An online notebook
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An online notebook
Looking forward to this evening, because Nick Booth has organised a get-together of Birmingham bloggers. OK, so I live in Kettering, but work in Coventry and that’s kind of close.
Here’s the Upcoming page for the event. Am looking forward to meeting fellow bloggers!
WordPress never fails to astound me with its brilliance.
I still haven’t finished putting this blog together properly yet, but today thought I ought to at least cobble together a mini blogroll of some of my favourite fellow bloggers. I’d already got a blogroll at my old blog, and the thought of copying and pasting them across was not, to be honest, a pleasing one.
A quick Google later though, and I had been alerted to the page residing on every WP blog, at http://yourblog.com/wp-links-opml.php. All you have to do is chuck this into the "import" option on your control panel, and you’re away.
OK, this could be made easier by allowing you to download the OPML file straight from your originating control panel, but I expect it’s not there to avoid cluttering things up with rarely used functions. But it is at least still there, and pretty easy to use.
My tag cloud (on the right of the screen on my blog’s homepage) is a complete mess. I need to edit the font sizes used, and maybe limit the cloud to tags which are used more than once, say.
I can’t find anything in the widget options – I am using the default one which comes as core in WordPress.
Any ideas, anyone?
Simon Dickson muses on the advantages of using open source platforms, as opposed to proprietary ones, in the light of the Interesource debacle.
It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly, I’m left wondering why anyone would use anything other than open source.
True. As Simon points out, one of the Interesource developers has mentioned the fact that none of their clients had escrow agreements in place to mitigate against this sort of risk. But when you are providing a service like a community based web platform, which people are wanting to access 24/7 escrows don’t supply the solution in an adequate time-frame, in my view. They may make managers feel happier, but don’t really give you the protection you need.
With open source, there’s bound to be someone in the office who knows about the innards of your system. Failing that, there are experts a-plenty out there on the web, easily accessible through blogs, forums and mailing lists. WordPress, the favourite of both Simon and myself, is a great example of the wonderful support communities that exist for open source systems.
So here’s a challenge: why not use open source? Well, recently Telligent – a company providing a great (if proprietary, and (worse) .NET based) community portal system called Community Server – released some information about a blogging/lightweight CMS platform they are developing. WordPress is the clear competition, which they make clear on their landing page:
Finally, a WordPress Alternative
Install and setup is easier…You don’t need to know PHP…Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform…
Hmmm. I, for one, am not convinced!
The Newsgator family of desktop RSS applications are now available for download free of charge! This is great news, and I would heartily recommend that anyone who hasn’t tried it before gives the Windows application, FeedDemon, a try. I have been using it for three years now, and while I have flirted with online services like Bloglines and Google Reader, I also come crawling back to FeedDemon. There are other products in the range too, like a plugin for Outlook and NetNewsWire, which is the desktop reader for the Mac.
They are still charging for TopStyle though – boo, hiss. It’s a great CSS editor. If you are thinking that’s a strange app for an RSS company to be selling, you’re right. The story behind it is that when Newsgator bought Nick Bradbury, the guy behind FeedDemon, he brought his other project with with, which was TopStyle.
Here’s a nice post explaining why FeedDemon is so great.
When I was at the Online Information conference last year I had an interesting chat with the guys from NewsGator. They have some cool enterprise products, which focus on making SharePoint actually useful, all through the magic of RSS.
Steve Rubel has posted about "The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging".
Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted – at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It’s almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.
So is this true? Is there really less value in the blogging that’s going on right now? I’m not so sure.
One issue is that the level of noise has increased – there are more bloggers. Therefore, there are more rubbish bloggers, and more crappy blogs. After all, 98% of everything is pretty crud. So that’s a factor. Attention loggers like TechMeme are bound to display large numbers of bloggers regurgitating news, because that is what a lot of bloggers do. That doesn’t mean to say, though, that the quality bloggers aren’t out there, nor that they are in decreasing numbers in real terms.
The other is that many of the best bloggers like to be on the bleeding edge – they like to be early adopters, especially those who blog about tech and web innovation. Quite rightly so: if they weren’t engaging in new technology, we’d be questioning why we bother reading them. Now, one of the trends of recent developments is that stuff is getting smaller, shorter. Twitter is blogging, reduced. Seesmic is YouTube, reduced. If people are playing with these toys, then their output is bound to be reduced. That’s not being lazy, it’s just taking part.
Jeremy Gould has been hard at work getting the barcamp for UK Government web types sorted out. We’ve got a venue – the Google offices in London. Cool. All the details are on the wiki and Jeremy’s blog.
The Google Group mailing list has also seen quite a lot of action. One thread I started was on bringing together the conversation. In other words, people are going to be blogging, tweeting, adding photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube before, during and after the event, and it would be good to have one place where they are all brought together. It would also be really useful for people who can’t attend, but would like to interact from their desks, say.
