My web hosting account came up for renewal this week, and I just can’t do it.  You see, about two months ago we had a little “incident” where several of my sites on the same host were defaced, with no good explanation as to how/why.  We suspected it had to do with a FrontPage Extensions vulnerability at our web host.  Which wouldn’t have been that big a deal if the note I sent via the company’s prominently displayed “Tell our CEO how we’re doing” link hadn’t been summarily ignored.  Twice.So this weekend, to take my mind off a grueling week at work (don’t ask - wasn’t pretty) I decided to drill in and migrate my stuff, including blahgKarma, to a new hosting account at A2 Hosting.  I found A2 via 43Folders (thank you Merlin), where they not only heartily endorsed A2 (they host 43F), but had a sweet 20% off coupon.  And, I could finally dump Windows hosting, which I’ve been wanting to get around to for some time, but haven’t.So far, so good.  The A2 control panel, cpanel, is WAY better than my last host’s.  And, Fantastico is making for some fun playing around with various Open Source web-based CMS installs, including Drupal which I used for a project last year and liked.Web hosting is certainly a commodity these days, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy it inexpensively AND have it work well.  Now if I could just find something with a cpanel equivalent on an OS X Server backend, I’d be REALLY happy… 

I’ve read about folks who use blogs as a way to capture info they’re likely to be interested in (themselves) later, and until recently thought “Why would you want to do that? - Just store the stuff on your HD”. Well, today I think I figured it out - my hard drive doesn’t really have an application that would allow me to annotate the material like I can on a blog (read: mini content management system).

Lets say I want to start tracking “stuff” about a particular topic. I want to make notes on the “stuff”, link to websites, maybe maintain a file or two (although not many), etc. I could do this in my main blog by tagging the content… or, if I think a different audience may be interested in the material (like mainly me, but perhaps a few others), I could just jam it all into a separate blog altogether.

I’m thinking about trying this… WordPress has a decent tagging mechanism and I may cross-post the stuff to both blogs, but this will give me a chance to check out what (if any) multi-blog capabilities WP has. Wish me luck!

Should I be flattered that comment spammers seem to have an interest in blahgKarma all of a sudden?

Now that went much better than I had expected!

REALLY wishing I’d been keeping track of my WordPress mods as I made them.  WP 2.0 is available for download, and as I think through the upgrade process I’ve realized the error of my ways.  In short, as I’ve tested, tweaked my theme and added plugins, I’ve not tracked my changes.  So, at the moment I’m at the moment pondering what’s likely to work and what’s not if I make the switch.  Guess I’ll DL the site, look at the mod dates and see if I can decipher that way…

Tip – even if you just keep a basic changelog for your blog, you’ll be happy for it whence you upgrade.  Take it from someone who knows (better).  And if you’re making the switch, the three most important things to remember are… backup, backup, backup!

Yup… made a donation to Matt Mullenweg and WordPress tonight, so its official – I love it.  Sure, I’m frustrated with little bits and pieces of the system, like the fact that despite trying every approach to making “pretty” Permalinks work on IIS 6 I still freaking can’t make it work, but overall, WP 1.5 has been a ball to work with.  I love the Plugins, love the themes, and love how modular it all is in terms of where I can modify it, etc.

I really don’t see a downside to hosting a blog or two in WordPress.  You really can install it in 5 minutes, and with the wealth of plugins available, do all sorts of customization without touching a line of code, if you’d like.  I suppose if the goal was to host a bunch of blogs, where I needed/wanted central admin I’d have had to look harder at MovableType, but to tell you the truth, I couldn’t even get it up and running after hours of playing with it.  All related to hosting on Windows, I suppose, but with several Sharepoint and couple of other sites I’m hosting and responsible for already sitting on IIS 6/Win2003 Server, dumping the shared hosted account for something more friendly to PHP wasn’t really an option.

So if I could change a few things about WordPress, what would they be?

Permalinks – first, I’d somehow rearchitect so that Permalinks would work out-of-the-box with IIS.  Why this doesn’t work escapes me – I mean, if the system can concoct the pretty permalink, and if the database is as small as it seems to be, why not just jam the permalink literal into the database and let it be referenced directly?  All this redirection, mod_rewrite and .htaccess mumbo-jumbo is stuff the average user should never have to mess with.  Of course, a bunch of folks will read this and say “what’s the big deal”.  Those would be the people who aren’t hosting on a Win2003 Server with IIS 6, I’ll bet.

WYSI-Not-WYG – In today’s world, a WYSIWYG editor for posts is a must.  Yes, there are plugin fixes for this, but embedding a more functional editor into the core product should be a priority.  Provide a switch back to the manual markup world if you think there are a bunch of minimalist users that don’t want WYSIWYG, but with the small amount of overhead, I’d think this would be core, not edge.  Stick spell checking in there while you’re at it… you know, the basic stuff like what Dmitry at BlogJet is doing in his standalone client.

Housekeeping – the Codex has many, many redundant threads, but this is just how Wiki’s work.  A degree of moderation, some housekeeping and a little TLC here would go a long way.  Granted, I’ll bet only a handful of the over 800,000 downloads to date have resulted in donations, so who knows how this effort gets done/paid for, but it sure would help the WP community.

