Posts in category "blogging"

• Joomla! 1.5 has been released and installed over here.
• Drupal 6 hasnt been released but that didnt stop me upgrading this blog to 6 RC2.
• I never thought I would say this but I think I am starting to get Twitter. Blame Tim Hall.
• FTP - Siebel had an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Oracle has an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Unsurprisingly, Oracle are standardising on the latter. I simply can't believe how much time I have ~~wasted~~ spent helping intelligent people crossing this chasm.
• The Europa Hotel in Belfast was the 'most bombed hotel in Europe.'

Siebel customers (and employees alike) all over the world are busy enjoying Metalink3 which has recently replaced SupportWeb.

Everyone (well me, mainly) is taking great delight in taunting Oracle DBA types with incredulous cries of 'Sorry - did you say you're still on legacy Metalink2 ?'

A number of readers, impressed with this bleeding edge technology and dying for more, have emailed me asking why this humble Siebel blog hasn't yet been updated to Drupal 6.0 RC2.

Consequently, I downloaded the distribution for Drupal 6 Release Candidate #2 and, unusually for me, I even took the time to read 'UPGRADE.txt'. I followed the instructions therein and took the site offline so any visitors receive a configurable, professional looking message: 'This site is being upgraded to bleeding edge CMS technology. Please spread the news and don't forget to taunt any Oracle DBA's.'

After that completely unnecessary configuration change (I have no visitors), I was then unable to login to initiate the upgrade. Sigh. Thankfully, I discovered this article from another early adopter which enabled me to regain control of my original site.

I attempted the upgrade from Drupal 5.3 which failed to modify the database schema and produced a worrying number of SQL errors.

Not to be defeated, I read this helpful article which implied the Drupal 5.x system should be running the latest stable release (5.6) which seemed eminently sensible advice.

I quickly upgraded from Drupal 5.3 to 5.6. Only I couldn't because my site was now inaccessible after the partial, incomplete upgrade so I had to hold my breath while I restored from yesterday's MySQL database backup which worked perfectly.

Then I upgraded Drupal from 5.3 to 5.6, having naively convinced myself this would fix the problem, and duly repeated the upgrade process to 6.0 RC2 which promptly failed with the same dire, database related, results.

Still, this is a beta release after all and sure enough (as always), some other poor soul has already been there and done that.

No fix yet. Roll on RC3.

It is just over six months since I first placed banner ads on this blog and, much to my surprise, the accumulated income has just reached $100 (which triggers the first payment from Google).

As the introduction of Adsense was purely an exercise to learn how the system works and experiment with different placements and formats, I have decided to donate all proceeds to a worthy charity.

Answered by our roving reporter, Kenneth.

Posts by month. Draw your own conclusions.

• Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2
• Plaintxt theme upgraded to v4.0. The main change is tag support which I dont currently use.
• Reinstated the 'Related Posts' plugin because I couldn't understand why people looking for information on Virgin Media/V+ don't scan other relevant posts. Already seeing a benefit.
• Added useful plugin to support embedded YouTube videos to liven up my monochrome posts.

Occasionally, people take the time to comment on this blog which is always welcome.

However, the vast majority of comments however are not so thinly veiled advertisements by spammers. Unfortunately, due to recent problems with Spam Karma, I have had to revert to Akismet to block this torrent of pharmaceutical, financial, pornographic and vacuum cleaner spam.

This means I have a few more comments held in moderation for judgement. The family convene every night with a cup of Horlicks to sit in judgement on the assorted comments. Norma kindly takes the minutes and Norman Junior twitters the whole event (live).

The 'Comment Approval Board' recently approved a comment from a heavy metal fan. We took care to follow Akismet's advice and checked the link which purported that 'Heavy Metal is our life'.

Approving this was not an easy choice but hey, this is a broad church and everyone is welcome.

When I subsequently happened to scan the SezWho profile of the author (a man with the unusual name of 'HeavyGod'), I found to my horror, that he (or a program) had left the identical comment on multiple blogs.

'Really good and really interesting post. I expect (and other readers maybe :)) new useful posts from you! Good luck and successes in blogging!'

The clues were all there. Commenting on a recent post sandwiched between other valid comments, a gmail address, the double use of 'really', the smiley, the compliment that I naively fell for. Hook, line and sinker.

I had been tricked. By a heavy metal fan. Oh the eternal shame.

I subscribe to multiple blogs (163 to be precise) and Google Reader makes tracking all of those sites trivial. Readers keyboard shortcuts mean scanning for new content and reading blog articles is also easy and quick.

Occasionally, I also leave comments on a much smaller subset of those blogs in addition to blogs I may encounter but may not necessarily subscribe to.

