Category: Web Design

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RSS in Plain English

I am in the midst of a relaunch of JEMM.com, a small business back in my home state of Iowa. We are taking it into new directions, many of which they have never witnessed or knew about before I got my hands on the site. I’ve also been muttering the words “Drupal” and “RSS” quite a bit, not to mention “search engine optimization” and “content management system”.

The Drupal part is something they are grasping well, and it is so nice to have a CMS in which nearly everyone at the business can have a helping hand in building the site with. The learning curve is getting easier everyday, and I’m discovering what it’s like to teach Drupal to new eyes, especially those who are still on the outside of what Web 2.0 really is.

The RSS part is another story. When I pointed this video out to them, they came back to me with a much better understanding of what I was trying to teach them. Plus, it’s hard to convey my daily interactivity with this stuff on a regular basis.

Still wondering what RSS is? Watch this video by the folks at CommonCraft.


Click To Play

Talking to Boris about my adventures, I’ll try to convey more about the creation of JEMM.com on a Drupal platform. If anyone wanted to help me out with some design input, I’m all ears. At this time, we’re much more focused on content.

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It’s a Matt Mullenweg world

I caught this video interview that Matt Mullenweg[wiki], Mr. WordPress founder himself, did with CNet yesterday. It’s really worth watching because you get his insights as to this whole Web 2.0 revolution, of which some say is dead, and other interesting things that he’s been more or less involved with.

I especially like the part about how he developed spam filtering for WordPress because he didn’t want his mom, who suddenly decided that she wanted to start blogging one day, to get bombarded by spam. More so to the fact, Mullenweg didn’t want her getting blasted by the naughty and not so friendly stuff. Akisment was basically born out of that.

One thing that he mentioned was a tool that I was instantly interested in. Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that you can install to have your browser data mirrored between every computer that you need to have synced together. Being that an iMac has been a new addition to our home collection, I have to say that I see why he endorses it. I love being able to switch from my laptop without the headache of not having all the same bookmarks on both machines, and this is far less complicated than importing them between the two. It also works for cookies and all the rest of the data you need and want.

To round out the day, WordPress 2.2 was released last night, up from the most recent version of 2.1.3. There are some decent additions to this edition that makes me pretty interested to really try it out.

  • Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0
  • Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol
  • Widgets are now supported in core
  • Protection against activating broken plugins
  • “Deactivate All Plugins” button. Sadly, my “Reactivate All Plugins” patch didn’t make it into this release. Hopefully you’ll see it in WP 2.3.
  • Improvements to comment management
  • Code optimizations and speedups
  • Future WYSIWYG support for the Safari browser
  • Post Preview moved into a popup window, rather than an iframe on the Write page
  • WordPress-specific XML-RPC API
  • JQuery support

[gunters]

Dang that Mullenweg. The guy has been busy.

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Follow up thoughts on SuperHappyDevHouse

My post about attending the SuperHappyDevHouse at the Bryght offices in Vancouver was pretty last minute, so I thought I would do my best to give a post-game reaction to the festivities.

20070511(003).jpg In all honesty, I went there with the intent of doing something kinda geeky and fun, but the fun really got put in front of the geeky. While the true hackers and do’ers were on the main floor doing some, what looked like, intense coding, I was manning the grill for hot action with some brats. And the way the sun was shining on the rooftop patio, I quickly made myself at home up there. The keg was up there too, so I was far from alone.

Talked to a lot of really cool folks while I was up there. In no particular order, Jordan Behan, Roland Tanglao, Jason Vanderhill, Boris Mann, Richard Eriksson, Kris Krug, Ianiv, Ivan, John Biehler, and big shout outs to good pals Duane Storey and the Dave Olsen.

20070511(006).jpg I’m unaware if anything monumental came from the event, but there were a chunk of folks who were looking to do something that sounded neat. I don’t think that I was completely out of my element there, but hard coding is a tad out of the realms of the things I know and like to do. I overheard that one of said coders asked Rebecca why she was there once they found out that she was “just a blogger“.

