Category Archives: Blogging

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    You. Yes you. I am now going to experiment on you. So quit squirming.

    After five years of blogging I’ve decided to publish all my blog posts as a graphic novel with me as caped superhero. My superpower would be the perfectly timed wisecrack. Just kidding. I do want to make a change though. I’m going to focus my blog more on photography and see what happens.

    There are three things I’m passionate and deeply interested in. (These, of course, do not include the really important things in life like my new wife and family and friends. Just to be clear.)

    These three things are:

    1. Writing software (my day job)
    2. Reading (both Fiction and Non-Fiction)
    3. Writing
    4. Photography

    Ok, that’s four things. Notice that math isn’t one of those three things.

    And then there’s blogging. Where does that fall in this list? Certainly number three. But where else? All. None. Some. Which is exactly the problem.

    Everything I’ve read about creating a successful blog (usually on a successful blog) suggests that the blog should specialize in something. Pick a topic. Any topic. And run with it. Right there, Mike’s blog equals blogging fail. My blog is too schizophrenic.

    Here’s a great post on writing a blog by Penelope Trunk (whom I’m a big fan of).

    I’m not sure how this will work out, but as I said it’s an experiment. I’m going to leave my posting of whacky youtube videos and random links to my twittering and try to write about where my life intersects with photography. That said, I’m going to try to do it in a way that doesn’t bore those of you not so interested in photography.

    I hope you stick with me and keep reading, thanks.

    PhotoMike.jpg

    Thanks Reeves for the photo.

    Another problem with the iPhone Wordpress Application

    During setup it posts and then deletes a test post. This is really really really REALLY lametastically lame. For me any post to my blog notifies in order, feedburner, twitter, the White House, the NSA, Homeland Security, and Roger the one arm middle school street crossing guard near my house. That’s literally mega quad bazillions of people.

    Did I mention how lame this is?

    All you evil doers, knock off all that evil!

    The-tick2.jpg

    Yes, WordPress for iPhone, I’m talking to you.

    C’mer…. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you. Just come here for a second…

    Slap.

    You can go now.

    Review of the new iPhone WordPress Application

    I found the WordPress iPhone Application to be very klunky. I gave it a review of 3 out of 5 stars in the iPhone app store.

    1. There’s a list of blogs you choose from when it starts, which is lame because I only have one blog. Why do I have to hit an extra item? Start up time is critical for useability. Don’t get in the way of me getting my post written.
    2. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to actually post to my blog. Turns out you have to set the “Status” to “Published” and then hit the “Save” button. This is really lame. I ended going back and forth from the drafts list and getting a bit irritated. There should be a big “Post Now!!!1!” button.
    3. I can’t set the size of my pictures. I hate this. This is, in fact, a deal buster for me. The new version of Ecto does something cool – it allows you to see a cssTag for your pictures. I’d love to see this application do something similar. Or at least have a setting where I can set the maximum size for my pictures.
    4. I kept getting lost when choosing a picture to add to the post. There’s some really weird back and forth behavior here. This needs to be streamlined and is particularly awkward.
    5. The application needs to show some inline indication of where the added photos will end up. I couldn’t tell how my post was going to be laid out. There’s a “Preview” button, but this is also lame because there’s some boilerplate text at the end of the preview saying how the pictures will be appended to the post. Um, isn’t this a preview? How does this help me? My advice? Lose the preview, and make the editing more WYSIWYG. Previews, imo, are workarounds for lame design.
    6. There should be default categories and tags, etc. Make it so I just start the app, enter a title, enter the text, maybe add a picture and hit the post button. Budda-Boom, done. Over and out. It’s too complicated right now to write a post – too much navigating around doing crap I don’t want to do.

    I think this application was designed like a desktop application instead of an iphone application. I think it needs some work. That said, it did actually work. Which is a good thing, and for something like this, a great starting point.

    write-1.png

    There are more pictures of the application, here.

    Posting from iphone

    Trying out the new Wordpress iPhone application.

    For your enjoyment, here’s a dog on a (mutha-effing) plane.

    photo

    All the redirects are working now…

    We had to turn on all wildcard matching in IIS on the server to get this working. But now it does, and it’s sweet!

    So the url for the picture below is http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/content/binary/jacky.jpg but the picture is actually on my new site at http://blog.mikefullerton.com/wp-content/oldcontent/jacky.jpg. I think this is exceeding cool. So now if you go to google images and search for mikefullerton.com, all the pictures still load! NICE.

    Jacky

    I have redirects working now, mostly

    One of the challenges of moving a website is preserving the permalinks – links to your stuff from elsewhere on the web. This is important if you wish to retain any page rankings in the search engines as well as just keeping stuff people have linked to you working. This is a big challenge when moving something as complex as a blog site like mine from one web technology to another, e.g. from dasBlog to wordpress. You really need to do a permanent redirect, so the search engines know that the resource in question has actually moved.

    What I’ve done is write a custom ASP.net website that does permanent redirects for every single one of my 650 blog posts, as well as date and category views. So links like the folllowing work:

    Example of a random post:
    http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/2007/11/13/TinySuperheroDogsFlyVeryLow.aspx

    Example of a month view:
    http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/default,month,2005-09.aspx

    Example of a category view:
    http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/categoryview,category,cars.aspx

    I also implemented redirect support for images that are linked to my site, so that images with URLs like this:

    http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/content/binary/jacky.jpg should be permanently redirected to http://blog.mikefullerton.com/wp-content/oldcontent/jacky.jpg. This is the only part I don’t have working yet. It works fine on my development machine at home, but barfs on the actual server. I’m not sure why yet. Binaries in wordpress are normally loaded into the mySql database, but for my old content I decided just to have a folder for the old posts.

    This was a fun little project I did in one day. If you’re interested in using this redirector website, let me know. Right now it’s hand tuned to redirect dasBlog to wordpress, but that could be abstracted a bit more for another blogging engine.

    More on this later. I want to post about how I actually moved the site, which was infinitely more difficult and frustrating.

    Please let me know if you have any problems.