Tag: Wordpress

WordPress Finally Has Tags! [en]

[fr] Après des années d'errance, WordPress implémente enfin un système de tags qui ne sont pas des catégories. Un billet un peu plus complet en français s'impose probablement. Qu'en pensez-vous?

I’ve known for some time that version 2.3 of WordPress would support real tagging. Today, Matt has just announced the deployment of tagging on WordPress.com.

From the start, I’ve been a very vocal supporter of the differentiation between tags and categories — and I really appreciate Matt acknowledging this in his announcement.

When I first met Matt offline for the first time nearly a year ago, at Blogtalk Reloaded in Vienna, I jumped on the occasion to pester him about tags and categories. He listened — but I don’t think he was convinced at the time.

A few months later, I was in San Francisco — and one of the first things Matt told me when we met again was “you know, I finally saw the light about tags and categories”. He told me version 2.3 would have both. I was overjoyed. I’ll never know exactly what role I played in Matt’s “seeing the light”, but I like to think I contributed 🙂

Looking back in time, Technorati started indexing tags in January 2005. They weren’t new for me then (I’d been tagging things on del.icio.us since May 2004 and on Flickr since October of the same year) but clearly, being able to tag posts was a great thing. You know me — my brain can’t sit still — two days later, I was rambling about some ways to combine tags in searches/sorting. Some of the stuff I talk about in there isn’t possible yet, but I hope it will someday.

Two days after that, I wrote my first WordPress plugin, Bunny’s Technorati Tags — which became quite popular and which I still use to this day.

I’m really glad to be able to retire this plugin, specially as Peter Westwood has written an importer for it. That means you should have no problems converting your bunny-tags into wp-tags. Thank you very much, Peter.

Bear with me while I dig though my archives: weighted tags by category is something I’d forgotten I’d wanted… does anything like that exist now?

My only gripe with the implementation of tags in WordPress, for the moment, is that they will be comma-separated. No! Please! We’ve been typing space-separated tags into Flickr and del.icio.us for three years now. Three years! When I chose space-separation for the tags in my plugin, it was because the existing interfaces for tags did it like that.

Spaces, please. Or at least an option to input them space-separated. Or a simple plugin. Tags separated by spaces, and multi-word tags between quotes.

Comment se faire connaître comme indépendant [fr]

[en] I'm often asked how I made myself known as a freelancer. I was lucky enough to have quite a bit of coverage, but when you look closely, the way I got people to find me was through my blog.

Start blogging about your passion and demonstrate your expertise on your blog. The rest will follow.

Histoire de combattre la paralysie du blogueur voici un petit billet « sur le vif ». Il est fréquent qu’on me demande comment j’ai fait pour me mettre à mon compte et devenir indépendante. (Mon site professionnel, vers lequel je viens de faire un lien, a grand besoin d’être remis à jour, mais allez quand même jeter un coup d’oeil.)

Il y a près de dix-huit mois, j’ai raconté un peu mes débuts dans l’émission « Déclics » de la Radio Suisse Romande. Vous pouvez probablement encore écouter ce que j’ai dit à l’époque.

En fait, c’est assez simple. En l’an 2000, j’ai un peu par hasard ouvert un blog, dans lequel je parlais de tout ce qui me chantait. Je pense que si on relit maintenant ces sept années d’écriture, on doit pouvoir voir comment mes intérêts ont évolué. Une des choses — parmi d’autres — qui m’intéressait, c’était l’intersection de la technologie d’Internet et des relations humaines. Les blogs tombent en plein là-dedans.

Petit à petit, alors que j’étais plutôt récalcitrante au départ, j’ai commencé à faire ce que l’on appelait du « metablogging » : je bloguais à propos du « phénomène blog ». Par ailleurs, mon blog gagnait gentiment en popularité. J’ai aussi créé le premier annuaire de blogs suisses.

Lorsque les premiers journalistes romands ont commencé à s’intéresser aux blogs, il n’ont pas tardé à s’adresser à moi (vu ma présence en ligne assez étendue, je n’étais pas très difficile à trouver) — d’une part en tant que blogueuse, mais d’autre part et assez rapidement en tant que personne qui y connaissait quelque chose aux blogs. J’ai eu droit à un véritable cercle vertueux en ce qui concerne ma présence dans la presse. Je suis tout à fait consciente qu’il y a là-dedans une bonne part de « au bon endroit au bon moment », et que les médias ont beaucoup aidé à me faire connaître du public.

Peu après, on m’a contacté pour me demander de faire une première conférence. J’ai rapidement mis en ligne un site Internet professionnel dans lequel j’annonçais quel genre de services j’étais en mesure de fournir. Entre le bouche à oreille, la presse, et surtout mon blog, la quantité de mandats a doucement augmenté durant la première année, jusqu’à ce qu’elle devienne suffisante pour que j’envisage de mettre entièrement à mon compte et de quitter complètement l’enseignement.

