Non, ce n'est pas un podcast, ça [fr]

A l’occasion de mon workshop dans le cadre de Pollens Pédagogiques, j’ai réalisé qu’il n’était pas inutile de rappeler ce qu’est et n’est pas un podcast.

En effet, dans le “langage courant”, on entend beaucoup le mot “podcast” utilisé pour faire référence “du contenu audio ou vidéo qu’on peut télécharger”.

Un podcast, ce n’est pas ça. Ce n’est pas juste “une vidéo en ligne”.

Un podcast, c’est l’équivalent audio ou vidéo du blog. (Avec le programme blogueurs de Solar Impulse, en passant, j’ai aussi réalisé à quel point il n’est absolument pas clair pour la majorité du public ce qu’est… un blog.)

Alors un blog, c’est… une succession d’articles organisés anti-chronologiquement.

Un blog est généralement disponible en HTML (ce que vous lisez peut-être en ce moment) et en RSS, format de publication que vous ne remarquez pas sauf si vous utilisez un lecteur de news, et qui vous permet de vous abonner au blog.

Un podcast, à la base, c’est un fil (flux) RSS dont le contenu n’est pas du texte, mais de l’audio ou de la vidéo. C’est une évolution de ce qu’on appelait à l’époque “l’audioblogging”. Ce qu’ajoutait le podcast, c’était l’inclusion dans le fil RSS du contenu “riche” (audio/vidéo) et l’automatisation (initialement à l’aide de scripts, puis via iTunes) qui permettait aux épisodes du podcast de se retrouver directement sur l’iPod de l’auditeur (d’où le nom podcasting).

J’ai en passant suivi l’histoire de la naissance du podcasting d’assez près à l’époque: fin 2003, mon ami Kevin Marks étant justement la personne à avoir fait la démonstration d’un script qui copiait automatiquement le contenu audio lié à un fil RSS vers iTunes, et donc vers un iPod. (J’adore quand le web nous permet de revivre l’histoire en direct, pas vous? Voici un extrait vidéo de la démo de Kevin.)

Donc, un podcast, c’est un blog dont le contenu n’est pas des articles composés de texte et de photos, mais d’épisodes audio ou vidéo.

Je me demande, en écrivant ça, si l’abus de langage qui nomme une “vidéo sur internet” un podcast n’est pas simplement le même que celui (bien trop répandu) qui nomme malencontreusement “blog” une publication isolée sur un blog, au lieu de “article” ou “post” ou “billet”. Ça ne viendrait à l’esprit de personne d’appeler “magazine” un article de magazine (on réserve ce nom pour l’ensemble des articles) ou “livre” une page dans un livre, pourtant.

Donc:

  • un livre est composé de pages
  • un magazine est composé d’articles
  • un podcast est composé d’épisodes (de podcast)
  • un blog est composé de billets, d’articles (de blog), de posts

Happy blogging and podcasting!

A Blog is Not a Post, Dammit! [en]

[fr] De plus en plus répandue, la confusion entre "blog" et "post/billet/article" est un cancer qui ronge la terminologie blogosphérique. Pour mémoire, un blog est un type de site composé d'une série d'articles (ou posts, ou billets). On ne dirait pas, dans le cas d'un magazine composé d'articles, "j'ai écrit un nouveau magazine" -- et donc on ne dit pas "j'ai écrit un nouveau blog sur le sujet".

Photographiez les coupables à coups de saisie d'écran et envoyez-les-moi -- je les ajouterai à la collection dans ce b... illet!

Lately, I (and others) have noticed an increasingly aggravating trend: saying “blog” instead of “post”.

To make it clear: a blog is a type of website, made of a collection of blog posts, or “posts”.

Just like a magazine is a collection of articles. You wouldn’t say “he just wrote a new magazine” instead of “he just wrote a new article”, would you?

So, you don’t say “to write a blog” instead of “to write a post”. It just doesn’t make sense.

I’ve started collecting screenshots of offenders and I’m collecting them here (Flickr tag: ablogisnotapost). Post your own screenshots on Flickr and I’ll add them to this blog… post (!) — with credit, linkage, and everything, of course. Just drop me a line or leave a comment with the link.