Bottom line, I had a lot of fun. People that I hung around and chatted with were a great group of folks, and we certainly had a good exchange of ideas, concepts, slams, jokes, laughter, and so on. Being that I have a few Drupal projects that I have been working on, these are the right folks to be talking to.

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Security vulnerability: myGallery plugin for WordPress

The other morning, Rebecca told me about some problems with the RadioZoom site. Essentially, it didn’t want to load at all. There was a consistent error with some PHP in the myGallery plugin that I have been using on the site. I don’t use it extensively, and it was mostly to showcase some photos of a soundseeing episode that I did while wandering through Stanley Park.

Mark Ghosh made a post yesterday that answered a lot of my questions about the problem I ran into.

MyGallery Plugin for WordPress If you are using the myGallery plugin for WordPress to display your pictures, please follow the link above and update your plugin to the latest version. A pretty serious remote code execution vulnerability in the plugin has been found and disclosed and there have been scattered reports of hack attempts. [weblogtoolscollection]

I thought it was fairly strange for a plugin to just stop working, and there was a hunch inside of me that was fearing a hacker trying to get into the site, not that there is a whole lot to really get into. This is why I do regular backups to the site, not to mention keeping an archive of all the episodes that are released.

Even though this “error” completely crippled the site, I was able to remove the plugin physically on the server and gain access again. It disallowed me from getting to my dashboard as well. Everything is updated and appears to be running smoothly. If you use it, I would seriously consider upgrading ASAP. I’m fairly sure that my problem was the result of a hacker, so it can happen.

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WordPress 2.1.1 bad, WordPress 2.1.2 good

It’s a little late to be posting this, and my vision is slightly blurry from passing out on the couch. Still, just checked a few sites and some folks are passing this word on. I figure that I should pay it forward as well. Ugh… Did I just use a crappy Hollywood reference?

If you’ve upgraded to the world of WordPress 2.1.1, you are in considerable danger. Nothing life threatening, but before some dude from Turkey cracks into your blog, you need to update your installation to version 2.1.2.

A hacker was able to add a vulnerability to the version of 2.1.1 that was pushed out about a week or so ago, but those still in the world of 2.0.x are fine for now. Essentially, it was a back door that got in by some dude who really, really sucks. So do the right thing and get yourself covered. I’m sure they are trolling for whatever they can get into as you read this.

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The issue of quality

Allow me to rant some more about podcasting, but it’s something I haven’t done very much of. Regardless, I feel like I should get some more thoughts about this medium out there. I can be such an armchair warrior, telling Rebecca all sorts of different feelings and thoughts about the things I see and hear.

When it comes to the quality of your podcast, there is a correlation to the content that you are producing, or at least there should be.

For instance, if you are a major company providing audio podcasts for the world to hear, then make it sound good. This should be the number one thing on your list of priorities. The actual quality of the content should matter just as much, but if I can produce something that is audibly better, then you have a problem.

I have a nephew back in the states that fired up Garageband, all by himself, and recorded his own podcast, trying to be like his uncle. Sure, an eleven year old kid yakking about going to school and playing soccer isn’t the most entertaining thing for the rest of the world to hear, but the crisp audio quality of him using the built-in mic on their iMac worked amazingly well. What he recorded never reach the ends of the earth, but it amazed me so much that I ran some bits of it on an episode of RadioZoom[rz#71].

On the other side of this argument, give me brilliant content with questionable audio quality over the reverse, no questions asked. I’ll always be wanting something to improve, that’s a given. If you have something really important or worthwhile to share with the world, then crank it out there.