Comme je dis souvent, tout cela s’est fait « presque malgré moi ».

Si on me demande conseil, j’en ai un : bloguer, bloguer, bloguer.

Je sais que mon cas est un peu particulier : une partie de ce que je mets à disposition de mes clients, c’est mon expertise sur les blogs. Et j’utilise mon blog pour la démontrer.

Même si votre domaine d’expertise n’est pas les blogs, vous pouvez utiliser votre blog pour mettre en avant cette expertise. C’est l’outil idéal pour cela : relativement simple à utiliser, et qui permet une documentation au jour le jour de vos expériences, découvertes, réflexions et recherches dans le domaine qui vous passionne au point que vous avez décidé d’en faire votre métier.

Peu de gens aujourd’hui soutiendront qu’on peut se passer d’avoir un site Web si l’on se lance comme indépendant. Et en général, on désire que ce site Web soit bien référencé. Les blogs sont extrêmement bien référencés dans les moteurs de recherche : la page d’accueil est mise à jour à chaque fois que vous publiez un nouvel article, chaque article a sa page propre, vous encouragez autrui à faire des liens vers votre contenu, et l’outil que vous utilisez a été conçu pour faciliter le travail des moteurs de recherche.

En bloguant, vous augmentez de façon importante votre visibilité sur Internet, et mettez sur pied du même coup une documentation fantastique de votre domaine d’expertise et de vos compétences. Pas mal, côté marketing, non ? Et le blog étant un extraordinaire outil de réseautage en ligne, il vous aidera également à rentrer en contact avec les personnes qui ont des intérêts similaires aux vôtres : des « collègues », des partenaires, des passionnés, et bien entendu… Des futurs clients.

En pratique ? Vous créez un un blog chez WordPress.com (c’est tout simple à utiliser), ouvrez un compte chez Flickr (attention à la prononciation) pour héberger vos images ou photos (peu importe le domaine dans lequel vous vous lancez, il y aura des illustrations d’une façon ou d’une autre). Le compte illimité chez Flickr coûte $ 25, utiliser son propre nom de domaine pour son blog $ 10, et avoir un look personnalisé pour son blog (autre que la cinquantaine de mises en page disponibles gratuitement) $ 15, mais tout cela est optionnel.

Donc, pour pas un sou, vous pouvez avoir entre les mains un outil de communication marketing très puissant. Il « suffit » de l’alimenter !

Petite page de pub — et très franchement, je n’ai pas commencé à écrire cet article avec l’idée de finir comme ça, du tout. L’utilisation de base du blog, d’un point de vue technique, et simple. C’est une chose qui fait sa force. Les difficultés qui peuvent se présenter sont d’ordre rédactionnelles et culturelles. Il est possible et réaliste pour quelqu’un qui se met à son compte d’apprendre tout ça sur le tas. Si votre temps est compté, par contre, ou si vous désirez vous donner les moyens de tirer le maximum de profit du média conversationnel qu’est le blog, cela vous tout à fait la peine d’investir une partie de notre budget marketing dans une formation à cet outil. Dans ce cas, bien sûr, vous savez à qui vous adresser : c’est tout à fait le genre de chose que je fais. Fin de la page de pub !

Blog du Paléo [en]

[fr] A quick feedback I gave about the blog of a local (but very popular) festival.

Une fois n’est pas coutume, je vais essayer de faire court. (Je soutenais hier à mon examinatrice de demi-licence de philo 😉 qu’on pouvait faire très court sur un blog, qu’il suffisait d’aller regarder, par exemple, le mien… ahem. Oui je sais, je suis la reine de la tartine.)

J’étais au Paléo hier sur invitation de l’association CIAO (je suis leur partenaire pour le thème internet), ce qui tombait bien, car j’adore les feux d’artifices de ce festival. Bref, avant de partir, j’ai fait un petit tour sur le site du Paléo et j’ai découvert qu’ils avaient un blog. (Je l’ai appris plus tard, une expérience “assez à l’arrache” (sic), donc tout à fait pardonnable qu’il y ait des choses à redire.)

Vous me connaissez, je suis à peu près incapable de la fermer. J’ai donc laissé un petit feedback concernant ce blog dans leur forum, qui a d’ailleurs été fort bien reçu. Je le reproduis ici:

  • dans l’ensemble, le blog part dans la bonne direction. Infos un peu “coulisses”, je crois que c’est la direction à donner à un blog de festival.

  • côté ton, par contre, ça varie selon les rédacteurs. Nombre de billets sont trop “journalistiques” (pas un compliment en l’occurrence, les journalistes font parfois les pires blogueurs). Un bon truc pour trouver le ton: parler en “je” (ça aide à être un peu “personnel”, sans pour autant que ça doive faire “journal intime”) et choisir comme public-cible de ses écrits un group d’amis qui nous apprécie.