Let’s fight back and get all those newcomers to get their terminology straight before it’s too late!

“Blog” and “post” confusion — offenders

How to Make a Blog:

Confusing 'blog' and 'blog post'

E-mail:

E-mail with "blog" and "post" confusion

StumbleUpon:

StumbleUpon » My Preferences

StumbleUpon » My Blog

Plasq, courtesy of Stowe Boyd:

plasq bad blog usage

Maria on Millions of Us, courtesy of Stowe Boyd (one could argue that this is, in fact, her “first blog”):

Her First Blog Ever

Foreign correspondent Telegraph Blog, courtesy of Adam Tinworth:

Not a Britney Blog - a Britney Post!

SAP Community Network:

SAP Blog_Post Confusion

Alan Patrick (his excuse: lots of beer and a late night, and an attempt at justification by invoking a semantic shift of the word “blog”):

broadstuff blog_post confusion

Dwayne Phillips commenting on /Message:

Comment on /Message, blog/post terminology confusion

Tim Berners-Lee himself 🙁:

OMG. TBL himself calling a post a blog :-(

Send me yours!

Bad Sector in Memory [en]

[fr] Je recherche un billet sur lequel je n'arrive plus à mettre la main, qui disait (ou en tout cas me faisait penser) que le blogueur-consultant qui fait du "consulting gratuit" sur son blog par moment (critiquant tel ou tel service) est en fait en train d'encourager ses clients potentiels à lui donner un mandat avant qu'il ne l'ouvre en public (enfin, si son blog est assez connu), puisque son feedback sera ainsi traité en interne.

Quelqu'un voit lequel c'est?

Maybe you can help me. I read this recently but unfortunately did not file it in either my shared reading items or my del.icio.us links. It was a piece, written by a blogger who is also a consultant (I thought it was Euan or Stowe, but I can’t find the post on either of their blogs)), which basically said that one possible (perverted?) effect of giving “free consulting” on one’s blog (like I’ve done a couple of times) is that if your profile as a blogger is high enough, it could be an incentive for prospective clients to bring you in before you start blogging about their flaws/faults in public.

This was based on the realisation that as a blogger/consultant, one tends to not be so public about stuff the client has to improve, as the input goes to them internally and gets treated there. I’ve clearly noticed that since I’ve been working for coComment.

So, can anybody tell me where I read this? What is my source?

Fixing Newline Abuse in WordPress [en]

Newlines had crept into some of my old posts and corrupted the formatting. Quick and dirty script I used to solve the problem.

[fr] Des retours à  la ligne excédentaires se sont glissés dans mes anciens posts à  un moment donné, cassant des liens et le formattage en général. J'ai utilisé un petit script pour supprimer tous les retours à  la ligne de ces posts.

I only realised right now how badly broken about 500 of my old posts where. Somewhere in the process, newlines got added at the end of each line, and not just at the end of each paragraph. As WordPress kindly and intelligently adds the necessary HTML markup for paragraph and line breaks in posts, this meant that lots of my posts had broken links (when the newline occurred in the middle of a link) and uneven lines.

Victims: about 500 posts.

Solution: luckily, all the concerned posts had complete HTML formatting in them. Purely and simply removing all the newlines with a short PHP script was the way to go.

Thanks to all those who helped. You probably won’t be able to use the script as is, but if you have a similar problem at some point, it might help. The script pulls out the posts from the WordPress database, removes the newlines, and puts the post back into the table.

Quick Comment Spam Tip for WordPress [en]

Here are the two plugins you need to fight comment spam using WordPress.

[fr] Deux plugins pour combattre le spam de commentaires sous WordPress: Kitten's Spaminator et Kitten's Spam Words. [Edit 03.12.2004] Ou plus simple, Spam Karma, que j'utilise à  présent.

If you want a quick tip to protect your WordPress installation from comment spam, the killer plugin combination is Kitten’s Spaminator and Kitten’s Spam Words.

