Metablogging

Business / Delco / Journalism / Metablogging / New Jersey / Philadelphia / Technology / Web 2.0 / Webculture — Comments Off
12
Mar 11

Newspaper pageview dirty tricks

Two local newspapers employ pageview tricks that best are annoying and at worst cheating.

The DelcoTimes splits even the smallest article into multiple pages;  When you navigate to the second page, a pop-up window appears.

The mobile version of Philly.com has a link to the desktop version of the site at the bottom of each article, but instead of rendering the full version of the article you are redirected to the index page.  The DelcoTimes doesn’t offer a mobile-optimized view.

I understand and appreciate the need to maximize pageview, but print-era metrics are no longer appropriate.  Facebook realized nearly 5 years ago that the pageview was dead.  When will print come to the same realization?

Metablogging / Technology / Webculture / Wordpress — Comments Off
24
Feb 11

Upgrading to Worpress 3.1

WordPress has recently upgraded to 3.1.  You can find out what’s new here, like the new toolbar, internal linking and post formats, or by taking a glance at the below infographic.

You can get higher quality images of the above infographic here (PDF, A4-sized PDF, Print-Quality JPG), and download WordPress here.  Fresh install instructions as well as upgrades are on WordPress’ site.  Lastly, if you get “run out of memory” errors when upgrading, check this post.

Some quick observations:

  • You won’t see the admin bar unless you enable it in each users profile (which you can find at yourdomain.com/wp-admin/profile.php).
  • You will need to use a theme which supports “Post Formats” if you want to use them.  Post Formats allow you to specify posts as being quotes, videos, galleries, and links.
  • Creating a network and using multisites looks easier, but still not easy.
Civil Rights / Corruption / Culture / Memes / Metablogging / Misc. / Musings / Personal / Philosophy / Webculture — Comments Off
29
Sep 10

Letter from Habbo Hotel

Malcolm Gladwell states that social media cannot cause social change, stating that the weak-ties created by social media participation and the low-levels of engagement are not sufficient to produce revolutionary change.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Anil Dash  counters, saying the makers (and participants online are changing the fabric of our lives, and the next revolution may not be immediately recognized:

It wasn’t the birthers or the truthers who earned the nod for helping shape America’s future: It was the makers. Their protests, their sit-ins, take the simple form of making things and sharing them with each other, online and off. The quietness of their ways, the heads-down determination of the scientist instead of the chin-jutting attitude of the street fighter, might make them easy to overlook. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a significant and enduring movement. it doesn’t mean the will of these millions of people doesn’t count, simply because it’s expressed in a way that doesn’t look like protest did five decades ago.

Best of all, the people who actually make these things happen aren’t just sitting around clicking “Like” on things online. As has been true since the earliest days of the blogosphere, the best minds in social media get together in person to help plan the future.

4chan (link, history and credited memes, links possibly NSFW) is mostly a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but there are bright spots.  The collective known as anonymous has tackled several iconic groups, from the Tea Party to Scientology (previously) to ACS:Law to the RIAA and MPAA.   In each case, the actions may be seen simply as immature pranking,  hacking, or trolling, but underlying each is a subtext of activism against unpopular social, political, legal, and economic stances.   If the point of non-violent resistance is drawing attention to a cause as well as economic and social disruption, then doesn’t 4chan fit the bill?  Can a distributed denial of service (DDoS) with the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) be the new Woolworth lunch counter or Atlanta Bus Boycott?

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Metablogging / Misc. / Technology / Webculture / Wordpress — Comments Off
05
Sep 10

WordPress, Cheap hosting, and Memory Limits

I’ve run into a bit of a wall doing three things with this blog, namely upgrading to WordPress 3.0, configuring and updating sitemap.xml, and exporting my posts (a necessary part of upgrading and migrating one’s blog).

All three of these memory intensive activities ran about against the PHP settings of my host – 1and1. I’ve by and large been happy with 1and1 – mainly due to cost – but it appears that their limitations are approaching a level where they may no longer be a viable hosting choice for hobbyist website builders.

The specific issue is that 1and1 limits their basic accounts to just 30MB of PHP memory usage.   Exporting several thousand blog posts and updating a large sitemap simply consumers too much mempory, consequently, the jobs never run.

After attempting various fixes – changing wp-config and wp-settings as well as adding memory limits to .htaccess and creating php.ini in several directories – proved to be fruitless.

My solution – short of migrating my blog and changing hosts – was to disable every single plugin except the barest of necessities and THEN run either export (or import) or Google Sitemap. Once those tasks are done, you can re-enable plugins.

Along those lines, I went through my plugins and themes and examined what plugins or widgets were necessitating a database call. At some point in the near future, I will hard code those features (comment policy, Creative Commons license, Statcounter code, etc.) directly into the theme as opposed to using a plugin or widget. I was also running some plugins that are effectively obsolete thanks to new features in subsequent versions of WordPress. As such, I have decreased the plugin footprint of this humble blog from near-50 plugins down to a more manageable 32, with at least a few more destined for deactivation.

Culture / Metablogging / Technology / Webculture — Comments Off
24
Mar 10

Gotta Hunch?

If you have a Twitter account, I recommend trying out Hunch’s Twitter Predictor game.

FireShot capture #033 - 'Hunch' - hunch_com_games_twitter-predictor_play

Says the Hunch blog (via Techcrunch):

Ben Gleitzman, the newest Huncher fresh out of MIT and Google, whipped up a game we call the Twitter Predictor Game. Enter your Twitter name and based on who you follow and are followed by on Twitter, combined with aggregated and anonymized Hunch data, it tries to make predictions about how you’d answer questions about yourself.

Note that if you are a Hunch user, the game doesn’t use any data you’ve given Hunch.  For the skeptics out there, try playing logged out of Hunch and with friends who have never used Hunch.  (Also, while playing you can click the “take a peek  button to verify the game is actually predicting what it claims it’s predicting.)

It works by examining your Twitter profile, contents, and connections and then guesses your answers to a set of questions.   77% is substantially better than a coin flip.

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