  • dommage que le blog ne soit pas plus mis en valeur ailleurs sur le site (e.g. intégrer à la page d’accueil un flux RSS avec titres des derniers billets, voire — au secours! — le blog entiter?) L’année prochaine peut-être?

  • les commentaires… quel dommage de les rediriger vers ce forum, où il faut s’inscrire, cliquer dans l’e-mail de confirmation, se connecter! Le plus gros risque avec un blog, c’est de ne pas avoir de commentaires — pas d’être débordé. Tout ce qui rend la conversation facile est bienvenu, et tout ce qui pourrait être un obstacle est à proscrire (jusqu’à preuve d’éléments nuisibles parmi le lectorat).

  • quelques détails concernant la maquette: liens “haut” un peu désuets, pas de permaliens (si je veux faire un lien vers un article depuis mon blog, je fais comment?), pas de flux RSS pour s’abonner… etc. On dirait que le moteur de blog a été “fait sur mesure”, ce qui est une solution que je déconseille absolument, à moins d’avoir des moyens considérables à disposition et une bonne connaissance des outils de blog (on ne s’improvise pas créateur d’outil de blog, même si on a une grande expérience dans la fabrication des sites web). Histoire de ne pas réinventer la roue, WordPress est un excellent outil, gratuit, et facilement intégrable à d’autre composantes d’un site.

Voilà! J’ajouterai juste, à nouveau, que si faire un blog est facile (tant du point de vue de l’installation de l’outil que de son utilisation), les aspects stratégiques et rédactionnels de ce média ne vont pas de soi. J’en profite pour vous envoyer regarder la vidéo que j’ai enregistrée il y a quelque temps déjà, et qui tente d’expliquer cet apparent paradoxe: bloguer c’est super facile, mais se former pour le faire correctement n’est pas superflu.

A Day at WordCamp 2007 [en]

[fr] Résumé des notes prises durant WordCamp.

Today was the first day of WordCamp 2007. Had a really nice day, met cool people (hi Daniel!), and live-blogged my hands off (almost literally: nasty RSI flare-up which made me skip two sessions of note-taking). Two sessions in the morning, two in the afternoon, a big two-session break, and then Matt Cutts. I also, of course, took a bunch of photos, which, as usually, received far more praise than I think they deserve. I’d like to take this occasion to remind everybody to please open up tagging to the community, and add tags to my photos as you stroll through them.

WordCamp 2007 4

Here are the sessions I live-blogged.

So, what do you think, 😉 should I start marketing myself as a 2.0 conference live-blogger? (Laying aside the fact RSI does limit the number of sessions I can do in a row…)

WordCamp 2007: Lorelle VanFossen, Kicking Ass Content Connections [en]

[fr] Lorelle VanFossen explique comment avoir du bon contenu.

These are my notes of Lorelle’s talk, as accurate as possible, but I’m only human. There might be mistakes. Feel free to add links to other write-ups, or correct mistakes, in the comments.

Lorelle: if you want to make money, invest in transportation. We order stuff on the internet and want it now. We should have all got a copy of her book today, but transportation has broken down (UPS) and they aren’t here!

WordCamp 2007 Lorelle Van Fossen

Problems with blogs: so many blogposts look like they were written in 10 minutes by people who

  • can’t type
  • can’t think
  • make you think they were released for the day by an institution.

If you want someone’s attention, you need to show them something they’ve never seen before, or in a way they’ve never seen it before.

Look for the missing subjects. Find the missing pieces. Not everything has been said, and even if it has been said, it can be said better: cleaner, more efficient, or in a new perspective.

Do we really need another “how to install WordPress” article? Before you start writing, do a search. If there are many copies, point to the good ones, find a new angle, don’t regurgitate.

Write about what’s missing. There is always another way, always a better way. We’re trained in school to not ask why. As bloggers, we’re asking why. Ask the whys.

1994: website about travels and stuff… a kind of blog before a blog.

Be an editor for your blog. When is the last time you generated a really good sitemap, looked at what you wrote, what you think you covered and you didn’t? steph-note: I need to do more of that. More editing. But so much screams to be written!

Unless you blog the news, read your feeds at night, sleep on them, think about it. You don’t have to be first out the gate, because other people are first out the gate, no matter how hard you try.

When you jump right in, you’re in a panic to get the stuff out there, you’re just processing and not thinking. And people who read it are the “panicked to get the information” ones. Wait, and you can be the sane voice a few days afterwards. The perception of your audience will also change. (Reader psychology.) The calmer the reader, the wiser they think you are.

2006: tagging; 2007: relationships

What’s the difference between a website and a blog? Comments, conversation, relationships.

Liz Strauss: gives out Successful Blog Awards. She’s started a series on blog strategy building. When you write your blog, you blog for one person: you. steph-note: totally agreed.