Finally, and I know I’m going to get flamed for this, I’d give serious thought to ways to monetize or commercialize it.  Yup.  I’d charge, I’d support it like a product that people rely on, I’d build it up and then I’d integrate it with someone/something and/or I’d sell it.  I’m all for getting a deal, but as WP becomes more important to me, I wonder about its future.  But, that’s an Open Source thing… take it or leave it, good or bad.

Awesome job on the system, Matt, and congrats on attracting so many others that are helping extend, enhance and support it.  Quite an accomplishment…

OK guys, even though I’m not quite done with my theme/presentation configuration on WordPress, I’m cutting off the Blogger version of blahgKarma.  I’ll post there ocassionally over the next two weeks asking readers to please subscribe to the feed for this new site, where they’ll still find all the blahgKarma goodness they’ve come to know and love, but I’m not going to parallel post any more.

The new and improved blahgKarma, complete with a totally new look and a bunch of new features, is located at http://www.blahgkarma.com/wp.  If you’re subscribing via RSS, i hope you’re already on the FeedBurner version of the feed, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/blahgkarma.  Let me know via comments if you’re using this feed and you’re having trouble with it (read the post below on Bloglines’ trouble with FeedBurner first).  Also, autodiscovery should be updated, so if you’re NOT reading via RSS, you should be able to browse over to the new site and have your reader/browser subscribe you.

After a couple of days of back and forth with Sandy Kemsley regarding my FeedBurner feeds not working properly in Bloglines, I’m confident the problem is on the Bloglines end.  As noted in a bunch of web references I Googled-up on the topic.  And since you don’t really want to go through all the troubleshooting Sandy did, I thought I’d make a quick reference here.

One of the behaviors is Bloglines not displaying or catching updates on the feed.  This, amazingly enough, is because in this case their RSS retrieval system stops retrieving info on the feed.  Not a handy feature when you’re an RSS reader.

The other behavior is errant information in the feed.  In my case, I updated my FeedBurner feed to use a different source URL, and when BlogLines was reading the feed, some of the info, like the URL associated with the blahgKarma header displayed for the feed in Bloglines, was incorrect – as it was an artifact from aged info from an earlier incarnation of the feed.

I can only conclude that Bloglines is doing all sorts of caching in their system when it comes to RSS reading, and that its not all working right.  A few of the articles I read indicated they’re good about fixing the problem on a feed-by-feed and user-by-user basis, so we’ll see if they respond and correct the issue.  Maybe one of the triggers for the issue is updating the underlying feed address in a FeedBurner feed (i.e. the address FeedBurner burns from).

Thanks again for the help Sandy.  I’m so glad you didn’t lose any data when you reformatted your hard drive during the testing (grin).

This is as much to remind me to look for a particular WordPress plugin as it is to see if anyone reading can help… in the past, I’ve used a service from www.blogrolling.com to maintain my blahgRoll.  It was simple – no real coding required, just a copy and paste – and it had a cool feature I liked, which was the ability to flag the blogs I point to with an icon indicating new content.  Now that I’m on WP, I have a dilemma… work to modify the theme I’m using to implement the blogrolling script, or find some other way to indicate “new”.  I don’t really want to do either… what I want is another WordPress plugin to magically appear to solve my problem, like the one from Ron Heft for WebStat.

Anyone out there?  The plugin really is the elegant solution, since I’m just as likely as not to change themes and would then have to re-implement blogrolling.  Truth is, I’ll probably stop using the service (or at least paying for it – there are two versions)… the Links feature of WordPress is working fine, sans this one feature…

Ran into a speed bump while implementing WordPress this weekend… well, two of them I guess.  One having to do with feature/capabilities and configuration, one with docs and one with IIS hosting in general.

Feature problem first – permalinks.  They’re a necessity, I think, and although every WordPress posting gains a unique ID, which in and of itself when handed to the proper URL serves as a permalink, I see two issues with them.  One, they’re ugly and two, they’re search engine unfriendly – that is, they don’t help your posts get indexed by the search engines.  So, off I go to mod the permalink structure (an easy thing to do, right?  Just update the appropriate panel in WP Admin?), and man did I hit the wall.  Long story short, you can change the structure all you want but the feature really just doesn’t work in a Windows shared hosted environment.

Which brings me to problem two – docs.  There’s a huge wiki with WordPress info in it, and I’ve found it very useful.  Unfortunately, the 50 or so articles/comments I read that took me down two different paths to try to resolve my issue were vague when it came to what environment the fixes applied to – in my case PHP running on Windows with IIS 6.  The info on manually editing redirects, etc. doesn’t even apply in my case (guess I’ll never get those two hours back, will I).  And, the need for making those tweaks on other platforms went away with WP version 1.5.  I’ll ask a favor – if you’re posting detailed fix info in the codex (and many, many people do – and the info is generally superb in quality), please indicate what platform and version of WP you’re referring to.  You know, so morons like me don’t make a bunch of unnecessary changes that don’t fix the problem anyway.  Thank you.

For now, I’m blowing off permalinks that will help with search engine optomization, in favor of publishing the site.  I don’t think this will bite me in the ass when I change the permalink structure later (assuming there really is a reasonable fix), since accessing a post via its unique ID should always work.  I hope…

Next step, swinging the FeedBurner feed over to the new blogsite.  Wish me luck…