'attaque pour lire quelques articles en anglais, je liste les 5 (et 3) plus importants en fin de billet.
It’s high time for a December 2007 Recap. 36 posts, including the November 2007 Recap. In future, I’ll try to do the recap nearer the end of the month. I will.
And I thought November had been busy?!
Let’s get cracking: I’d say one of the major themes of December 2007 was my announcement of Going Solo, and a whole bunch of posts I wrote around that. I’ve now copied the posts over to the blogs of both Going Solo and Going Far, so I’ll link to them there.
On the Going Solo blog:
For some reason, Badges at Conferences didn’t get copied over to the Going Solo blog — but it’s clearly related to this conferency stuff.
On the Going Far blog:
These posts are more general musings (most of the time) on the whole “starting a company” thing.
Here, too, a post which I think I should also have copied over, but which got left behind: Feeling Like a Born-Again Blogger.
While on the topic of events, December saw some action in the “get together and do stuff” department: Website Pro Day (WPD) and World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day (WoWiPAD). The second WPD (French post) was announced and took place on the 28th. WoWiPAD1 and WPD2 News was a short announcement/sign-up post.
As a result, I’ve worked a bit on my professional site (this month too, actually), and written about trying to map out what I do and how to “advertise” is: Working on my Professional Site (with a French version: Qu’est-ce que je fais, au juste?.
I also decided to start organizing a blogging crash course. As this targets local people, I’ve blogged about it in French: Trois heures pour se mettre à bloguer (the concept — I’ll be proposing this as a workshop at the LIFT conference once I’ve figured how to write it up… tomorrow — deadline is 20th!) and Qui prendrait des “cours de blog”?, my vision of the target audience for this kind of course.
I sent in a talk proposal for BlogTalk 2008 (BlogTalk 2008 Proposal — Being Multilingual: Blogging in More Than One Language). For the funny story, I had a nasty time booking my flights, then my talk was rejected, then I decided not to go to BlogTalk and started cancelling my flights, then I was invited to come on a panel (which I’ve just agreed to moderate), so I had to un-cancel and rebook a couple of flights. Sigh.
Still in the “work-related” department, as I was booking my flights with Kayak.com, I decided to write up the experience: Being My Own Travel Agent With Kayak. This was a chance to share what I’d learnt with my fellow travellers, and in the same time provide a demonstration of what kind of material I might produce during an experiential marketing campaign. The very next day, I came upon an article on a French blogger’s site (about some form of blogvertising) which prompted me to give some explanations about the experiential marketing concept in French: Marketing expérientiel vs. publireportage. So… two rather long blog posts just before Christmas. (There would be another post or two to write about the end of my adventures in organizing travel: sites that don’t take non-US credit cards, for example, or various weird pricing structures and policies you can bump into. But not now. Today, my travels for Feb/March are booked, finally.)
Though it was written early in the month, Blogs en entreprise, un peu en vrac (in French) also belongs to this pile of “work-like” posts, as it is an explanation of the issues surrounding corporate blogging and what it involves. I actually wrote it for a prospective client at the time.
Another major theme for December was WordPress-related things (as you can see, I’ve been knee-deep in code):
Now we find ourselves faced with a bunch of posts that don’t seem directly related to one another. My interests are varied, and I must say that I sometimes wonder how anybody else but me would find such a mixture appealing.
Here are some about Web 2.0-ish related stuff:
What’s left? Photography: Being the Model, where I express that though I’m glad to have my photo taken, I do consider I have some rights to the resulting photo as it’s a picture of me. Fresh Lime Soda Episodes 8 & 9 (yes, that was bad — episode 10 is waiting on my hard drive to be edited).
And two more posts in French: Arghl! Du spam par SMS! On fait quoi? — some practical advice on dealing with SMS spam. And last but not least, Du lavage de linge sale en ligne, about using blogs to wash dirty linen in public. The dirty linen being, in this case, the fact that one Christophe Ginisty CEO of Pointblog (the company which ran the now-defunkt Pointblog blog) owes a bunch of people — including me — money for work we did. This has been dragging along for years now (I wrote an article in early 2006 for a magazine that Pointblog was producing).
There you are! A month of blogging in just one post! Not feeling up to reading it all?
If you were to read only three posts (sticking to the English ones):
Ready for five? Add these two:
[fr] Going Solo a maintenant son propre site!
Here we are! Going Solo now has its own (very linkable, please — it’ll need some link-love) website. As with everything around here, it’s still in the making, but I’d rather show it to you now than wait until all is “purr-fect” (ahem) before lifting the veil.
I’ve cross-posted what I’ve written here about Going Solo to the new blog, so everything is over there.
Remember, a couple of months back, when I announced I was starting a company? Well, the company has a name now: Going Far (thanks to Stowe for coming up with the name).
I’ve copied over there the blog posts which have more to do with the whole “setting up a business” aspect of things than with Going Solo in particular.
So, now I have three spaces in which to write about all this “business” stuff. I hope I won’t get lost. Expect some cross-posting, and also maybe some confusion.