A successful blog is a blog you arrive on looking for information, and it gives you a feeling of “home” — safe, has the info I want, looks like me. (We like comments which say “You’re right! I agree with you!”) First impression to go for: this is the place that has answers I need, it’s familiar and safe. Blog for you and to you. steph-note: gosh, I really need to work on CTTS

How do we know when a blogger is faking it (audience):

  • factual information that’s wrong, when we know better
  • too many ads and affiliate links
  • excerpts and no added value — blog-quoting
  • people that just re-post their twitters

Dead Sea Scrolls: scraps containing journal entries or info about people’s everyday lives.

Our blogs are note on our boring everyday lives for the future, at the least. Write for the future.

Playstation fake blog: top search results are about the fake blog, not about the playstation itself.

I don’t get any comments! Tips:

  • too many people are still writing for their eighth-grade teacher. Complete sentences, complete thoughts, complete ideas — complete essays. Doesn’t leave any space for response. Don’t finish the idea. Leave things out on purpose.

Don’t respond to every comment, but make your readers think that you do. Blog your passion, your ideas, show that you care, say thank you (don’t fake it, though). Avoid “Now, what do you think?”. Doesn’t work.

Be with your readers like an old married couple — let them finish your sentences. Blog about what other people are blogging about. Blog about their conversations, and add stuff. Don’t challenge people to blog about something. Be linky. Comment on other blogs, but intelligently. Make people want to see your blog! We all do it. It’s our job to help our fellow bloggers continue the conversation. Comment in a way which will help the conversation go further. steph-note: un poil didactique, là.

steph-note: Lorelle giving a shout-out to a bunch of people from the WP community who are in the room.

Help each other, share connections, blog about each other, comment on your friends’ blogs…

Lorelle has been under WordPress since pre-1.2.

“I lived in Israel 5 years. I know about terrorism, so I know how to handle comments on my blog!”

Lorelle doesn’t care about stats. They’re not important for what she does. She’s been doing this too long, doesn’t care anymore.

Write timeless stuff. One of her posts from two years ago was dugg over Thanksgiving.

Q: fictional blogs. Good or bad, when it’s not clear? Blogotainment.

A: if people know, it makes a difference. disclosure.

Q: could too many guidelines/rules turn us into the traditional media?

A: has a lot of rules for her blog (ie, doesn’t blog about politics, personal life, dad dying, being sick…) — she has very focused blogs.

Q: Fighting comment spam?

A: Akismet, Spam Karma, Bad Behavior.

WordCamp 2007: Dan Kuykendall, Podcasting and podPress [en]

[fr] Notes prises à WordCamp 2007. Introduction au podcasting et à podPress, un plugin WordPress qui le transforme en machine à podcaster.

Here are the notes I took of Dan’s talk on Podcasting and podPress. I did my best, but they may not be accurate.

WordCamp 2007 Podcasting and podPress

Dan Kuykendall is the author of the popular podcasting plugin podPress.

Podcasting is very similar to blogging (just audio/video). About getting your message out. All about content, in consumable ways. Feeds.

RSS2 feed + “enclosure” tag.

Difference with blogging: lots of offline podcast viewers/listening. (Not many offline blog readers.)

Gear? Microphone, recording software, site + RSS2, something to say/play. Dan has a $100 mike, a $100 external sound card — steph-note: fancy! but not even necessary… in-built microphone and soundcard can do for starters.). Software: Audacity is free, so is WordPress.

WordCamp 2007 Dan Kuykendall's Gear

Podcasting does not require a major investment.

Dan got into podcasting early 2006. steph-note: is that early, as far as the history of podcasting is concerned? Podcasting is a little more personal than blogging (voice, etc.) Podcasters, like bloggers, really crave feedback. At that time, podcasting wasn’t built into iTunes. WordPress looks great for that, but if you’re interested in podcasting more than blogging… hmm.

WordCamp 2007 Dan Kuykendall

Dan heard about the plugin system in WordPress… He had figured out how to do podcasting and make his podcast look good in iTunes, but what about others? => started writing a plugin, PodPress. “Which has now grown a bit out of control!” steph-note: indeed, problems with redundant queries which caused my site to be shut down by DreamHost twice in the last six months.

Podcasting is not just about pointing to your mp3 files. PodPress adds meta information, media players, etc. This means your public can view your podcast even if they don’t use a dedicated “podcast reader” (iTunes…)

steph-note: tour of podPress’s features, and demo (not blogging this)

WordPress: amazing blogging platform and CMS, with tons of hooks for plugin developers.

steph-note: my experience of podPress is lots of settings, does the job though, even with minimal settings. However, as I mentioned above, my blog has been taken down once and maimed at least once by DreamHost because it was raising the load on the server it was hosted on way too much. After narrowing down the problem, the culprit appeared to be podPress.

Q from Dan: who is providing media content in their blog, but doesn’t use podPress? steph-note: question unclear from me, in my mind a blog which provides media content is a podcast, as long as the media content is made available as an enclosure in the feed, which I thought WordPress did out of the box.

