Month: January 2007

Mac and PC

I really couldn’t think of a better pair than Mitchell and Webb to do the Mac and PC thing for the Apple adverts.

Still, they’re a bit annoying. The ads, I mean, not Mitchell and Webb. All this stuff about how Macs can do video and podcasts and other fun stuff, while PCs are only capable of spreadsheets, and that kind of guff. Now, I’m no Windows fan – I spend 80% of my computing time in Ubuntu – but this just isn’t true.

The only difference is that Apple provides the software within the box as standard, the form of ILife. PCs come with all sorts of stuff, depending on the manufacturer, not all of it good. You have to hunt out the decent stuff yourself, which I suppose is the problem for many people.

It reminds me of the early 90s, when the Atari ST was promoted as this amazing music computer, simply becuase it had MIDI built in from the off. The Amiga was a far better system as far as everything, including music, was concerned, but because you had to spend ten quid on a MIDI adaptor, no one bothered. Pah.

[tags]apple, mac and pc, mitchell and webb[/tags]

Zoho Notebook

Zoho Notebook looks like yet another very cool web app – they don’t seem to be putting a step wrong at the moment. It’s in private alpha at the moment – Hopefully I will soon get in for a play and will post my thoughts over on hyprtext.

[tags]Zoho notebook[/tags]

Why I love WordPress 2.1

Visitors to my blog site, rather than just RSS readers, will have noticed a slight change on the right hand side of the site this evening – the archives and categories have just got a lot bigger! This is because I have managed to use the new import/export feature of WP 2.1 to pull together all the posts I have made since I started blogging. Yowza!

Basically, I have had 4 blogs. The first one was a terrible effort on Blogger. Then I got serious and installed WordPress and blogged at davebriggs.net. At some point I imported all my Blogger posts into that blog. Then I switched to this domain and started a new blog – but in a new set of database tables, so the old blog’s content still existed. Then, when this site went kaboom at the start of this month, I installed WordPress on a third set of tables.

All I had to do to get the blogs all in one place was to install another WordPress setup elsewhere on the server, make sure the wp-config file pointed to one of the old databases, run the upgrade script, run the export and then import it into this blog. I used the same install for the exporting, just changing the database table prefix each time.

It worked like a dream! Only…I know remember how bad some of my early blogging was. Please don’t go there!

[tags]wordpress 2.1, blogger[/tags]

Comment deletion

Steve Rubel asks why it is that not many blogging and other social media platforms allow commenters to edit or delete the comments they make on community based sites.

Everyone sticks their foot in it from time to time. If you do this
on your own blog, you can edit the post and take it back. You could
delete the post too, but it’s not looked on very positively. Still, if
you leave a comment on some other site, you very often need to live
with it. So you better think twice before lambasting your friend for
slamming Jethro Tull on his blog.

There’s really no reason why community sites shouldn’t offer this
option. It’s good for everyone involved. Three sites, at least that I
know of, allow you to edit or even delete your comments. They’re the
social saints.

These ‘social saints’ are Flickr, Blogger and Facebook.

WordPress doesn’t feature the ability for commenters to edit what they write. There might be a plugin out there that does something like that, I don’t know. But for me, it should be up to the blogger – the site owner – whether a comment is changed or deleted. A commenter can always send an email to the site owner, or add another comment clarifying things.

To my mind, the person that makes the decision on the site is the person that is responsible for it. There have been countless examples of bloggers getting grief for deleting comments from their sites – allowing others to do so just clouds matters and complicates things, especially when the deleted or edited comment has already become a part of a conversation.

[tags]steve rubel, blogging, comments[/tags]

Also posted at Performancing

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