I’m trying out Bee, which is a blog posting application by Adobe. I tried ScribeFire, but it added a “powered by ScribeFire” advertisement at the bottom of my posts.

I am blogging some more serious content — content that will be carefully edited over time. I need version control. Wordpress stores pages and posts in the database — making it hard to version content. Sure, you could store old versions, and write a bunch of custom software to diff recordsets. I have a better idea — store content on the filesystem. Then you can use subversion. DB storage is nonstandardized.

I’m going to start learning a RubyOnRails blogging package — whichever one I think is going to be dominant. I’m not sure if it’s Typo or Mephisto, or something else.

I hope that whatever tool I choose, it saves posts in the filesystem.

I know at least one tool that saves posts in the filesystem — blosxom does — this software is being used by a bunch of the pragmatic programmers people. Downside — it’s perl, and probably it doesn’t have the nouveau web services support that WordPress and the emerging ROR platforms have.

I may look into hacking WordPress to save content where I want it to be saved. One person has posted a plugin that stores versions in the database, but it’s old. Another has posted a plugin that allows you to insert a tag in the content pane that links to a text file on disk. Of these, I like the first solution best since it lets me keep editing in WordPress and by using ScribeFire.

Thanks to digg, I have added visitors from Australia and South America to my loyal readers from North America, Europe and Asia. I am still waiting on readers from Africa (preferably Botswana) and Greenland (standing in for Antarctica).

I really like digg. I just started using it on my own best content yesterday, and got 80 new visitors. Which is about 1/3 of the total visitors since the site opened on Februrary 24, 2007. Yay digg. The content is various online animations and toys.

Popular content:

[Physics simulation toy]

[False-coloring images]

I am interested in aggregating calendars in WordPress. Mostly these will be local calendars, and I will be writing custom scraping engines and then posting the iCalendar data. (I will also import from Google calendar.)

What follows was written quickly, and all the thought that went into it went in while I was writing. Thus there’s not much thought… But in the interest of publish early, publish often, I am posting it anyway.

I realize there will be a bit of an issue with identifying unique events, but I will make my best guess. I will assign a URI. Anyway, once I have iCal feeds I am interested in adding metadata / to each calendar element, and sticking the whole thing on my wordpress blog. I want people to be able to comment on each event, so…these things will be exposed as blog postings.

I’m going to set this up at events.ithacablogs.com. The engine is going to be Bedework, for which I need to shell out for a Tomcat hosting provider. (Dreamhost is a great hosting provider with a lot of flexibility, but they don’t support Tomcat or PostgreSQL. The other problem with Dreamhost is the load on their serrvers seems high.) Unfortunately there’s no good PHP / MySQL calendar engine available, which would be a killer app.

Update: on second thought, I think that a digg-like interface is needed to seperate the really really boring events from the rest of the stuff. So I am going to work with the Upcoming.org API to create a WordPress plugin.

Recently I came across this blog entry, by one of the authors of Wordpress, that mentions a site with some serious coding that uses Wordpress as part of the backend. It also calls WordPress a “framework” — that may be a step too far. But I guess that others are also onto the idea that you can integrate a good old fashioned engineered website with Wordpress.

Oh, at some point I will figure out what pings, trackbacks, etc mean in the Wordpress bloggy world.

I’m working with a client who has a brochure-type website to which he periodically posts articles. This website was created several years ago, nominally in ASP, but the site consists of mostly static content, with one lonely contact form.

The client is looking for a few changes: he wants to strongly encourage visitors to provide him with their email address before reading articles on the site. To this end, he wants to present users with a squeeze page when they visit an article: they will be asked to provide their email address, but can opt-out of this and proceed to the article.

Additionally, he is publishing a book and wants to include links in the text to up-to-date content on his website content. He wants these links to look good, like http://www.example.com/book/guitar-manufacturers-in-england, for example.

This seems to be a client who would be better suited with Wordpress than with his current system. He’s publishing periodic articles, and he has some business services to sell, so he needs brochure-type pages.

Wordpress can easily support these needs. It offers blog posts, which would suit the articles, and pages, which would suit the non-chronological content. It would be easy to reimplement his template in wordpress’s templating system. There are plugins to do most of the work for the email collection system, and the squeeze page could be integrated. The pretty links for the book could be supported directly and easily if running on Apache, and with a bit more difficulty under IIS.

Then there’s the question of platforms, and switching away from the all-Microsoft solution. Wordpress works only with MySQL and requires PHP. It’s much better to run it under Apache, and it doesn’t matter if the OS is Windows or Linux.

The advantages of Wordpress are that it is easy for the client to post articles and SEO-type functionality is vastly improved – blog feeds are built in, and plug and play plugins are available for generating google sitemaps and integration with google analytics. The implementation would have to setup 301 permanent redirects for the current .asp pages, which would impose no additional burden beyond that imposed by implementing the pretty links for the book.

This would be an upsell, but it would perhaps give the client functionality they’ve been wanting, and would make many future improvements cheaper, in some cases trivially cheap.

Recently someone asked to put a squeeze page into their website. It’s the idea of asking a user’s email before they can see an article, but allowing them to opt out of providing said email. There’s some question of how to do this and still have the site’s content visible to search engines. Anyway, I googled “squeeze page” and came up with a bunch of hot air and sales pitches for software … all on pages that would have been embarrassing in 1998. Then I thought … what about wordpress plugins?

I googled “wordpress squeeze page”…

Much better, more technical results without the appalling sales pitches.

My mantra…put “wordpress” in every google query.

Well, I was hoping that wordpress had a user model that could restrict access to pages and posts, but it appears…not. In fact, are there some hard coded roles in the system? I think there are. You get a subscriber (basically a request to become something else), a writer, an editor, and an administrator.

Then there’s this strange post-password thing, where you see the title of the post and when it was posted, but you can’t access it unless you enter a shared password.

I assume that someone is working on this.

Otherwise, Wordpress is pretty cool, in my opinion.

WordPress has proved pretty useful as a base to build client websites with. It’s easy for the client to add custom pages, and it’s operation is well documented by WordPress. I have been working with a lightweight framework that allows easy creation of custom data entry and presentation apps, similar to Ruby on Rails or PHPCake, but integrated into WordPress as a WordPress plugin. When we get it to a releaseable point we’ll tell you.

And then last week I decided to start this blog. I am having a lot of fun.

Here are some other plugins that I’ve been using both here and at work:

WordPress-phpMyAdmin – creates an admin panel with phpMyAdmin running in an iframe. Simple and useful.

cforms – A contact form plugin. The neat thing about this is that you can define custom fields for a form, have validation on those fields, and have multiple forms. However, it doesn’t seem to have functionality to put the data into the database: which would be really, really nice. I’m using it for my contact form.

Google Sitemap Generator – This seems to work. It indexes posts & pages and lists them by permalink. It produces xml like this.

WordPress plugin uploader -this is pretty cute, it lets you add plugins through the admin interface. It includes a 250kb php script that does zipping/unzipping.