Q from audience: monetization? A: no, for free, but PayPal donations, though they haven’t really covered the cost of hosting…

Q Mark JaquithAaron Brazell: I love podPress, but the only problem is the weekly releases… could we space them out a bit? A: never sure when I’ll be coding, so when I get some stuff done I release it. => Q for Matt: will WordPress support some kind of plugin update automation? A (Matt): yes, for 2.3 (at least notification). steph-note: yay!

Notes From San Francisco [en]

So, roughly half-way through my five-week trip to San Francisco, what’s going on? I haven’t been blogging much lately, that’s for sure.

For once, I took some photographs from the plane. Unfortunately my camera batteries ran out just as we were coming down on San Francisco, and my spare ones were in the luggage compartment above my head. Oh, well.

Flying to San Francisco 31

I got some first-level questioning at immigration coming in. No, not the sort where they take you to a separate room, become much less friendly, and have boxes of rubber gloves on the counter. This is how it went:

  • …And what is the duration of your stay?
  • Five weeks.
  • …And what do you do in… over in Switzerland?
  • I’m a freelance… internet consultant. OMG that sounds bad. …I’m actually here to work on a book project. Yeah I know I should never volunteer information.
  • What’s the book about?
  • Er… teenagers and the internet.
  • And…?
  • Er… Well, the situation with teenagers and the internet, and what we’re doing about it in Switzerland.
  • And what are you doing about it?
  • Well, not enough!
  • And? Come on, tell me more about it.
  • Er… OK. OMGOMG Well, see, teenagers are really comfortable with computers and the internet, and so they’re chatting, blogging, etc. — they’re digital natives, see? — and parents, well, they’re clueless or terrified about the internet, and they don’t always understand what’s going on in their kids lives online, so basically, we have teenagers who are spending a lot of time online and sometimes getting into trouble and parents don’t know or don’t care about what they’re doing there, so we have this… chasm between generations and…
  • Thank you. You can go.

The pick-up from the airport was wonderfully orchestrated and much appreciated. Being driven into town by somebody friendly rather than having to use unfamiliar public transportation really makes a difference. Thanks to all those involved (yes, it took that many people!)

Waiting on the Sidewalk

Then, through some freak breakdown of all modern forms of communication (partially documented on Twitter), I ended up waiting outside on the sidewalk for almost an hour while my kind host Tara waited for me inside her appartment. We worked it out finally, and I was introduced to my (nice and spacious) room before going to hang out at Citizen Space. A nice dinner out with Chris, Tara and Jimmy to end the day, and I happily collapsed in my bed at a respectable local hour. You will have taken note that I did not collapse at 4pm feeling like a zombie, thanks to having taken melatonin on the plane. (It doesn’t seem to work that well for Suw, but it works perfectly on me, and I’m never traveling between continents without it again.)

The four next days went by in a blur of Supernova madness: too many people, too many sessions, food with ups and downs, parties with cupcakes and others at the top of skyscapers. I took lots of photographs and even a video sequence that got some attention.

Supernova First Day 33

During the next week, I started settling down. Met and hung out with old friends, made new ones, unpacked my suitcases, went walking around in town, saw Dykes on Bikes, the Gay Pride Parade, and the iPhone launch, photographed skyscrapers in the night, ordered a new camera, got my MacBook (partly) repaired, and even dropped in at Google to take notes of Suw’s talk there.

All this, actually, is documented in my Twitter stream — maybe I should add a whole lot of links? — be sure to keep an eye on it if you’re interested in a more day-by-day account of what I’m doing here.

Overall, things have been good. A small bout of homesickness a few days ago, but I’m feeling better now. I need to start focusing on the things I want to get done (blogging, writing, book, writing, fixing things for clients…) — holiday over now!

Downtown San Francisco By Night 9

I’ve been thinking about my “work career” a little, too. I’m very happy doing what I’m doing, but I’m not going to be doing “Blog 101” for ever — I can feel my interests shifting somewhat already. I’ve been interested in the “social tools at large” department for a long time, but unfortunately it seems to translated to “blogging” in most of the work I do, so I’d like to expand my horizons in that direction a little. I’ve had a couple of talks with people in startups recently, and I realize it’s a kind of environment I wouldn’t mind working in — at least part-time. We’ll see what happens.

I’m also realizing that there is more potential than I first thought around the two main things I care about these days: teenagers online and internet language issues. Hence, the book, and also a talk on the subject of languages on the internet which I’ll be giving at Google this coming Tuesday.

Also in the “work” department, two other things have been on my mind. First, the idea of opening up a coworking space in or around Lausanne (Ollie is having the same kind of thought — we’re talking). Second, trying to find a solution so that I don’t have to do maintenance on my clients’ WordPress installations once all is rolling, or spend hours swimming in HTML, CSS and WordPress theme PHP template tags. Not that I don’t know how to do it or don’t enjoy it once in a while, but it’s really not the kind of work I want to spend my time doing. So, I’ve been starting to ask around for names of people who might do this kind of thing (for a reasonable fee), and even thinking of recruiting some students in Lausanne that I could coach/train so that they can do most of the work, and call me up only for major problems. So, see, I’ve been thinking.