The second allows you to “delete as spam”, adding keywords and IPs to the filter, and the second gives “spam points” to new comments (ie, for words matching the filter, previous comment posted within the last x minutes, IP matching the filter), deleting those over a certain threshold directly, and queuing the others for moderation. It’s also smart enough to give bonus points if the commentor has already had comments posted on the blog.

Edit 04.12.2004: See the comment, I’m now using Spam Karma rather than the two plugins presented above.

Indulging in Memes [en]

Another meme test. I don’t usually go for memes, but I love the idea of tests and research. The Google-juice is nice, of course, but I find almost more exciting to be able to visualise the trail of weblogs as the meme spreads.

[fr] Encore un meme. D'habitude, je ne saute pas dans le train, mais celui-ci a l'intéret (a) d'être créé afin d'en tirer quelque enseignement et (b) de nous permettre de visualiser immédiatement le "chemin de blogs" parcouru.

Update 04.08.04 23:50: post text modified as requested by Nova. (It’s pretty different from the initial text, but the idea remains the same. Not that I’m obsessed by Google ranking, as I hope you’ll guess.)

Copy This GoMeme From This Line to The End of this article, and paste into your blog. Then follow the instructions below to fill it out for your site.

Steal This Post!!!! This is a GoMeme– a new way to spread an idea along social networks. This is the second generation meme in our experiment in spreading ideas. To find out what a GoMeme is, and how this experiment works, or just to see how this GoMeme is growing and discuss it with others, visit the Root Posting and FAQ for this GoMeme at www.mindingtheplanet.net .

By adding this GoMeme to your Weblog you can get higher Google rankings for your site, and help your friends get higher Google rankings too. Your blog will be linked from every other blog that discovers this GoMeme downstream from your blog (from your readers, their readers, and so on). And that will raise your Google rankings in proportion to the number of downstream bloggers that get this GoMeme from you and post it to their blogs. The more people who blog the GoMeme from your blog, the better your Google rankings will get.

By hosting this meme on your blog, you will also be participating in an experiment to generate a distributed Blog survey and test how memes spread through social networks. The dataset from this experiment is public, open and decentralized — every blog that participates hosts their own data about their own blog. Anyone can then get the whole dataset by just searching Google for this unique string: 98818912959q This code is the “global unique identifier,” or GUID for this GoMeme — it marks every web page that participates in this GoMeme so that it can later be found with all the others. (Note it may take a week or longer before Google indexes your blog, so be patient).

Disclaimer

This is purely an experiment and is just for fun. We are really just curious to see what will happen and this is not a commercial project. Participation is voluntary. We don’t mean to annoy anyone. However, if you don’t have much curiosity, or at least a sense of humor, you may find this experiment to be upsetting. In that case, you might try drinking a good strong cup of coffee. If after that you are still unhappy with us, just don’t read any further and have a great day! (If you don’t want your blog to get better Google rankings, that’s purely your choice!) On the other hand, if you are interested in exploring new technologies and pushing the envelope, then keep reading and we look forward to your participation in this experiment. We also request that participants in this experiment refrain from spamming anyone with this GoMeme. To spread it, just put it on your blog; that should be enough.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ADDING THIS GOMEME TO YOUR OWN SITE

Step 1 First, to add your site to this experiment, copy the GoMeme to your site from the “Copy This GoMeme From Here” heading above to the End of this article. Please copy this whole article and try not to alter the text so that it is authentic for the people who get it from your blog. If you would like to come up with your own catchy headline, or anything else to help your GoMeme spread, feel free! Let’s see what works best.

Step 2: Now, fill in your answers to these Required Survey Fields (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers). These will later be automatically data-mined by bots to compile the survey results.

(1) I found this GoMeme at URL: http://www.mindingtheplanet.com

(2) I found this GoMeme on date (day/month/year):04/08/04

(3) I found this GoMeme at time (in GMT format): 07:30:00

(4) I foundit via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Browsing the Web

(5) I posted this GoMeme at my URL (use a hyperlink): Climb to the Stars

(6) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 04/08/04

(7) I posted this at time (in GMT format): 07:50:00

(8) My posting location is (city, state, country): Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

Step 3: If you’re feeling very altruistic today, also fill in these optional survery fields (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(9) My Weblog is hosted by: Myself

(10) My age is: 30

(11) My gender is: Female

(12) My occupation is: Teacher

(13) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NetNewsWire Lite

(14) I use the following software to post to my blog: WordPress

(15) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 13/07/00

(16) My web browser is: FireFox

(17) My operating system is: OSX

Step 4:Now add an entry for your site after the last entry in the PATH LIST below: Your entry should be of the form: line number, URL, hyperlink, optional personal GUID for your blog.