After posting your comment, it is imperative to be able to follow any subsequent discussions in case someone violently (dis)agrees with you or simply to hear other people's viewpoint on the same subject.

So how do you track all those insightful, witty comments you have contributed during your travels on the blogosphere ? How do you monitor all those interesting conversations, heated discussions and outright flame wars that you haven't necessarily contributed to but are still interested in ?

The primeval solution is to bookmark and subsequently revisit every single blog article you have commented on and, err, scan for any new comments. However, this isn't a very efficient solution and you may find you have no time left for reading the blogs (or holding down the day job) let alone leaving comments.

Another possibility is to subscribe to the comments feed for all the blogs you comment on. However, this may be overkill as you may only be interested in certain articles of interest or articles where you posted a comment.

For example, some articles on popular, high volume blogs (Scoble, ProBlogger) may receive over a hundred comments but I am only interested in tracking comments on a relatively small number of posts.

Some blogs offer 'Subscribe to comments via email' but this is not universally available.

A deluxe version would enable me to track follow-ups to my specific comments on blog platforms that support threaded comments.

My main requirements for comment tracking are:

• Easy, quick way to track comments on a blog. Fully automatic if possible and certainly not more than one click.
• Ability to select comment threads to be monitored.
• Ability to stop tracking conversations.
• Must be able to track all blog platforms.
• Automatic notification when comments updated.
• Ability to check for updates manually.
• Visual indicator for threads with updated content.
• Must support RSS feeds to track comment threads.
• RSS feed must include the context (blog, date, comment text and author)

The main three comment tracking services are:

• co.Comment
• commentful
• co.mments

[SezWho, Disqus and IntenseDebate offer similar services but require installation of plug-ins on the server to be truly universal so are excluded but you may find these tools are of interest.]

Installation¶

All three sites require (free) registration and use a Firefox bookmarklet to track comment threads. No additional plug-ins are required on the server.

Usage¶

Each site has a home page displaying tracked conversations.

commentful provides a dashboard displaying all conversations of interest. Threads with unread comments are highlighted in bold. Only the number of comments is shown and to read the actual comment, you need to click through to the original site. This is less than ideal as for sites with lots of comments, you have to waste time scanning for the recent updates.

co.mments has a excellent, simple, uncluttered summary page displaying the tracked threads with new content clearly displayed. You can read the additional comments simply by expanding the thread. The context including the blog name, the date and time and the author of the new comments are displayed.

One (minor) problem is that threads are listed in reverse chronological order so recent threads with no updates appear above older threads with active conversations.

The coComment 'My Conversations' page is a little more complicated. Comments may be viewed by expanding the appropriate comment thread and the author is shown although the date and time are not included.

coComment seemed a little slower to pick up new content than both commentful and co.mments.

Both commentful and co.mments allowed a 'Check' button to force a poll for new comments which is a feature coComment doesn't support.

coComment added a lot of social and community features in version 2.0. It is fair to say that these Web 2.0 features were not universally welcomed by the existing user base.

coComment allows you to examine comment threads tracked by 'neighbours' (people who presumably are tracking similar conversations' and you can subscribe to other users' tracked threads. Personally, I don't have a need for this feature but I can see how it would be useful for discovering new, relevant blogs of interest. However, your Web 2.0 mileage may vary.

Intriguingly, I have one stalker - sorry follower - on coComment but am I able to click to discover his/her profile ? No. Maybe this is the dawn of anti-social networking.

coComment also has a sidebar view to displays conversations with the original blog displayed alongside but the interface is a little busy for my liking.

Tracking comments¶

All three comment tracking services use a Firefox/IE bookmarklet to add a blog post to be tracked. commentful and co.comments display the confirmation message and helpfully disappear. Unfortunately, the coComment window persists and has to be explicitly closed Breaching the one click rule).

Notification¶

coComment provides a Firefox plugin that provides automatic notification in the browser. However, the current version (0.2.3.6) proved unreliable for me using Firefox 2.0.0.8 on Windows XP. In fact, I actually had to explicitly disable the coComment extension in order to add conversations using the bookmarklet. In addition, the plugin broke some Google Analytics functionality.

commentful also installs a Firefox notifier (1.7.3) that turns Amber when new comments are available. Clicking on the notifier icon opens a window containing the Watchlist. The notifier only updates every 15 mins so once you have read all new comments, confusingly the notifier doesn't immediately revert to Green (no new comments).

Thankfully, co.comments doesn't include a fancy comments notifier. Probably just as well.

RSS¶

Of course, checking a Web page to check on the status of blogs you have commented on is pretty tiresome. Even with the help of a notifier application. What intelligent, lazy people really want is an RSS feed that tells them when important changes have occurred.