Some people have been asking me if I was planning to move here. Indeed, 5 weeks in the city looks suspiciously like a scouting operation. Actually, traveling has an interesting side-effect for me: I tend to come back home thinking “gee, Lausanne is such a great place to live! I’m never moving!” Sure, I have some underlying personal issues which contribute to making me overly attached to my hometown, and I know that someday I might end up living elsewhere. But really, for the moment, I don’t think I’d want that.

And even though I’m told San Francisco is very “European” compared to the rest of the US (which I have yet to see) I can’t help seeing how “horribly American” it is. Don’t get me wrong, I really like this city and am enjoying my time here. I know that what I say can give wrong impressions (for example, people — especially Indians — read the story of my year living in India and think that I hated the country; it’s not true, I really loved it, and can’t wait to go back). But I walk around San Francisco and see all the signs with rules and regulations and “stupid” warnings (like, God, the pineapple chunks I buy at Whole Foods haven’t been pasteurized and may contain harmful germs! or, don’t use the hairdryer in the bath tub!), the AT&T Park and other manifestations of what to me is “consumerism gone mad”, I hear about health care and “you’re expected to sue” horror stories, visa lotteries for non-renewal, the education system…

So, yes, I’m focusing on the negative. And Switzerland, even though it’s a wonderful country ;-), has its negatives too. Like many natives all over the world, I’ve developed a selective blindness to what is “wrong” in the land I come from, considering much of it “normal” as I have been brought up with it. I know that. But too much of what I see here makes my skin crawl. I’m really enjoying spending some weeks here, I love my friends, the food and the sunshine, but I don’t think I’d be happy living here.

Misty Skyscrapers in Downtown San Francisco 10

Well, this was one of these longer-than-expected posts, and it’s occupied most of my morning. My tasks for this afternoon are (in this order):

  • one WordPress install for a client
  • spending a little more time trying to see if there is hope for the aggravating Google Groups problem I bumped into, and if not, setting up a Yahoo! Group instead
  • writing a post for bub.blicio.us or working on my book — whichever I most feel like.

Mystery WordPress/Markdown Problem: Troubleshooting [en]

[fr] Description d'un vilain problème WordPress avec PHP Markdown Extra. Certains billets refusaient de s'afficher et faisaient tout simplement planter la suite du chargement de la page (donc, pages archives incomplètes, billets disparus). J'ai résolu (plus ou moins) le problème en remplçant PHP Markdown Extra par Markdown tout court, mais je n'ai toujours pas compris le fond du problème. Ce billet donne quelques détails sur les symptômes et mes déductions.

If you’re a WordPress person and you feel like a bit of juicy troubleshooting, this one is for you. I’ve narrowed down part of the problem, but have failed to identify clearly the cause of the problem. I’ve found a workaround by replacing a plugin by another similar one, however. I’ve made screenshots so that even once this problem is fixed (hopefully very quickly) you can make sense of this post.

Symptoms:

Some posts on the VibrationsMusic website fail to display their content, or display incompletely. When this happens, the page stops loading altogether, resulting in a truncated page. (So we have vanishing posts and incomplete aborted archive pages where they should appear.) No error messages in source, HTML code just stops.

Narrowing it down:

Removing post content makes the post display OK, so I figured it had something to do with the content. Removing the PHP Markdown Extra plugin removed the problem, to. So it has something to do with a combination of certain things in the content and the PHP Markdown Extra plugin. (Removing other plugins didn’t change a thing, so I deduce from that it isn’t a plugin interaction issue.)

Using the “cut-half-out” technique I tried to narrow down the problem to a certain type of post content. At first, it seemed to be caused by either (a) HTML links in Markdown lists or (b) embedded YouTube players (<object>). However, some posts with either (a) or (b) were displaying correctly. In one faulty post, replacing the embedded YouTube video with another removed the problem.

However, it seems more subtle than that. In some cases, removing the other half of the post also removes the problem. => post length? Not really either. In a quite weird case, one post stops displaying right at the end of the content (Technorati tags and closing divs don’t appear) and if changes are made to the next post (like removing its content) then the first post displays correctly (and the second one too).

This seems (to me) to point to some problem in the query-array-manipulation area (but I don’t know how things work well enough in that department to make a more precise hypothesis).

Workaround:

I replaced the PHP Markdown Extra plugin with the “normal” Markdown plugin, and everything displays fine.

BlogCamp: Multilingual Blogging Session [en]

[fr] Mise par écrit des notes de préparation pour ma présentation hier au sujet des blogs multilingues, lors du BlogCamp à Zürich. En deux mots: il faut des gens pour faire le pont entre les îles linguistiques sur internet, et la façon dont sont conçus nos outils n'encourage pas les gens à être multingues sur leurs blogs. C'est pourtant à mon avis la formule la plus viable pour avoir de bons ponts.

