Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Wordpress Questions
Still finding my feet with Wordpress - it seems powerful enough, but also has a "sticky tape and glue" feel about it. I guess it will feel more mature as it tends towards 3.0. The Blogger import process was a bit bumpy because the built-in one didn't work. I've written up what I had to do instead, but it's a bit confusing so I probably won't post it here. I also messed up the date stamps on my comments and haven't had a chance to fix them yet.
Does anyone know if there are plug-ins that will:
- let me enable/disable comments on a batch of posts, all at once?
disable comments on a post after a specific length of time (on all posts, but preferably with a per-post override too)?Update: Auto shut-off comments will do the trick!- style my feeds so they make sense in a non-feed-aware browser?
For what it's worth, I'm already using Ultimate Tag Warrior, Widgets (plus Feeds Widget, del.icio.us Widget and Ulitimate Tag Warrior widget) and Post Control and Draft Control.
Merged Weblog and P5 Sketchbook
I've moved my blogs over to Wordpress, merged my Processing sketchbook with my regular weblog Random Etc. and dropped everything down to the homepage of www.tom-carden.co.uk for simplicity.
Your feed reader should pick up the changes automatically, and your browser should be redirected. I've done my best not to break any permalinks - fingers crossed!
If you're only interested in my Processing stuff (previously TomC's Processing Sketchbook) then you should stay subscribed to the Processing category feed, but you might want to switch to the full feed for more variety.
Please email me or add a comment if something you're looking for is no longer working and I'll do my best to fix it - thanks!
Next up, a customised less bloggy front page template, and more content...
ModRewriting for Blogger Archives
404 errors for nicely formed URLs like www.tom-carden.co.uk/weblog/2006/01 occasionally show up in my stats. It should be really easy to serve something useful (if I wrote anything that month), but Blogger is currently providing me with archives in the form of www.tom-carden.co.uk/weblog/2006_01_01_archive.php which isn't quite right.
Here's the fix I used, for this blog and my p5 blog, in the .htaccess file for www.tom-carden.co.uk:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^weblog/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/$ weblog/$1_$2_01_archive.php [L]RewriteRule ^p5/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/$ p5/$1_$2_01_archive.php [L]</IfModule>
Your mileage may vary of course, and I'm aware that the above two rules could easily be just one, but this is good enough for now.
You can try it here: /2006/01/ should be the same as 2006_01_01_archive.php. Not sure what to do about unadorned years though - perhaps just point to January?
Computing for Emergent Architecture
For better or worse, I share my attention between three blogs: this one which syndicates to Processing Blogs, my personal blog Random Etc, and Computing for Emergent Architecture at UCL.
Often the things I write would be equally suitable for all three, so I thought I'd point you at two recent CfEA posts, one on an interesting project called Waiting and one on some thoughts for Real-time Ego-centric Isochronic Maps.
(If you're being completist about your e-stalking, you'll also want to subscribe to OpenGeoData and PintCast - the latter is a new podcast with Steve Coast and friends that is still finding its feet, and is yet to buy a good microphone...)
If you’re reading this, then I’ve succesfully moved webhost
Quite how my website crept to 300Mb zipped up I have no idea. Nevertheless, I moved it all yesterday and hit the Big Red DNS Button today. Let's see if I got everything right...
What a difference a digg makes
My tube map is getting so much attention it brought the server to a crawl*, thanks to links from Digg.com and Spiegel.de.
Digg seems to be living up to its reputation as a cross between metafilter and slashdot - good content bubbles up very often, but the comments are overwhelmingly inane and the hastiness to declare a link a dupe gets in the way of actually looking at it. One user claimed to have seen my tube map a month ago, which is impossible since it only barely went live a week ago. Of course, they were mixing me up with Oskar Karlin's map, but they could have found that out by reading my applet page for 30 seconds or so.
Interestingly, Digg also seems to be sending roughly ten times as much traffic per digg than del.icio.us sends per bookmark, but perhaps that's a network effect which comes into play once you hit the front page?
*Big thanks to Mikel Maron for mirroring it in the meantime.
Processing Blogs updates
The fabulous Daniel Shiffman has been added to Processing Blogs. I'm a big fan of his course site for The Nature of Code, so it's an honour to have him on board.
In other news, I think the problems with Blogger feeds (empty links and images for some posts) have been fixed with the latest updates to FeedWordpress. Fingers crossed. Unfortunately my cron job for automatically updating the blog has broken, so for the time being I am updating by hand - apologies for the laggy updates.
I also have a new domain for Processing Blogs which I will announce soon.
Animated GPS Map
As part of the OpenStreetMap project, last month Steve Coast and I produced an A1 poster showing all the data we'd collected for London.
The biggest contributor to OpenStreetMap's UK data is an innovative courier firm called eCourier, and by way of thanks for their continuing commitment to the project I cooked up a movie of a sample of their data using Processing. Thankfully for me and my bandwidth, eCourier are kindly hosting it here for your enjoyment.
You can read more about our collaboration on their news page, and on the OpenStreetMap wiki.
Still wrestling with Feedwordpress here at Processing Blogs HQ. We're upgraded to 0.97, but something still strips links and images from Blogger feeds with mode="escaped" and I can't work out what it is. Much love and prizes to anyone who can spot the problem.
I don’t want Blogger, I want del.icio.us
Like many people, I find that 99% of the time I don't really want or need a blog - I'm happy pouring links into my del.icio.us account instead.
If you subscribe to this blog via a news reader, I can recommend subscribing to my del.icio.us feed too. Since I'm usually pretty diligent at using the extended descriptions as commentary, you'll get more of what I have to say through that channel. I'm not much of a fan of inline del.icio.us links in blog feeds, so I won't be doing that here for the foreseeable future.
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