The Republic of T.

You may have noticed some funny looking posts that consist of links to other blog posts. Allow me to explain.

I’ve been experimenting with some way of posting regular digests of interesting blog posts I’ve come across, in a way that’s as automated as possible, involves very few extra steps, and doesn’t require any actual writing on my part. My first attempt was to set up a del.icio.us account, post to that, and use its “daily blog post” function. But I didn’t like that I had to switch accounts from my regular del.icio.us account, and that I couldn’t change the title of the post, etc.

So I did some searching, and the closest thing I found was a Wordpress plugin called “Postalicious.” It’s not the newest, but it works with the current version of Wordpress, and it seems to do the trick. All I have to do is “share” posts in Google Reader, and “Postalicious” checks the feed on an hourly basis, and then posts the next five new links. I need to tweak the settings a bit — change the title of the post, and which content gets included — but it’s a solution for now. (It’s not perfect, I know. in some cases the link is to the RSS feed, instead of the post itself, but I haven’t found a fix that fits the aforementioned criteria.)

So, I guess I’m an aggregator now.

Anyway, the holiday is fast approaching, and I figure people have better things to do than read blog posts. So, I’m giving it a rest until Monday.

Unless I read something interesting. Then you might see more digest posts.

Happy 4th. Be safe.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. As part of the upgrade and redesign of the blog, I finally got around to installing the Feedsmith plugin for Feedburner. Several people had advised me to install it before, but I put it off out of fear that I’d end up breaking something else in the process. Since the upgrade had the potential to break everything, I figured “What the hell?”, and installed it.

The plugin, BTW, basically reroutes your Wordpress generated RSS feeds to your Feedburner feed. The result being a better quality feed for readers, and better statistics on how many people are actually reading the blog. Page views, after all, don’t tell the whole story. Neither do unique visits. If you’ve got a Feedburner feed and a Wordpress feed, you don’t have an statistics on how many people are subscribing to your feed. And, well, they’re readers too.

I installed the plugin and forgot about it, until I noticed that post-upgrade my feed no longer carried full content, but just everything before the jump. I’d prefer a full content feed. So, I signed into Feedburner to see if the problem was here. Well, I found more than I bargained for. More readers that I didn’t know about until now.

Technorati Tags: blogs

Read the rest of this entry »

Success! I can continue engage in serial blogging while making it easier to find series of posts, thanks to the Organize Series plugin. It’s a habit I fell into a while back, and I’ve given up trying to break myself of it. Try as I might, I can’t force my brain into the four-paragraph blog format. (Fortunately, according to some experts, that’s exactly what I shouldn’t do anwyay.)

I can’t It took a little while for to figure out how to get it working, but it’s paid off with a series category page. There you’ll find links to each series, along with descriptions of each series. I’m going back through the archives little by little and find posts that were written as series . But the best part isn’t the series page itself. Now, if a post is part of a series, you’ll know as soon as you look at it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Actually, more like complete renovation. I put off upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress for as long as I could. Mostly because I finally had the blog looking and working pretty much the way I wanted it, and because I knew that upgrading would break my theme and any number of plugins, etc. But time and technology marches on, and sooner or later you realize it’s dragging you along behind it whether you like it or not.

So, when my host upgraded to what I think was new version of PHP, and my old version of Wordpress and the WP-Cache plugin started acting loopy, I took a deep breath and started preparing to upgrade. My one problem was finding a theme that would be compatible with the new version of Wordpress, and allow me to preserve at least some of the great look and feel Lauren created for the blog a while back.

Fortunately, I’d bookmarked a post from Mashable about 30 3-column Wordpress themes. That’s where I found Mandingo, a terrific theme that let me incorporate the banner and background Lauren created. Not only is it a great theme, but according to the Showcase page now have something in common with Björk.

The site is pretty much the same, but there is one new addition. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to keep some posts from getting buried in the 1,000+ posts on this blog. (And that’s not counting the XXXX posts in the October 2003 - June 2006 archives.) Right now the Articles page is my attempt to give some of those posts a chance to see the light of day. (Thanks to the great work of Alex King, BTW.) That page will be updated as I unearth more posts to feature there. I’m also working on a way to showcase series of posts, but haven’t been successful with that yet.

I’ve also added a PayPal button to the sidebar. For now, donations will go to support research for the Hate Crimes on Wikipedia project, and will be used to pay for access to newspaper archives.

Hope folks like the new look, etc. Feedback is appreciated!

Technorati Tags: wordpress

So, yeah. I’ve completed the transition into a fresh, clean, new blog. I ended up going with a new Wordpress installation because, frankly, there are some interesting platforms out there, but I wasn’t able to fine one that had a theme I liked. Textpattern holds some promise, though, if they make their templating system easier. In the meantime, I’m hoping that moving my old content to archives.republicoft.com and starting with a fresh database will be less taxing on Wordpres and MySQL. After all, I’m down several hundred thousand rows of data now, and the site’s cached (as it was before).

I’ve had help from several people on this, from my hosting company to technically talented friends of mine. From all of them — who looked at my database and site configuration — the verdict was that the problem was something in Wordpress code that was causing the database load. Interestingly enough, it didn’t seem to be the traffic that was the problem. It happened whenever I posted something. I went a day or two without posting, and nothing happened. Then I wrote a few posts in Wordpress and scheduled them to post the next day since I was going to be busy. That’s when all hell broke loose. Every time something posted.

So, I’m hopefull that the new set-up will improve things. I’m also optimistic that whatever the coding problem was, it will be fixed in an upcoming version of Wordpress. I hope so anyway. If not, well, I now know several ways to get my data out of Wordpress and into another platform. Maybe I’ll do a series of posts on those platforms and my experience with each of them.

For now, I have to update the new site with an actual blogroll and a few other thing. Also, my apologies to folks whose comments didn’t make the transition into the new set-up. Actually, none of them did.