I presented a session about multilingual blogging at BlogCamp yesterday in Zürich. Thanks to all of you who attended (particularly as I was competing with Xing’s Nicolas Berg!) and wrote about the session (Bruno of course, Sarah, Sandra, Maira, Jens-Rainer, Waltraut, Jokerine, Antoine…let me know if I need to add you here), and to Greg in particular for filming the session.

Although I’m rather used to giving talks, this was the first time my audience was a bloggy-geek crowd, so it was particularly exciting for me. I prepared my talk on the train between Lausanne and Bern, and unfortunately prepared way too many notes (I’m used to talking with next to no notes), so I got a bit confused at times during my presentation — and, of course, left stuff out. Here’s a rough transcript of what I prepared. Oh, and don’t forget to look at this photo of my cat Bagha from time to time to get the whole “experience”.

Steph giving her talk.
Photo by Henning

Talk notes

In the beginning there was the Big Bang. Space, time and matter came to exist. (Physicists in the audience, please forgive me for this.) We know it might end with a Big Crunch. Internet looks a bit like this Big Crunch, because it gets rid of space. With the right link to click on, the right URI, anybody can be anywhere at any time.

However, we often perceive the internet as a kind of “space”, or at least as having some sort of organisation or structure that we tend to translate into spatial terms or sensations. One way in which the internet is organised (and if you’re a good 2.0 person you’re acutely aware of this) is communities.

Communities are like gravity wells: people tend to stay “in” them. It very easy to be completely oblivious to what is going on in other communities. Barrier to entry: culture. Language is part of a culture, and even worse, it’s the vehicle for communication.

What is going on in the other languageospheres? I know almost nothing of what’s going on in the German-speaking blogosphere. The borders on the internet are linguistic. How do we travel? There is no digital equivalent of walking around town in a foreign country without understanding a word people say. Note: cultural divides are a general problem — I’m trying to focus here on one of the components of the cultural divide: language.

Who speaks more than one language? In the audience, (almost) everyone. This is doubly not surprising:

  • Switzerland is a multilingual country
  • this is the “online” crowd (cosmopolitan, highly educated, English-speaking — though English is not a national language here)

Two episodes that made me aware of how strong language barriers can be online, and how important it is to encourage people to bridge the language barriers:

  • launching Pompage.net because at the time of the browser upgrade initiative I realised that many French-speaking people didn’t have access to all the material that was available in Anglophonia, because they just didn’t understand English well enough;
  • the very different feelings bloggers had about Loïc Le Meur when he first started being active in the blogosphere, depending on if they were French- or English-speaking, particularly around the time of the Ublog story.

A few questions I asked the audience (mini-survey):

  • who reads blogs in more than one language? (nearly everyone)
  • who blogs in more than one language?
  • who has different blogs for different languages?
  • who has one blog with translated content in both languages? (two courageous people)
  • who has one blog with posts in various languages, mixed? (half a dozen people if my memory serves me right)
  • who feels they act as a bridge between languages?

So, let’s have a look at a few multilingual blogging issues (from the perspective of a biased bilingual person). Despite the large number of people out there who are comfortable writing in more than one language (and the even larger number who are more or less comfortable reading in more than one language), and the importance of bridging cultural/linguistic gaps, blogging tools still assume you are going to be blogging in one language (even though it is now accepted that this language may not be English).

What strategies are there for using more than one language on a blog, or being a good bridge? Concentrate first on strategy and then worry about technical issues. Usage is our best hope to make tool development evolve, here.

A. Two (or more) separate blogs

  • not truly “multilingual blogging”, it’s “monolingual blogging” twice
  • caters well to monolingual audiences
  • not so hot for multilingual audiences: must follow multiple blogs, with unpredictable duplication of content

B. Total translation

  • a lot of work! goes against the “low activation energy for publiction” thing that makes blogging work (=> less blogging)
  • good for multilingual and monolingual audiences
  • technical issues with non-monolingual page (a web page is assumed to be in a single language…)

C. Machine translation!

  • getting rid of the “effort” that makes B. fail as a large-scale solution, but retaining the benefiits!
  • problem: machine translation sucks
  • too imprecise, we don’t want more misunderstanding

D. A single blog, more than one language (my solution)

  • easy for the blogger, who just chooses the language to blog in depending on mood, bridge requirements, etc.
  • good for the right multilingual audience
  • technical issues with non-monolingual pages
  • how do you take care of monolingual audiences? provide a summary in the non-post language

“Monolingual” audiences are often not 100% monolingual. If the number of people who are perfectly comfortable writing in more than one language is indeed rather small, many people have some “understanding” skills in languages other than their mother tongue. Important to reach out to these skills.

For example, I’ve studied German at school, but I’m not comfortable enough with it to read German-language blogs. However, if I know that a particular post is going to be really interesting to me, I might go through the trouble of reading it, maybe with the help of some machine translation, or by asking a German-speaking friend.