(Note: If you would like to track all postings of the Meme that result from your posting of it, once Google has indexed them, you may add your own optional GUID after your hyperlink on your line of the Path List — just make sure it is short, unique, and doesn’t return any results on Google — for example “mysitename137a2r28”. Also note, if the path list gets too long, you should still try to include the whole path in your blog — even if you have to put the list on a continuation page rather than the excerpt for your posting — and make sure others copy the whole GoMeme along with your Path List when they get the GoMeme from you — If they don’t copy it, your blog and your upstream blogs won’t be linked from their blogs).

PATH LIST

1. http://www.mindingtheplanet.net Minding The Planet, mindingtheplanet14798
2. https://climbtothestars.org Climb to the Stars, climbtothestars87432
3. (your Path List entry goes here in the form URL, hyperlink, GUID. Also, please add a new line after this one, for the next person.)

The End

U-Blog, Six Apart, and Their Angry Bloggers [en]

This very long post is, for the first time in English, a pretty complete account of what has been going on with U-blog and Loïc Le Meur in the French blogosphere for some time now. With the acquisition of Ublog by Six Apart, these problems are bound to take another dimension for the English-speaking blogosphere.

[fr] Ce très long billet expose en anglais l'histoire de U-blog et des problèmes s'y rapportant. J'ai déjà écrit à ce sujet en français (lire également les commentaires) -- pour une fois que la "barrière linguistique" empêche les anglophones de savoir certaines choses, plutôt que le contraire!

So, why on earth are U-bloggers so angry?

I’m often concerned that the language divide makes non-English-speaking people miss out on a whole lot of interesting stuff. These past few days, I’ve been concerned that the language divide may be preventing English-speaking people from knowing about certain things. U-bloggers are angry, and they also have the sympathy of others in the franco-blogosphere, but all that is happening in French.

How aware is Six Apart that they have a bunch of angry french customers, who were encouraged to sign up for a paying version before the end of last year under promise of new features, which weren’t developed and seemingly never will? Edit 06.01.05: see note.

Let’s rewind a bit, shall we? I always think that history explains a lot. Many of the dates here are taken from Laurent’s short history of the franco-blogosphere, a work in progress. Other information comes from my regular trips around the blogosphere and my conversations with people — in particularly, here, with Stéphane, the creator of the U-blog weblogging platform. This is the story to the best of my knowledge. If there are any factual mistakes, I’ll be glad to correct them.

In November 2002, Stéphane Le Solliec starts working on a blogging platform he calls Meta-blog. A few months later, in December, U-blog (the new name for the platform) already has a few hundreds of users.

The interface is good, U-blog is pretty zippy, and it has a great community. Also, it’s French. Setting aside any primal xenophobia or anti-americanism, a great product designed in your language by a fellow countryman is not the same thing as another great product translated and adapted from English. (Ask somebody who lives in a country where most of the important stuff is “imported” from the German-speaking part…) And let’s face it, one does like to support a local product, whether one is French, Swiss, or American. I actually considered U-blog the best hosted solution for French-speakers, at some point, and recommended it to a few friends, who started weblogs. Joueb.com is a native French weblogging platform which has been around for far longer than U-blog, but for some reason it isn’t quite as popular.

About a year later, Stéphane is thinking about abandoning the platform. He’s doing it on his free time, he has a baby, and U-blog takes up a lot of time. He stalls development, and stops allowing the creation of new free blogs. (It will again be possible to create free blogs a few weeks later.) Existing free blogs remain in place, but lose visibility (pinging and home page) compared to paying blogs. (Paying U-blog customers pay 1€ per month.)

