Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

WordPress v. Blogger

A decent amount of time has now passed since I migrated my primary blog from Blogger to WordPress. In general, the move has been for the better. I have more control now and needn’t spend hours pulling out my hair when the Blogger servers are down (as they often are). The biggest advantages are:

  1. Control – Since all the WordPress code, including content management, lives in your own webspace, you have much more control over it than you do with Blogger. That means you can play with fairly advanced stuff like PHP scripts, MySQL databases, and htaccess files. On the server side, WordPress is just a more powerful, more versatile system.
  2. Features – Categories and trackbacks come to mind immediately, as do some of the excellent plugins available for WordPress. Spam Karma 2 is especially valuable. The ability to create and integrate static content pages (everything under the ‘Pages’ heading in the sidebar) is also a significant plus.

Of course, there are a few problems as well:

  1. Poor image implementation – With no effective integration of image uploading and thumbnail creation, I need to do everything by hand. Download files from my A510 to iPhoto, choose the photo of the day, extract it to a jpeg, create a full sized and thumbnail version in Photoshop, upload the two copies using Fetch, change the permissions for them, then insert the thumbnail as an image and like it to the full sized file. In Blogger, everything after “extract it to a jpeg” is basically done automatically.
  2. Awkward upgrades – Because WordPress lives on your server, you basically need to replace the bulk of the code when an update comes out, even a minor one. Because you would be a complete fool to do this without a full backup, it makes for a fairly serious hassle. You also need to go through the bother of making sure all the aforementioned useful plugins still work properly, after the change.
  3. WYSIWYG editor glitches – When pasting a complete blog entry from TextEdit, the What You See is What You Get editor built into WordPress will frequently separate paragraphs using double line-breaks, rather than paragraph tags. More seriously, it also has a habit of leaving tags open. It’s not usual after a complex formatted post to find that everything on the page below it has been left italicized or indented.

All in all, I am glad to have made the change. I like being in control of my own system, even if I don’t know all the complexities and there are some associated frustrations. Not counting all the headaches involved with Google when you switch your permalinks, the process of moving is very easy. To people with webspace using Blogger searching for better templates and more control, I recommend WordPress.

Mapping virtual selfdom

Working in the Department of Politics and International Relations

There’s nothing like seeing all the websites to which you have contributed listed in one place to make you feel like a hardcore geek.

Now, back to being the only person in the Department of Politics and International Relations. At 8:45pm on a Sunday. Surrounded by books on the Middle East, and drinking Red Bull.

[Update: 11:59pm] After three hours of editing, I have something with which I am actually pretty happy. It is definitely much better than my decolonization essay. I am going to go home, then give it one last check over before giving it to Dr. Hurrell tomorrow. Just one paper left!

Pringle-saturated satirical news

The Comedy Central website – once a much prized source of Daily Show and Colbert Report clips – has become unusable. Now, every single clip is preceded by a truly insipid 30-second Pringles commercial: the same ad for every clip. Given that both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show post about 6-7 one-minute clips on each day from Monday to Friday, watching them all would involve watching that Pringles video more than ten times in a half hour period: something I am not willing to put up with.

I can understand the need to pay for bandwidth, but this is just too annoying a way to pull it off.

PS. The Show and The Report are also under discussion here, at the moment.

Strategy time – time strategies

I have been trying to learn what I can learn during these last few days of the Google Idol contest, in hopes of being able to maximize Mica’s chances. The first potentially relevant fact is that the website hosting the contest is registered in Brisbane, Australia. I had often found it difficult to guess what time the server would be ticking over into the next voting day, allowing all the IP addresses that had already voted to do so again.

This round ends on June 24th, but nowhere does the website specify at what time. As such, the earliest it could possibly end (00:01 Brisbane time) would be 2:01pm Oxford time on the 23rd. The latest it could possibly end (23:59 Brisbane time) would be 1:59pm on the 24th. If someone has figured out at what time of day their server ticks over, it would be very useful information.

Why?

Because the lead has been cyclical:

Chart of voting patterns

Chart based on data between 22:00GMT on the 18th and 22:00GMT on the 20th.

As you can see, the distance between the number of the votes for each video rises and falls according to an orderly pattern. I would guess that with ‘Twan, Sjoerd, Manuel en Iwin’ living in Western Europe and Mica coming from the West Coast of North America, there is about an eight hour lag between time equivalencies in the areas where most of their respective voters will be living. Those of Mica’s competitors rise eight hours earlier, vote, and go to sleep eight hours earlier.

The fact that the slope of Mica’s line is more constant may be the product of how I have been cajoling people on the east coast of Canada and the United States – as well as in the UK and elsewhere – to vote for him as much as possible. Alternatively, I may have nothing to do with it and people voting for him just vote at times more distributed across the day for some other reason or collection of reasons.

As such, it would be helpful to work out what time it will be in each place when the contest ends. Ideally, we would probably want it to end around midnight Vancouver time, when it will be about 8:00am in Europe. I think that would be about 6:00pm in Brisbane.

[Update: 22 June 2006] I have created a chart that shows the amount by which Mica has been winning or losing at various times when I have checked on it.