A summary of the post in the language it is not written in can help the reader decide if it’s worth the trouble. Writing in a simple language will help non-native speakers understand. Making sure the number of typos and grammar mistakes are minimal will help machine translation be helpful. And machine translation, though it is often comical, can help one get the gist of what the post is about.

Even if the reader is totally helpless with the language at hand, the summary will help him know what he’s missing. Less frustrating. And if it’s too frustrating, then might give motivation to hunt down a native speaker or do what’s required to understand what the post is about.

Other bridging ideas:

  • translation networks (translate a post or two a month from other bloggers in the network, into your native language)
  • translation portal (“news of the world” with editorial and translation work done) — check out Blogamundo

Problem I see: bloggers aren’t translators. Bloggers like writing about their own ideas, they’re creative people. Translating is boring — and a difficult task.

Some more techy thoughts:

  • use the lang= attribute, particularly when mixing languages on a web page (and maybe someday tools will start parsing that)
  • CSS selectors to make different languages look different (FR=pink, EN=blue for example)
  • language needs to be a post (or even post element) attribute in blogging tools
  • WordPress plugins: language picker Polyglot and Basic Bilingual
  • excerpt in another language: what status in RSS/atom? Part of the post content or not? Can RSS/atom deal with more than one language in a feed, or do they assume “monolingualism”?
  • indicating the language of the destination page a link points to

Extra reading

The nice thing about having a blog is that you can dive back into time and watch your thinking evolve or take place. Here is a collection of posts which gravitate around language issues (in a “multilingual” sense). The Languages/Linguistics category is a bit wider than that, however.

Blogging in more than one language:

About the importance of language, etc.:

Promote Comments Plugin Idea [en]

[fr] Une idée de plugin que m'a soufflée Bruno Giussani: pouvoir "promouvoir" un commentaire et l'intégrer sans peine au contenu du billet.

A few days before LIFT’07, I had dinner with Bruno Giussani, who now happens to be one of the lucky people to live in beautiful Lausanne.

Amongst other things, he told of his frustrations with current blogging software (he’s using TypePad) and how the perfect tool didn’t seem to exist. I guess one simple reason this is so is that “perfect” means different things to different people.

I use WordPress, like it, and generally recommend it around me, because to my mind it’s the most complete and user-friendly platform out there, and because the plugin architecture allows for nearly any functionality to be added to it if somebody takes the trouble to code it.

Bruno shared with me one shortcoming of today’s blogging technology that he and Robert Scoble were talking about at LIFT last year (so this is not a “new” idea). Here is a write-up of this idea (with his permission of course), with a few implementation and interface details, in the hope that someone out there will pick it up and write the plugin. (I’ve heard enough people recently asking for plugin ideas to work their mad coding skillz on…)

Here’s the basic idea: there are often valuable contributions in the comments of a post, and we would like a way to be able to effortlessly “promote” a comment (or part of it) into the body of a post. This allows the blogger to easily act as an editor for the conversations taking place on his blog.

All this, of course, would have to be nice and ajaxy. Here’s how I could imagine it happening.

First of all, the plugin recognises that the author of the post is logged in, and adds a “promote” link next to each comment, in addition to the “edit” link. If that link is clicked, the comment text is automagically appended to the post content in a blockquote, complete with author name and link to original comment.

If part of the comment is selected when the promote link/button is clicked, then only that excerpt is quoted in the post.

Instead of the dreaded confirmation pop-up, a nice confirmation message should appear alongside the promoted comment in the post body, with an undo link.

From a back-end perspective, the promote link “knows” which post it belongs to (check the ID of the comment <div> it’s in). It shouldn’t be very difficult to grab author name, author url, comment permalink, format them all nicely (blockquotes, credit, microformats), edit the post, and add it to the end of the content with some introductory text (like “promoted comment”) and an “edited” stamp with time/date of promotion.

Possible problems:

  • if part of a comment is selected and the wrong “promote” link is clicked, what behaviour would be expected? Probably an error message of some sort, or even better (but probably trickier to implement), a choice: promote the whole post (based on link clicked) or the excerpt (based on selection)?
  • should promoted comments really be added into the post content, or stored as post meta data?

Taking this a step futher: wouldn’t it be nice to let the blogger introduce the promoted comment, or write a few lines after it? In this case, pressing the promote button/link would bring up a pop-up where more text can be added, with the option of displaying it before or after the quoted text.

And even another step futher (but I’m not sure it’s an interesting one): how about allowing the blogger to make a new post out of the promoted comment, instead of just appending it to the current post? Would this be interesting?

Additional thoughts on this basic idea are welcome (Bruno, let me know if I forgot something, it’s been a while since our conversation). If you’re a plugin author and you feel upto it, go for it (just make sure you give Bruno credit for the idea). I’ll be happy to try it out.