I was going to cobble a quick web page together using MagpieRSS to parse the various feeds. I then had a rethink and realised it would be so much easier to use a public start page. For no reason other than it was the first one I thought of, I chose PageFlakes. And it did the job perfectly.
You can find the site at http://www.pageflakes.com/barcampukgovweb/
Just finished watching The Innocents, the 1961 film based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Here‘s the IMDB link to find out more, or there’s always Wikipedia.
It really is one of the scariest things I think I have ever seen. There’s a great thread on Palimpsest discussing the movie.
There has been a flurry of largely negative postings about the newly launched alpha of Wikia Search – Jimmy Wales’ human powered search engine. I’ve bookmarked quite a few at del.icio.us, which will pop up on this blog around midnight tonight.
Phil Bradley has a nice little summary though:
Results are fairly basic, with a title, summary, URL, cached version and some sort of rating. Here’s the one for the top ranking site relating to Web 2.0 – see if you can work out what it means! That is so going to keep the SEO bods intrigued. There’s also a star rating system, which you can click on, but you get a message saying that they don’t actually do anything yet. Please – either make them do something or take them away until they are ready to do something.
Had a lovely day yesterday in the glorious sunshine. We visited the Suffolk coast, at Dunwich Heath and Southwold, and had a marvelous time. Here’s some photographic evidence. There’s more, should you want it, on my Flickrstream.
Ning founder Marc Andreessen has posted a response to the discussions about the fact that quite a bit of Ning’s traffic is as a result of ‘adult’ communities. Ning, remember, is the service that allows you to create your own social network. Andreessen says:
First, we have built Ning to be a broad-based service — people can use Ning to create social networks and social experiences around any topic area they want and then contribute content and engage in any activity they want, as long as what they do is not illegal and fits within a pretty general set of terms of service…
Second, due to this inherent flexibility, some people have chosen to use Ning to create social networks and upload content around adult topics, including porn. It is true, there is porn on Ning…
Third, adult topics and content are a relatively small percentage of the total activity on Ning. We have various ways of quantifying this, and all of them show this to be the case.
However, my view is that I would now be much less likely to encourage someone to use Ning within the public or third sectors because of the heavy amount of adult content. I think that one of the key factors in encouraging people to engage with social media in a professional capacity is that it needs to be safe – and part of that is being free from association from undesirable content, like porn.
Ning is a great service, and could continue to be without the one-handed content!
I recently undertook the task of organising all my feeds into folders in FeedDemon – before this I had just the one (very) long list of sites I checked, not broken up in any way. This had become unmanageable.
So, here are the folders I have created, in order of the attention I give them.
If a feed falls into more than one category, then generally I stick it in the one that appears the highest on the list above. So, for example, Neville Hobson‘s blog could fit into PR, etc or UK but I in fact have it in Must Reads.
The General folder is heaving though – I need to go through that again, I think!
Drupal is an open source content management system which is fully extensible through a huge range of community developed modules. It’s the system which powers the demo site I put together for The Information Authority last year, and it is as happy providing a platform for personal blogs as it is multi-user social networks. I will be focusing here on how it can be used to create a social media based community, allowing the sharing of various types of media including text, audio, video and images.
The open source nature of the platform means that not only is it cost free, but you also have carte blanche to edit the source code however you see fit, as long as you are willing to make the changes available to anyone else who might want them. So, if Drupal doesn’t do what you want, all you have to do is edit it so that it does – or get someone else to.
Some well known uses of Drupal include The Onion and Spread Firefox.
Basic Functionality
Drupal comes with a number of functions which are operational without having to track down additional modules. They include:
On top of this there is a comprehensive user rights management system to ensure that only certain members can produce or view certain types of content, ensuring that your community is as secure as you need it to be.
There is, therefore, quite enough functionality available out of the box to get a community up and running very quickly.
Extra Modules
There is more that Drupal can do though, and all you need is to find the right modules to do it. Here are some of the ones I’ve picked out as being useful for community building:
Themes
You can also change the look of your community with the freely downloadable themes from the Drupal website. Those included by default are all pretty good, especially Garland, but if you want to have a more individual looking site it might be better to find a less well known theme and customise it. Some good looking themes include:
Note that some themes require certain modules, or ‘theme engines’ installed to work properly.
What’s Missing
Drupal lacks a proper wiki module, which is a shame. The one that does exist is Liquid, which allows you to make any content as a wiki – in other words, making it available to edit by other users. However, this is a confusing solution and not one that is recommended at this stage. The only other option is to use the books module to collaboratively author content, but again this isn’t really perfect.
Drupal is also rather confusing to administer, and the learning curve is pretty steep. The best option is to play around with it first, and take your time. Once you become used to the way of doing things will Drupal, you’ll be amazed at the power and versatility of the system.
Conclusion
Drupal is a free out of the box solution to creating online communities that will have you up and running in no time. The learning curve is relatively steep, but it is worth it for the power and flexibility of the system.
This post has been shamelessly regurgitated from my old blog, FEConnect 😉
