Blogging 'bout Blogging

This is my penultimate entry for Holidailies 2007. The goal was a month of daily blogging and I'm on track to achieve that (for the first time in my many years of Holidailies participation).

I've learned a couple things from this exercise.

The first thing I learned is that I'm not as interesting as I thought I was. But, then again, who is?

Although I've had a handful of posts over the past month where I think I've had something pretty valuable to say (such as the Socialized Football and Time Warner Rate Increase posts), the blather ratio was higher than I'd have hoped.

Part of the problem is that I'd intended to write on things that came out of interesting December projects, but I didn't have many of those. I didn't take much time off from work, and I spent that little free time on family stuff not projects.

I mentioned last week that I added a "rate this post" feature to my blog using the Drupal fivestar module.

There is a serious usability issue with this module. If you don't show the rating widget on the article teaser then visitors probably won't know there is a rating feature, and so there may not be a lot of rating activity. (The teaser is the first few paragraphs of the entry, displayed on the blog page.)

Comments work similarly to ratings. You have to click through to the full article to leave a comment, just as you do a rating. This, however, doesn't present the same problem as article ratings. First, visitors tend to know that if a blog supports comments, you have to click through to the full article to access the comments. Article ratings aren't a common feature, so visitors don't expect them.

The Austin Bloggers web site recently was attacked by a scraper site. The scraper was grabbing our RSS feed and republishing it on their own web site, pretending it was their own content. We received no attribution and the scraper put their own copyright on the page. The scraper also plastered ads all over the stolen content, which, of course, is the whole purpose of the scam.

It's Holidailies time again. Holidailies is a community writing project for online journalers and other web writers. Participants aim for writing an article a day through the entire month of December.

The project, now in its seventh year, was founded by my wife. I've been assisting for the past four. I developed the portal that allows people to register and post their daily entries.

This year I got lazy and just reused last year's code without much change. That explains why this year, for the first time since I've been involved, we're actually starting the project on December 1 instead of partway through the month.

Last year I signed up as a participant. I finished the month with 23 entries posted.

This year, I probably won't. At this time last year I had wrapped up one contract and didn't expect to begin looking for a new one until after the new year. So a daily writing project seemed like an interesting project to try. This year, I fear I can't realistically commit to that.

But just because I'm being a total wimp doesn't mean that you have to. If you want to participate in Holidailies, you can. It's totally free. You just need to sign up. Just be warned that every year past we've had to cut off registrations early, so as not to overload our readers panel. I have no reason to expect this year will be any different.

If you do sign up, also consider becoming a sponsor. It's a great way to publicize your personal or small business site. Or, if you are associated with a non-profit group or organization, and would like some free public service advertising, drop me a line. We have a small number of "comp" slots set aside for non-profits that might be of interest to Holidailies participants.

It's been three weeks since I released the Force Preview plug-in for the Movable Type blog system. I blogged about it upon release. Thought I'd give a brief update.

First, the good news: it's been completely effective at stopping comment spam. I've found that the moment the plug-in is enable for a blog, comment spam ceases. My girlfriend reported a single spam, probably hand entered, during the past three-week period. Besides that, nada.

Now the bad news: it's kind of a pain in the butt. You need to modify a minimum of two templates (your individual archive entry template and comment preview template), and more if you use the (now deprecated) comment pop-up. The instructions are pretty explicit, so it shouldn't be difficult if you've only got one blog. It's might annoying, however, if you have several. I had four blogs that needed protection, and only today did I get around to dealing with the last of them.

More bad news: I tried to register the plug-in with Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, but they won't let me without signing up for Type Key.

My other concern is that trackback spam continues to be a problem, but it's not nearly at the level of the comment spam.

So, I recommend that people with existing Movable Type blogs who are frustrated with comment spam consider trying it.

Sometimes, I feel like the last blogger left using the Movable Type blogging package. All of the cool kids have moved on to Wordpress or Drupal or something else. Even the Scripty Goddess, one of the first (and best) Movable Type resources, has moved on.

There are three things that keep me on Movable Type. First, I really like the static publishing model. Most publishing systems generate pages dynamically, which can mean a lot of processor and database overhead to serve a request. Not Movable Type. By default, when a web server receives a request for a Movable Type blog entry, it just serves a static html page from disk. The processing and database overhead are eliminated, which means even a dinky web server (like mine) can survive a slashdotting (like mine has).

(The tradeoff is the much reviled Movable Type "rebuild" function. That's a feature, not a bug. On a busy blog, the milliseconds of processing and database overhead across thousands of page view more than makes up for the rebuild.)

I'm pleased to report that Blogger has finally figured out how to say, "Ooops!"

When you request a web page from a server and the web server cannot provide that page, it is supposed to return an error. And by error, I don't just mean serving up a web page that says, "Whups! So sorry!" When the user requests a document that does not exist, the server is supposed to respond with a specific protocol handshake called a 404 error.

This year, we began accepting paid advertising on the Holidailies web site. Jette and I went into this with some trepidation. Would there be a community backlash? Would it make the site look crummy? And, most importantly, would we get anything out of it? It's only been a few days, but so far it seems to be working well.

The goal of this article is not to sell advertising, but rather to share my experience with other people looking for models to support community web sites. Nevertheless, we do have a few sponsorships available at this time, so if this sounds interesting, please do feel free to become a Holidailies sponsor.

I just finished posting a new, crappy web site, and I couldn't be happier.

This is the second project I've done with the Drupal content management system (CMS). The first was for the City of Austin Community Technology Initiative. This new site–the crappy site–is for SoAustin.Net, the quasi community hosting service that I run.

The reason that I'm happy is that even though the new Drupal site is crappy, that's mostly because I just migrated the content of an old, static (and, need I say, crappy) web site into the Drupal framework. I think moving to a CMS may be a first step towards cleaning out the crap.

I can't really explain it. The physical effort of typing "vi newpage.html" (vi is the Linux text editor) is barely incrementally more than pushing a "new content" button in a CMS. Yet, somehow, when my content lives in a static framework, it is rarely updated and often goes to rot. I discovered this truth when I migrated my personal website to a blog. I published more in my first six months of blogging than I did in the previous six years combined. I am hoping that movment to a CMS does the same for SoAustin.Net.

So if you are an SoAustin user, please hang in there. I really really really will get correct instructions posted for configuring your email client one of these days.

It's almost Holidailies time again. Now in its sixth year, Holidailies is a community writing project for online journalers and other web writers. Participants aim for writing an article a day over the course of the month-long project.

When Jette first began the project, it was a small webring of journal writers. It has grown significantly over the years. I joined in two years ago and built a custom portal, to support even more participants. Last year, 176 people registered to participate.

We brought the 2005 site live today, and we're hoping it will be the best Holidailies yet.

If you keep an online journal or weblog, and think you are up to the challenge of posting daily, consider joining us this year. It's totally free, but the post-a-day pace can be grueling, or so I'm told. You've got some time to think about it. Registration opens November 30.