In any case, I’m really excited about having these two sites up. Keep an eye on them as they evolve over the next weeks!
[fr] Un nouveau plugin, qui permet d'insérer automatiquement une feuille de style pour l'impression dans son blog WordPress.
La feuille de style que j'ai pondue étant bien pauvre, incomplète, et franchement pas terrible, l'aide d'un gourou CSS serait fort appréciée pour mettre à disposition une feuille de style pour impression qui soit jolie, conforme, et à un peu près universelle. Crédit sera donné, bien entendu. (C'est un anglicisme, ça?)
Right, here we go — another plugin. I noticed some time back that many WordPress themes were provided without a print stylesheet.
In my attempt to stop fiddling with my theme files, I dreamed up a simple little plugin that would add a link to a print stylesheet in the page header, and provide a simple, universal, print stylesheet that people could use.
Well, I’ve got half the work done, and it’s my new plugin Bunny’s Print CSS (zip, .phps. “Half the work” because it includes a sample stylesheet and links to it automatically in the theme header when activated, but the stylesheet is nowhere near “complete”, “universal”, “pretty”, or any other nice adjectives you’d like to find associated with a print stylesheet bundled in a plugin.
So, call to all you CSS gurus out there. Can you improve on my print.css? It would be nice if it were at least somewhat sandbox/kubrick compatible. Credit will be (loudly) given.
Now, aren’t there other plugins out there doing similar things? Not that many, at least in the plugin repository. MyCSS allows you to add custom theme-independant CSS to your blog. WP-Print creates a “printable version” of your blog (if I understood correctly, by creating a set of print-friendly pages).
[fr] Je me suis levée à l'aube pour aller faire la nouille sur RSR1 et prendre un p'tit déj improvisé chez une ancienne copine d'uni. Ensuite, j'ai passé la journée les mains dans le PHP, ce qui veut dire que je n'ai beaucoup blogué, mais que j'ai mis à jour deux plugins: Basic Bilingual, qui permet de tenir sans peine un blog "bilingue" comme celui-ci (c'est ce qui me permet de rédiger et d'afficher ce petit extrait en français) et Bunny's Language Linker, très utile pour afficher des liens entre pages correspondantes des différentes traductions d'un site.
After waking up at an ungodly hour this New Year’s Day (for a live radio appearance and impromptu breakfast at a uni friend’s home nearby) I spent the rest of my day elbows deep in PHP code. As a result, I haven’t written the half-dozen of posts that have been sitting in my drafts list over Christmas, but I have updated two plugins — an old one, and a new-born.
Basic Bilingual 0.32
This release fixes the disappearing excerpts problem (was fixed in 0.31 actually, but I never announced it) and replaces the ugly “language box” floating somewhere near the top of the post admin page by a pretty DBX (let me know what it stands for) box in the sidebar:
(I always want to call it “Language Links”, which was the initial name I chose — still not sure I was right to change.) Anyway, this version is pretty exciting, as it does something I’ve been thinking of for a while: it puts the link to the other localized versions of the page you’re viewing in the menu bar if you’re using a Sandbox-based theme:
Otherwise, it puts it at the end of the page in its own div (you can style it the way you wish). I’m not saying this is the best, final solution, but I think it’s headed in the right direction.
[fr] Un nouveau plugin WordPress que je viens d'écrire. Celui-ci vous permet de gérer les liens entre pages équivalentes de deux versions linguistiques d'un site. Par exemple, si vous avez http://stephanie-booth.com/en et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr (deux installations WordPress séparées!), le plugin vous aidera à faire en sorte qu'il y ait des liens entre http://stephanie-booth.com/en/about et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr/a-propos.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m proud to announce the WordPress plugin Bunny’s Language Linker (zip, phps).
I’ve been wanting to write this plugin for ages, and I’ve finally done it this evening. This is a plugin for people who have a WordPress site with content duplicated in more than one language, like I’m going to have with stephanie-booth.com. For example, you have an “about” page in English, and another “about” page in German. This plugin helps you create and manage links between such “sister” pages. (“Pages”, not “posts”. It doesn’t work with posts at all.)
The plugin adds an extra field to the page editing form, inviting you to input the page slug of the sister page:
The screenshot is a bit small, but there on the right, there is a little box with “a-propos” — the slug of the French sister page. It works with more than one other language, too. You just need to edit the settings in the plugin file to specify which languages you’re playing with (instructions are in the plugin file). If I had sites in 3 other languages, say French, Spanish, and German, my settings line in the plugin file would look like this:
$bll_other_languages=array('fr', 'es', 'de');
And the little box would provide three different fields for the page slugs of the different localized sites. (OK, I’m making this sound complicated, sorry.)
The plugin then automatically adds links to the sister pages you’ve indicated. Here’s what it could look like:
There’s a readme file with the plugin which will give you some more details. I’ll soon have a client site in production using that plugin, so if these explanations weren’t very clear, hopefully the demonstration will help.