Around that time, Loïc, whose interest in weblogs has been sparked by meeting Joi at the World Economic Forum, and who has unsuccessfully approached the founder of Joueb.com, Stéphane Gigandet (yes! another Stéphane!), gets in touch with Stéphane Le Solliec in September (2003). As a result, he acquires the platform and user-base, and founds the company Ublog.com. Loïc really wants Stéphane to stay on board, and he does, before leaving a couple of months later (company-life isn’t really his cup of tea).

Loïc does a great job getting the French press (and later, politicians) interested in weblogs. He calls up journalists, educates them, and before long Loïc, fondateur de Ublog regularly appears in articles about weblogging. Inevitably, he starts appearing as “the guy who introduced weblogs in France”, and the expression “founder of Ublog” entertains a confusion between the blogging platform and the company (“founder” being at times replaced by “creator”). Loïc founded the company, but he in no way created the blogging platform U-blog.

You can imagine that the U-bloggers, who already weren’t very excited about having been “bought” (particularly by a guy who had the bad taste to start blogging in English), didn’t really like seeing Loïc shine so bright and Stéphane slowly fade into oblivion. Some long-standing French-speaking webloggers external to U-blog will start keeping a suspicious eye on this newcomer that so many are talking about, and who seems to be (God forbid!) making weblogs into a business (complete with press pack).

End October, when Stéphane announces the changes at Ublog following the association with Loïc, the following structure is presented (as an aside, the fact that this page seems to have been taken down doesn’t make Ublog look good. If it’s a mistake, they should put it back up again):

Free U-blog
The basic offer, with an advertising banner.
U-blog Plus
The paying offer, with a few more bells and whistles than the free one (ping, home page listing) and lots of exciting new features (for 4€ per month instead of the actual 1€)
U-blog Pro
More advanced, with own domain name, multi-author, etc… to be defined

In a smart move, existing U-bloggers were given the chance to sign up for the second offer for 1€ instead of 4€ for the coming year, starting January 1st (date at which the new tariff would become active). It sounded attractive, and quite a few went for it. The future seemed bright, with promise of dynamic future development, despite the complaints about the increase in pricing (but which did not impact existing users that much).

During the next months, some new features are introduced. More are announced.

In March, Six Apart and Ublog SA sign an exclusive representation agreement in Europe. An announcement is made in the U-blog newsletter. April 29th, TypePad arrives on U-blog. The official Ublog weblog will publish another four or five brief posts related to TypePad before going quiet.

One can wonder: what sense does it make for a blogging platform like U-blog to sign an agreement with another, similar, hosted blogging platform like TypePad? Was the U-blog platform not good enough? Will development be stalled on the “old” platform, will it be abandoned? Overall, U-bloggers are worried and unhappy (I could add more, but those are two good starting-points and seem to sum it up pretty well). They are now offered three possibilities (as often, what is said in the comments is much more interesting than the post itself):

Free U-blog
The basic offer, same as before.
U-blog Plus
The paying offer for those who already have it, same as before, but no new features.
TypePad
A more advanced platform, where the active development will take place. Approx. 15€, but discount prices for current U-bloggers.

In short, all new development efforts seem to be going towards TypePad, and U-blog Plus will stop evolving, unlike what had been promised end of October. Reactions are aggressive (we all know that end-users are not kind when they complain). When U-bloggers ask about the new features that had been promised to those of them with paying accounts, they are told that the features are on TypePad. Loïc, who has already ruffled a few feathers by demanding that a popular blogger remove a post about him, under threat of lawsuit, does not distinguish himself in the area of good customer relations. (In particular, his comment regarding the contents of Aurora’s weblog (bondage and S&M), in the middle of a thread about U-blog and TypePad, didn’t look very good.) U-bloggers (particularly the paying ones) feel a bit cheated.

There is no question for me that Loïc is being given a harder time than he deserves, but it is pretty clear that he is not doing a very good job communicating with his unhappy customers.

