Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Blogging

Unified Blogging Day

Many disgruntled readers have contacted me via email, IM, facsimile, phone and anonymous poison pen letters to ask ‘Hey Norman - whatever happened to the unified blogging day scheduled for Friday 18 April ?’

Apologies for the delay but before we get started, some random, meaningless statistics:

  • Feedburner: 66 subscribers.
  • Google Reader : ‘From your 189 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,807 items, starred 1 items, shared 325 items’.
  • Twitter: Following 19. Followers 55. Updates 1,292 in 87 days.
  • FriendFeed: Subscribed to 35. Subscribed to me: 30. Comments: 180 this week, 504 all time. Likes: 77 this week, 188 all time.
  • Disqus: Comments left: 59 in 21 days. Comments on my blog: 31 in 14 days. Precious clout points - 12.

Originally, on Unified Blogging Day, I was going to religiously transcribe every single ‘output’ over a 24 hour period into a separate blog entry (annotated with timestamp and channel).

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the thorny issue of blog comment ownership

A couple of Oracle bloggers (Laurent and Yas) are experimenting with Disqus on their blogs but Tim Hall has expressed some reservations about committing his blog comments to a hosted service outside of his control.

Jake Mckee is also taken by Disqus but eloquently expresses similar concerns about ‘data ownership and presentation’.

I understand (and used to vehemently share) both Tim and Jake’s reservations. It does seem perfectly natural to want all your blog content stored in your MySql database on your server. What if Disqus servers are slow and unresponsive or worse, even down ? Your blog would be accessible but your comments wouldn’t. What is Disqus isn’t around next year ?

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25 reasons you should use Disqus

  1. Disqus lets you easily track all comments you have left scattered over the blogosphere.
  2. Disqus allows you to administer comments on multiple blogs from a single dashboard.
  3. Disqus has built-in effective protection against comment spam.
  4. Disqus provides tight integration with Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, MT and Tumblr.
  5. Disqus provides Javascript code for every other CMS.
  6. Disqus supports threaded comments.
  7. Disqus allows you to fix that embarrassing typo by editing comments.
  8. Disqus ‘eat their own dog food’.
  9. Disqus is free to use. 10.Disqus is used on over 4,000 blogs.
  10. Disqus lets you subscribe to individual comment threads.
  11. Disqus supports gravatars.
  12. Disqus lets you rate comments you like (and dislike).
  13. Disqus provides an RSS feed for all your comments.
  14. Disqus styles comments in keeping with your blog.
  15. Disqus is configurable and extensible.
  16. Disqus is written in Django.
  17. Disqus treats an email reply to an comment thread as as additional comment.
  18. Disqus is under active development.
  19. Disqus listen to user feedback.
  20. Disqus offers an API so you can write your own applications.
  21. Disqus allows you to use your OpenId credentials.
  22. Disqus offer unbelievably helpful and prompt support.
  23. Disqus provide excellent widgets.
  24. Disqus supports multiple moderators and a range of moderation options.
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resurrection of Disqus comments

Five months ago, I experimented with Disqus powered comments when this blog was running on WordPress. The trial was rather short-lived because I was disappointed that Disqus wasn’t able to fully integrate with all the existing blog comments. Importing comments still isn’t possible but Disqus says this feature is being worked on.

However, I have decided to reinstate Disqus for the following reasons:

  • Disqus recently added integration with FriendFeed so any contributions I make on Disqus powered blogs will also be visible in my FriendFeed stream.
  • I am encountering an ever increasing number of blogs using Disqus.
  • I am hoping Disqus will help to trigger more comments, interest and interaction on the blog.
  • Disqus provide a nice combination widget providing ‘Popular’, ‘Recent Comments’ and ‘People’.
  • The most recent release of Disqus included a raft of changes including support for Open ID.
  • Disqus is being actively developed and, more importantly, listen to their users.

I still have some reservations that the couple of articles with decent comment threads included replies to earlier comments (which are no longer visible) so we are literally starting from zero. However, hopefully some comments will appear soon and the tabs will actually display something !

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blogging bankruptcy

It’s no good. I simply can’t go on. I can no longer summon up the enthusiasm for blogging.

All the warnings from the blogging 101 courses over the years have proven to be very true.

I foolishly dipped my toe into Twitter and then FriendFeed but it’s no good I simply can’t go on with this any longer.

I can’t bear to miss my children growing up just because ‘Facebook is so last year, Dad.’

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WordPress 2.5 dashboard

The forthcoming release of WordPress 2.5 was one reason I was hesitant to move to Habari.

However, having seen a demo of the revised dashboard in WordPress 2.5, all I can say is I am glad I made the move and didn’t wait.

While I am merely an end user (not a UI designer), Michael Heilemann articulates many of my views on the deficiencies and usability of the Wordpress dashboard in this detailed analysis.

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post mortem on the WordPress to Habari migration

‘Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it.’

The migration of this blog from WordPress to Habari is mostly complete.

I had a few unexpected problems with a significant number of comments and a handful of posts that contained mismatched HTML tags and didn’t display the corresponding page at all. So I had to painstakingly review every single post with comments and correct the HTML by hand.

Inevitably, I forgot the lesson of my previous migration and didn’t give any regular readers advance warning of the impending chaos or any notice of the change in RSS feeds. That’s not because I don’t care, but rather that I treat this blog as a chance to experiment with the technology.

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now on Habari

I simply couldn’t resist the temptation any longer so this blog is now running on Habari because:

  • The Habari Administration screens look like they have been designed rather than evolved.
  • The WordPress import utility works brilliantly.
  • Michael C. Harris created a TinyMCE plugin for Habari - literally minutes after my initial enquiry.
  • Most of the required functionality (Google Analytics, Feedburner, Akismet, Sitemap) is available as plugins for Habari.
  • Michael Harris also helped me configure rewrite rules so my existing WordPress permalink structure is retained.
  • A gentleman called Harry from London developed this attractive Habari theme.
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