All three services offer RSS feeds for the monitored conversations.

Like the Watchlist, the RSS feed from commentful just contains the blog title together with number of new comments. You have to visit the site to view the newly added comments. This rather defeats the purpose of the RSS feed because ideally, you want to be able to view as much content as possible from within Google Reader. The only time you might visit the site would be to participate in the conversation (i.e. someone said you were an idiot).

The co.mments RSS feed contains everything needed for context (author, blog, comment, date).

coComment offers the usual separate RSS feed containing updates on all tracked conversations although the author appears to be 'unknown' most of the time. I presume this is 'unknown' to the coComment system because the author details are supplied on the actual comment.

CoComment does have a additional feature which is useful. coComment provides a second RSS feed purely contains the individual comments you have posted. This is very useful if you are intending to add all your words of wisdom to a lifestream style page (Tumblr, FriendFeed).

Conclusions¶

commentful is basic but does the job and will save you time if you merely want to be automatically notified when new comments have been added to a blog post. However, you do have to visit the site to identify and read the new content.

coComment is the most feature rich and potentially powerful tool but the complexity of the interfaces and wealth of social networking features are slightly overwhelming for my simple requirements. However I will use the RSS Comment Author feed to track my own comments. Once I've worked out why it has stopped working.

co.mments - simple and functional. The RSS feed contains precisely the information I need and is updated quickly. This is the tool I am now using (via RSS) to monitor all comment threads of interest.

Just installed SezWho on this blog. At least, it imported all existing comments (unlike Disqus). I would like to change the red colour to blend in with the theme but haven't worked out how.

Now just rate each other nicely or you will be sent to bed without any tea and the plug-in will be removed. Any feedback, just shout or comment.

Another interesting service but, again, the problem is that it needs to be installed on the majority of blogs/wikis/forums in the world to be truly useful. I think marketeers call it 'traction'. Pity the support email supplied is totally broken but still.

What a blessed shame SezWho doesn't currently support Blogger which means this superlative comment couldn't add 5 stars to my embryonic profile.

I am still in shock at not being shortlisted for the Best UK Blog but I decided to swallow my pride and enjoy a few hours enjoying the high quality content of the 10 finalists:

• Ian Dale's Diary - A tagline of 'Commentary, analysis and gossip from the heart of Westminster' completely turned me off and I closed the Firefox tab before I was subjected to any more torture.
• Guy Fawkes - Hoping for top tips to blow up the Houses of Parliament but just got more politics. Yawn.
• Neil Clark - The winner apparently. Anti-war hack with a lot of posts urging readers to vote for him.
• EU Referendum - Simply couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to click through.
• Pub Philosopher - Promising title but yet more (right wing) politics. May as well buy the Daily Mail.
• The Devil's Kitchen - Considered outpourings on the wit and wisdom of David Cameron. No thanks.
• Baggage Reclaim - Much better. A blog recording amusing anecdotes from an anonymous baggage handler at LHR. Oh no - wait a minute - it's just a blog about dating and 'relationships'.
• Nourishing Obscurity - Promising title but this excerpt completely lost me: 'I see that the current crop of parents lost their moral compass long ago and this is the first generation to grow up "moral-code-lite".
• Bright Meadow - Soft porn alert 'She loved how the amber glinted off his bones'. I daren't read any more. Particularly as I am on a formal warning from my employer.
• Kickette - At last. A discerning blog all about football. Only this one is about celebrity footballers (Fat Frank), their tiresome girlfriends and pictures of Ronaldo with his shirt off.

I was so depressed that I decided to ~~kill myself~~ compile my own list of the definitive, real, undisputed 'Top 10 UK (and Irish) blogs' in strict alphabetic order:

• BlogStorm - Internet Marketing/SEO but, refreshingly, from a UK blogger.
• Caroline Middlebrook - a lady who took the brave step of quitting her IT job in favour of blogging.
• Donncha - WordPress employee #2 and aspiring photographer.
• Doug Burns - Scottish DBA with wicked sense of humour.
• Modern Life is Rubbish - Quality not quantity.
• Pete Ashton - Brummie blogger with varied mixture of music, photos and tech with no signposts or self-importance. Pure blogging.
• Random Acts of Reality - I help people read books. This guy saves people's lives for £10 an hour. Deserves first prize for the blog name alone.
• Tim Hall - Oracle DBA, film critic and Karate Kid. Another Brummie.
• Tom Raftery - Irish slant on IT, tech and all that Web 2.0 stuff.
• Who Ate All The Pies - Genuinely funny football blog.

Tumblr update is imminent. First impressions are excellent.

Timestamps. Archives. Tags. Channels. Markdown. No comments though.