You should always strive to make things better, but if you are hunkered down in the middle of nowhere with a mic, laptop, and some form of internet connection, podcast away. Tell the world what it’s like to be alone and starving to death, but surviving on the heat of your laptop battery. That might be a tad bit extreme, and you should be able to at least IM some one for help in that situation. Stiil, if you have your laptop and a mic in your office at work, get what you can when the situation calls for some ghetto engineering, or in this case, ghetto podcasting.

I only mention this because I listened to some big company’s podcast today. It irked me because of the reasons I just mentioned. I won’t mention who it was for or done by, but it sounded painful. The content itself wasn’t up my ally, but even an objective view of it still makes me think that there is room for improvement. I wasn’t buying into their product when I went to the site in the first place, and you can bet that there is no way that I will in the future.

On another, related note, Matthew Mullenweg has started podcasting. The brainchild behind WordPress has a mic, a computer, and probably a lot to say. Only two episodes[#1, #2] and not the best sound quality, but I’m more curious as to what a major player in the world of blogging has to say versus how well it sounds when he says it.

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Don’t mind the mess

It’s been a bit of a process getting this blog update to WordPress 2.1. The hardest part is making sure all your plugins work and figuring out what templet tags have changed or not. I’ve got the CSS of my site cleaned up with some minor tweaks, but I feel like the pages are loading slower now. I don’t know, but there will probably be some minor changes yet to come. Most you probably won’t even notice. Regardless, if you have to make the upgrade, do so very carefully.

Update: I have added a RSS feed for the comments of my blog. I know that I find it pretty handy for other people’s sites, so it was about time to add it to my own. You can find it at the bottom of the sidebar on the main page, or you can take this link and add it to your list of feeds that you pay attention to.

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WordPress 2.1 and PodPress

Being someone who uses PodPress with both of the podcasts that I produce, I thought I would pass on a heads up in regards to the recent release of WordPress 2.1. If compatability of this plugin is of a concern to you, then you’ll be interested to know that the plugin has been updated to version 7.1. I did some preliminary testing and can verify that this does work.

I have not upgraded any sites to WP 2.1 yet, but that will be happening over this week. I’m also doing a bit of reprogramming to this site, offline, in order to clean up my CSS and make some other, minor tweaks.

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WordPress releases and betas

I’m knee deep in the world of WordPress right now. I actually oversee five setups, and when there is a new release of an upgrade, that’s five sites I have to work through. Backup here, backup there, overwrite the old, and in with the new. It’s a few hour process when all is said and done.

The big thing right now is that 2.0.7 was released just a few days ago. In fact, 2.0.6 was released not even two weeks ago, and I’d avoid that version if I were you. There was some security concerns in the PHP, meaning that could allow some hacking to happen to your blog. Not good.

The hugely geeky reason that I know this is that I have recently joined up with the development mailing list. Just a couple of days after the 2.0.6 release, there was an announcement on the list about the issue and a test version sent out to all subscribers for testing. This is why I always hesitate to be on that “bleeding edge” of things. It’s good to let people much smarter than you test things out if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.

The WordPress Podcast is what really got me into the idea of joining the testers mailing list. WordPress 2.1 is in beta, and I get a kick out of seeing the exchange of knowledge about what’s new, what doesn’t work, and so on. You can get more info about it at WordPress Planet.

I did a local install of it and made a preliminary look through of the next generation of WordPress. There’s some interesting things, but it’s still too early for me to report on it. Regardless, I’m looking forward to the full release, as many folks have for over the past year.

The WP Podcast did just mention that there is talk about a 120-day turnaround between versions 2.1 and 2.2, a vast departure of the development, or lack there of, that we’ve seen from the WordPress folks. This won’t stop me from doing development from here on out in 2.1. Who knows when it will go into full release.

Wrote this post while waiting for the last of the sites to finish updating and listening to the They Might Be Giants podcast. Holy crap. Now back to your regularly scheduled geekiness.

Update: This post about 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 is a really great read about the new version that should be coming out soon. In fact, this article sites as January 22, 2007 being the day that this version is to be fully released.