TypePad.fr does not seem to be a howling success. I have heard complaints of people who find it slow (slower than U-blog, in particular) and not intuitive. Jean-Luc Raymond, the blogger who runs MediaTIC, publishes a critical post about TypePad.fr. Now, JLR isn’t the blogger I respect the most. He doesn’t always verify his sources, and has been known to remove embarrassing comments and posts with little ceremony. However, if his article on TypePad is over the top (as I suspect it might), it would in my opinion deserve more precise refutation than this dismissive comment of Loïc’s.

So, what is going on today? Basically, a continuation of what was already going wrong. Now that Six Apart has bought Ublog, the U-blog platform and communitydefinitely seem doomed.

No official announcement of the transaction has been made on the U-blog site (as I mentioned, the official “corporate” weblog is dead). Loïc’s answer to my post raising the point is that U-bloggers who want information can contact him on his blog. Worse, in my opinion, Loïc withheld the announcement on his blog until it was published by the media. So in the franco-blogosphere, we learnt about it through the press rather than through Loïc’s weblog (the de facto official source of information for U-blog, as the company site has not been communicating anything these last months).

Aurora goes to war, and other U-bloggers are following suit. One can disapprove of their virulence, but calling them “Aurora’s fan-club” (in the comments to my post) does not get anybody anywhere, and mocking Aurora’s sexual preferences in response to her criticisms is distasteful, and unbecoming of the Director for Europe, Africa and the Middle-East and Executive VP of Six Apart.

Loïc may have a squeaky-clean image in the anglo-blogosphere, but it is far from being the case in the franco-blogosphere, particularly when you start digging around in comment threads. I find it especially disturbing that there seems to be a discrepancy in attitude between Loïc’s discourse on his weblog and his comments on other people’s weblogs.

I personally do not think Loïc is a bad person, or has bad intentions. He’s interested in “the business side of weblogs” (and in that we differ), and that of course will make him unsympathetic to some, but I do believe he is genuinely interested in what he’s doing. However, I think he does not understand his customers very well, and does not communicate with them well either. His ambition as a businessman, excited by the challenge of managing an American company, leader in its domain, does at times seem to overshadow his concern about his end-users well-being.

This has been a long post. If you’ve read it, thank you. If you’ve just skimmed it, let me briefly come back on my main points:

  • U-bloggers have been promised features for their pay-version, which will not come.
  • The acquisition of Ublog by Six Apart seems to point to a near death of the old blogging platform, and more dramatically for its users, of the very strong community built around it. (Typepad doesn’t really have this “community” thing to it.)
  • Ublog (and now, Six Apart Europe) is demonstrating pretty poor communication with its unhappy users

Update, 24.07.04: a brief update after some comments I’ve received about this article.

  • I have now learnt that Six Apart did know about the problems at Ublog (since before the acquisition).
  • Although I considered it a possibility that they might not know, my main motivation for writing this article was that there was more to the Ublog story than what the English blogosphere in general was getting.
  • Of course, not all U-bloggers are unhappy. We’re talking about a bunch of very vocal and very angry people, not about the whole community. But in my opinion, the fact they are a minority does not mean they should not be taken seriously.

Easier TopicExchange Trackbacks for WordPress [en]

A WordPress hack which makes it quicker to add TopicExchange channels to trackback, and makes them visible (like categories) in the weblog. (Sorry for the duplicate postings, trying to fix it.)

[fr] Ce 'hack' pour WordPress permet d'ajouter facilement des trackbacks vers les canaux de TopicExchange, et liste sur le weblog les canaux concernés pour chaque billet.

Here is a solution to make it a little quicker to trackback TopicExchange channels with WordPress, and make those channels visible in your weblog.

I love TopicExchange. When I asked Suw what they had talked about during BlogWalk, she mentioned trackbacks. I asked if anything had been discussed about trackback etiquette. For example, I’m often tempted to trackback people who have written posts related to mine, but which I haven’t linked to. Well, the consensus is that this is not what trackback is for. Trackback is really for making a “backlink”. TopicExchange is the answer to the “related posts” issue.

I’ve been using TopicExchange a lot during the last weeks, but nobody has noticed it, apart from those people who already use TopicExchange as a source of information. As Seb Paquet notes, TopicExchange needs to be made more viral. It needs visibility. What follows is my interpretation of “making ITE easier to use, and more visible.”

