i preferred the beginning, where a selected trio of local bloggers discussed the community aspects of their blogs.
listening to ben macneil talk about the uberpopular trixieupdate and rewarding users with regular photos was cool. it would have been nice to see him go into some more details, perhaps a behind the scenes look. and where was trixie? that was 50% of the reason why i woke up at 8am! of course who knows when you might bump into them at maple view farms, on campus, elmos, or armadillo grill with camera in tow.
sid’s discussion seemed disconnected, maybe mostly because i don’t completely understand his blog. which i think he said is something he actively pursues–to be at the end of the long tail. meanwhile paul was still trying to get wireless to work on his laptop, and i started live blogging and looking up URLs. ah, the bliss of wireless internet.
ed cone spent time talking about “flow,” and i wonder whether he means “traffic flow” as in “hits” or if he is thinking of Csikszentmihalyi’s flow? he offered some advice in response to those “how do i get traffic?” types of self-promotion questions. if you want to be read, he suggested emailing post snippets and URLs to other big name bloggers that might be interested in something you’ve written. i did like dave hoggards suggestion that you should blog like no one’s reading.
i don’t think any of this is different from what someone has to do socialize in the real world. if you want to meet new people, you have to get yourself out there, be a regular somewhere, increase the opportunity for new social interactions. and get to know connectors (people who know people). which is something that didn’t explicitly come up during the conference.
the second half with dan gillmor just didn’t seem to have any umph. i mean dan is so sedate, and as my attention wandered, i found myself registering for flickr and posting some pictures that i was taking from the audience.
for future bloggercons, i would recommend a panel structure composed solely of blogger-delivered “case studies” intended to touch on a number of predetermined conference themes (e.g. comments, traffic, aggregation, social networking/community, political advocacy) followed and intersperced with audience discussions and questions.
all in all, i had a real nice time. kudos to anton (and paul) for making it happen.
which required digging into apache’s complex mod_rewrite module and plodding through some really crappy documentation on setting up the rewrite rules to work with mediawiki.
i think i got it working right, but took some doing. then i thought i’d try to improve the mediawiki documentation, but i started having trouble getting the rewrite rules to work in an .htaccess file (i had done everything in httpd.conf), so i just gave up.
update:
here are my mod_rewrite rules for a mediawiki wiki, which are inside a VirtualHost container in Apache’s httpd.conf file:
# Allow rewriting URLs
RewriteEngine on
#RewriteLog /home/jwatt/rewrite.log
#RewriteLogLevel 4
# fix for URLs like this: hostname.tld/?title=page_title
# if the requested page is the root page "/"
# and the query string contains the title
# return the index page, query string will be automatically appended
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^title=
RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php [L,QSA]
# Don't rewrite requests for files in MediaWiki subdirectories,
# MediaWiki PHP files, HTTP error documents, favicon.ico, or robots.txt
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/(stylesheets|images|skins)/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/(redirect|texvc|index).php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/error/(40(1|3|4)|500).html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/favicon.ico
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/robots.txt
# Rewrite http://wiki.domain.tld/article properly, this is the main rule
RewriteRule ^/(.*) /index.php/$1 [L,QSA]
for the last month, it’s worked for me flawlessly.
stumbled onto ruby on rails the other day–but i can’t retrace how (yet). which led me to some o’reilly article on ruby on rails that like everybody (err, every programmer) in the blogosphere seems to be simultaneously linking to. and i came away thinking “ruby on rails is not for me.” at least not for the financial web application that is my job. but then i tend to have a gut negative reaction to most things the first time i experience them. i’m a bit of a skeptic that way.
so i googled ruby tonight and read up a bit on its features, one of which is the idea of closures (lexical closures) which i read about in hackers and painters, and didn’t understand then. so i googled “lexical closure” and via the newly discovered, right-up-my-alley blog, StronglyTyped, I learned that a lexical closure is something like a rudimentary/proto object. i still don’t know why it’s called a lexical closure.
so i installed sage cause paul keeps mentioning it, and because i don’t have/use a newsreader/aggregator, and because my life is probably incomplete as a result, missing out on all that information and such.
of course StronglyTyped’s RSS feed isn’t well-formed because there’s a less-than sign in some ruby code he posted (ruby uses less-than signs where java/php uses the keyword extends). and this error just happens to be in a post about ActiveRecord, which appears to be a major part of Ruby on Rails, and which is a design pattern i just happened to be reading about in advanced php programming at the end of last week!
i’ve alluded to it several times, but for the past two weeks i’ve been working on a blogroll plugin for wordpress that sorts blogs from the most recently updated to the least recently updated.
sounds simple enough, right?
i started with a world-accessible web-interface for adding blogs. once i got that working, i realized it’d be great if it could auto-discover the feed url and blog name from the blog url. so i wrote some code to do that with an html parser i found. i figured out some things about RSS/Atom feeds so i could get the last modified date (not easy!) and last post title for each blog, using a pretty good rss parser. then i had to figure out how to use php on the command line so i could have a cron job call a method to poll all the feeds in the blogroll. fairly simple, but something i hadn’t done before.
i installed wordpress to help in transforming what i had done into a plugin, and i discovered that i needed another plugin that would evaluate php code in the body of a blog post.
that got me to what i called v0.1, a custom proof of concept which is currently running quite nicely over at OrangePolitics.org (check it out). the motivation for doing this in the first place was my desire to create a tool to support/reflect a local community of bloggers, which grew out of some discussions on orangepolitics sparked by anton’s upcoming conference on blogging and community. this may not be that tool, but that’s another blog post…
since then, i’ve gone over v0.1 with a finer-toothed comb in order to get the code to a place where i’d be willing let anyone else see it. it’s designed it to be highly configurable–there are 24 different settings that affect how it looks and works.
however, i have to say setting it up is not for the faint of heart. so far it has only been tested on my clean wordpress install and ruby’s reasonably-modded orangepolitics. it requires a number of different components working together to achieve the intended effect. of course if anyone does install it, i’d love to hear reactions, feedback, and questions.
there are some more detailed instructions at the beginning of dynamic_blogroll.php in the archive above, but you should feel comfortable with the following before attempting to install this plugin:
extracting the files (dynamic_blogroll.php, poll_feeds.php, run_php.php) from the archive above into wp-content/plugins
editing settings in dynamic_blogroll.php and poll_feeds.php (see instructions in dynamic_blogroll.php)
activating Run PHP and Dynamic Blogroll in wordpress
adding the following to a wordpress post:
<phpcode>
$dynamic_blogroll = new DynamicBlogroll();
$dynamic_blogroll->run();
</phpcode>
setting up a cron job to run poll_feeds.php every hour
be aware that other plugins may conflict with dynamic blogroll, in particular v0.9 of Scott Reilly’s auto-hyperlink urls plugin. however i found that it plays well with the latest version (v2.01).
