Recently in blogging Category

I have odd ideas during the middle of the night...

The other night while chatting with a couple of people about social media "experts" and other snake oil types I went checking domains ... SocialMediaExpert.ie was available (as were a few other extensions), so I grabbed it.

James from Forbairt Media did a wonderful job on the design and layout (if you don't like it blame my taste, not his skills!)

And the first couple of posts went up yesterday.

What's it all about?

My first post explains some of it

A few months ago Stewart mentioned Sweetcron as a "lifestream" solution (You can see his here).

A "lifestream" basically acts as an aggregator of all your online activities, as many of the online services that people use, such as Twitter, Flickr etc., publish your activity via RSS.

I'd already been experimenting with Movable Type's Motion, which is a pretty cool addition to an existing MT powered site, however having a separate, standalone, solution was not without its attractions. I registered michele.ie a few months ago, but apart from using it to test our Exchange mail hosting I hadn't really done anything with it.

So last night (and very early this morning) I decided to setup Sweetcron on one of our shared hosting plans. Our hosting system allows you to split your domain up across multiple hosting plans and platforms, so while the main site is now on a Linux web server the email is still on Microsoft Exchange.

I chose to setup the webspace to use PHP5, since PHP4 is defunct. In terms of the database I opted for MySQL5, since it's also the more recent version.

I'll have to admit that I hadn't used FTP for a long time. I have a habit of just doing things from the command line, but once I'd got over that it was easy enough to setup.

The documentation for Sweetcron is a bit sparse, but the basic install is easy enough. On our system you just need to remember that the MySQL database server is NOT "localhost", as the basic configuration file assumes that you're running everything on a single server.

The one step that isn't documented clearly is how to setup a simple cronjob to automate it for you. Fortunately someone else had done that already, so adding the cronjob via the hosting control panel was fine.
You just need to execute the following command every few minutes (or hours):

curl http://your/true-cron/url

You can find the actual URL in the Sweetcron admin panel. So just set that command to run via the cronjob manager and off you go.


The basic install ships with two themes, but there are several other themes available which range from the very simple to the incredibly complex. I still haven't settled on which one I actually want to use, as they all handle parts of your "stream" differently. In order to avoid duplication issues I think I'll stick with a theme that doesn't pull in the full content from blog posts and just provides a link to the original source.

So if you're bored and want to know what I'm up to you can head over to my new personal space and see!

I've made another couple of minor changes to the RSS feed from this site, so any feedback would be appreciated.

What's changed?

I've added a daily delicious bookmarks thing as well as my Flickr feed.

If you think these shouldn't be there let me know and I'll remove them

I love these broad sweeping generalisations.

They're sort of fun ...

According to a Ryanair spokesperson "bloggers are idiots"

Lovely!

At least they are consistent in their approach

The idiot in this instance is Jason and anyone else who mentioned his post (I presume we're all guilty by association .. )

This year's Oscars were dominated by Slumdog Millionaire.

I liveblogged the evening / night over on FilmReviews and lost track of how many awards Slumdog picked up - was it eight?

Jason spotted a glitch on the Ryanair website earlier today and posted about it.

It's a glitch. Most large complex websites have them at some point or another.

It's not the end of the world (Aer Lingus still use the browser language setting to "work out" where you're based)

What is amazing is the tone and total lack of professionalism of the comments from the Ryanair staff members. Check out Jason's post to see them.

Don't they realise what a bad reflection on their employer they're giving?

Seriously - if you want to post rude or offensive comments online don't do it from a corporate netblock. Anyone with half a clue can trace it back to your employer.

The people behind FlowersMadeEasy are running a Valentine's Day competition.

If you blog about your "better half" (or the one you would like to be your better half ..) then you could win a nice little prize:

• 12 red roses
• bottle of champagne
• box of Butlers' chocolates

Full details on their blog

While I can understand that bloggers want to encourage people to subscribe to their RSS feed OR email newsletter, do they have to annoy us with popups?

A lot of bloggers seem to have adopted a really annoying popup system that loads EVERY single time you visit their blog. Every time.

Haven't they heard of cookies? You know, those little things that you can store so that you won't annoy your readers with the same damn popup every single time they visit YOUR site.

ShoeMoney uses it, for example, and it's really putting me off following any links he posts to his site on Twitter.

And he's not the only one ....

Since upgrading to the E71 I've found myself using online services on my phone a LOT more. There are two reasons for this:

1. The data plan we are now makes it a loss expensive to use and abuse web services
2. The full QWERTY keyboard
   

One of the things that I would love to be able to do is blog directly from my E71.

For some odd reason Nokia did away with the LifeBlog application in their newer phones, so I haven't had much luck finding a usable replacement.

Most of the Symbian software options for blogging are either ancient and don't work with MovableType 4.* or simply are not compatible with MT at all.

There probably are some wonderful software tools out there that are compatible with both the E71 and Movable Type, but I haven't had much luck in finding them.

If anyone knows of any solutions please let me know!

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I wasn't overly impressed with the article in this Sunday's edition of Computers in Business which harped on about yet another death knell for blogs.

You can read my reaction over on the company blog