This WordPress hack creates an extra field in the posting form where ITE channel ID’s (e.g. “wordpress”, “multilingual_blogging”) can be entered (I was tired of typing the whole trackback URL’s all the time). It then stores these channel ID’s as post meta data (in the postmeta table), so that it can retrieve them and display links to the corresponding channels along with the post, just as is usually done with categories.

First of all, add the following code to my-hacks.php. Then, edit post.php (in your wp-admin directory) and add this code where indicated (the comment at the top of the file explains where to insert the code).

Also in post.php, after the line add_meta($post_ID);, insert the following code:

// add topic exchange channels
	if(isset($_POST['ite-topic']))
	{
		$_POST['metakeyselect'] = 'ite_topic';
		foreach($topics as $topic)
		{
    		$_POST['metavalue'] = $topic;
    		add_meta($post_ID);
    	}
    }

In edit-form.php, add this code to create an extra input field for ITE trackbacks:

$form_ite = '<p><label for="ite-topic"><strong>Trackback</strong> TopicExchange:</label>
(Separate multiple channel ID's with spaces.)<br />
<input type="text" name="ite-topic" style="width: 360px" id="ite-topic"
tabindex="8" /></p>';
	$form_trackback.=$form_ite;

It goes near the top of the file, after the line which defines $form_trackback (do a search for that and you’ll find it).

Finally, in your index.php template, you can use <?php the_ite_channels(); ?> to display a paragraph containing a comma-separated list of channels trackbacked for each post. If you want to change the formatting, play around with the function definition in my-hacks.php.

If, like me, you have old posts with trackbacks to TopicExchange, and you would also like these to appear on your posts, use this patch from inside wp-admin. The patch will tell you what meta data it is adding — just load it once in your browser and check the result in your weblog. (Don’t load it twice — it’s supposed to be able to check the existing channels in the database to avoid duplicate entries, but I haven’t got it to work. Read instructions and debug notes at the top of the patch file.)

In future, it will also be possible to use the TopicExchange API to return the “nice title” for the channels listed — so we sould have “Multilingual blogging” instead of “multilingual_blogging”. (I’ve asked, it will behas been added to the API.)

Good luck with this if you try it, and as always, comments most welcome!

Note: as far as I have tested, the code seems to work now.

Batch Categories 0.9 [en]

Batch Categories for WordPress has been fixed and enhanced. If you have major category jobs to do, it can probably help you. Feedback and testers welcome.

[fr] Batch Categories pour WordPress a été corrigé et fonctionne à  présent. Le compagnon idéal si vous desirez changer les catégories de nombreux billets en même temps.

Batch Categories 0.9 is out! It’s the ideal companion for large-scale post-import messy category work. List all posts belonging to a category or matching a keyword, and edit their categories, easily visible at a glace with a collection of sexy drop-down lists. What’s new since the the first draft?

  • It now works, and does not “eat” categories without a warning. (Pretty nice of it, huh?)
  • It tells you what it did — which categories it added to which posts, and which ones it removed.
  • Add a whole bunch of posts to a category with one click.
  • Remove a whole bunch of posts from a category with one click.
  • Ensures that all the categories for a post are always listed, whatever the setting for the limit number of drop-down lists.
  • This is what it can look like.

You can still access it as a plugin or edit the Edit navigation menu, as described in my post introducing Batch Categories. If you’re in a hurry, just drop the PHP file into your wp-admin directory and send your browser straight on it.

Next steps?

  • Gather feedback from courageous testers (please don’t blame me if you haven’t backed up your post2cat table and things go wrong) for chasing the last bugs, improving interface and functionality.
  • Redo the code which generates the drop-down lists to take advantage of the category cache, and avoid flooding the database with useless queries.
  • Allow more subtle selection of posts: combinations of categories (AND/OR/NOT), categories without their subcategories…
  • Anything else you would want…?

Update 24.07.04: BB made me notice that “All” and “None” didn’t make much sense in the drop-down which allows one to select the categories to display. Replaced them in v. 0.91 by “Any category”.