Not polyglot

Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of just how low a click-through rate spammers need in order to justify sending emails is the huge number of messages written in Asian scripts that I receive every day. Since my email address is posted in several places on several different websites, it it unsurprising that all manner of spam robots have collected it. Because of my general willingness to give my ‘real’ email address to various websites and companies, I generally get more than 100 spam messages a day. Thankfully, GMail catches nearly all of them.

Given that all the websites from which my email address has been taken are in English, you would think that an even moderately intelligent spam robot would direct English spam towards addresses listed thereon. I now get more than twice as much non-English spam as English spam, and almost all of that in Asian scripts. Not that I mind being the target of Chinese, Japanese, and other sorts of spam – I don’t even need to skim the titles to know that they aren’t for me.

First eBay sale

I’ve joined the ranks of those who have at least listed an item on eBay. In this case, it’s the Sony headphones that I want to sell in order to get money for a snazzier pair. These are brand new and in the original packaging.

I may have set the minimum bid a bit high, but you can’t set a reserve price under £50 and I’m really not willing to sell these for less than £15 after spending almost £25 on them. In any case, we will see how this experiment in commerce goes.

[Update: 21 June 2006] With exactly 12 seconds left in the auction, someone placed a bid. Looks like I am offloading these headphones for £15 plus the cost of shipping.

The economics of it all:

Price initially paid on Amazon: £25.66 C$53.01

Payment received from eBay: £15.00 C$30.99
Shipping fee from eBay: £2.00 C$4.13

eBay listing fee: £1.29 C$2.68
PayPal currency fee: £0.86 C$1.77
Cost of packaging: £0.49 C$1.01
Cost of shipping: £0.68 C$1.40
Net eBay income: £13.68 C$28.26

Amazon cost – eBay income: -£11.98 -C$24.75

In the end, choosing to buy these headphones cost me about twenty-five bucks for three months’ usage. Let’s hope the ones I choose to replace them with last much longer.

Syndication and RSS: a simple introduction

A few people have asked me what ‘syndication’ and ‘RSS’ are, so I thought I would write a quick, non-technical introduction.

Syndication intro

The content of this blog can be broadly separated into two types: the text that makes up posts, and all the formatting that surrounds it. What syndication does is take just the text, allowing it to be read through some other site or program than the one usually used to view the site. The big reason why this is helpful is because it lets you quickly check a great many information streams to see if any have changed.

Instead of having to check more than 100 different pages every time I want to see if one has been updated, I can take a look at one page that lists all the different syndication ‘feeds.’

BlogLines

One service that allows this is BlogLines. If you have a look at my BlogLines account, you will see that it tracks more than 100 different ‘feeds.’ These include things as diverse as all the LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger, and other blogs run by friends of mine; listings of video clips from the Colbert Report and the Daily show; headlines from Metafilter, Slashdot, and other news sites; and a few miscellaneous other things.

If you sign up for a BlogLines account, you can add two different feeds from my blog. Both use a technology called RSS, which stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication.’ The addresses in question are:

Blog posts: http://www.sindark.com/feed/
Blog comments: http://www.sindark.com/comments/feed/

Opening either in a normal Internet Explorer or Firefox window will probably bring up a lot of confusing looking garble. This is the machine readable version of the blog. If you add one of those addresses to your list of feeds in BlogLines, however, you will see a list of recent posts presented, complete with short summaries and links back to the original. Whenever this site (or any other one you have listed) gets updated, it will turn bold on your BlogLines page.

Signing up for the comments feed will allow you to see whenever anybody leaves a comment on any post of mine, without having to check each one individually. I find it a useful way to follow conversations, without having to look at many different individual pages. For people running blogs, it can also be a good way to catch spam.

Firefox live bookmarks

Another way to read RSS feeds is to add them as ‘Live Bookmarks’ within Firefox. This can be done very easily. In Firefox, look over to the right hand side of the blog’s address, inside the white box near the top of the window. On the right hand side, there is a little orange icon with a white dot and radiating arcs. Any page on which you see that icon has a syndication feed available.

If you click that orange icon, a window will pop up asking you to name the bookmark and choose where in your bookmarks menu you want to see it. Then, any time you go into the bookmarks menu and select the name of that site, it will show you a listing of recent post titles. You can click on any of them to go to the post itself.

More information

Bloglines FAQ
WikiPedia on RSS (includes the orange logo I described)
Firefox Live Bookmark tutorial

A few words on the OED

Those of you on the networks of better universities probably have access to that finest of English dictionaries: the Oxford English Dictionary. A bit of the colourful history of the thing can be learned from the entertaining book The Professor and the Madman. Perhaps the most notable thing about the OED is that it doesn’t simply seek to define all words in the English language, it also seeks to identify when they were first used in a particular sense. As such, it constitutes a wonderful history of the language itself.

Here’s a special bonus for people using Firefox or Safari. Follow these instructions and you can add a new button that, if pressed, opens a popup window that lets you do an OED search. Also, if you select a word in a brower window and click the button, it will automatically look it up.

Like online access to the OED in general, this will only work if you are physically connected to the network of an institution that subscribes, or you are using a virtual private network (VPN) to access such a network.