Category: blogging
A.G. is in the house
I’m two months late noticing, but The Angry Gimp is back and blogging. Good deal.
Multiple authors, multiple time zones?
I’m setting up my first multiple author Wordpress blog, for an organization with contributors across the United States. I’ve searched in vain for some methodology or plugin that allows authors to have their own time zones, so that their posts will be properly timestamped.
Is anyone aware of such a thing, or do I just have [...]
Becky’s back
Good to see Becky back blogging at GoBecky.net.
Accessible CAPTCHAs?
Donimo says:
I have two arts-based disability blogs and I was unaware of the problem with captchas. So many people use them to avoid spam comments. How do you avoid this? Can you recommend any sites for guidelines for making an accessible web site?
My personal response, before I go googling, is to say don’t use CAPTCHA. [...]
Linkroll update
Craig Grimes, who has been MIA for a year at AccessibleConsulting, is now back and blogging at Accessible Everything. I’m looking forward to seeing what he has to say. I would have left a comment, but he’s enabled captchas, which are both disability-unfriendly and cross-platform-unfriendly.
Congratulations
Retired Waif has had a beautiful baby human.
A Grab Bag of Links
While I was gone, a number of emails arrived asking me for links, and I’m happy to oblige:
disapedia.com is a new-ish wiki for the disability community. Unlike most blogs, a wiki is a collaborative website that relies on multiple contributors.
Matt Schneider’s blog is full of information on adaptive equipment for quads, inter alia.
Hesperion are promoting [...]
Lotta things going on
Since I’ve been gone, working 12 hour days, no weekends off, no internet access except at the hotel at 2 in the morning:
Christiane has mastered haranguing the train people in England
Dorothea has gotten a new job
Erik is relapsing (feel better soon, Erik!)
Patricia has moved to Typepad (looks nice!)
Stephen has started his new job
Lady Bracknell has [...]
2006 Recap
First sentence of each month for 2006 (idea shamelessly stolen from amputeehee):
January: Thanks to my on-going remission (hooray!), I flew last week with only crutches, no wheelchair, and discovered that this made me a second class crip.
February: Disability Bitch is back, with some schoolin’ for cutesy crips:
March: After all, it could be hay fever.
April: I [...]
MIA?
AL Masters, where are you?
CripRevolution seems to have disappeared.
How about auto-moderate?
The barrage of uncaught spam comments appears to have stopped. S commented on the previous entry that she wouldn’t want to shut off any attempt to strike up a conversation, so I went hunting for something less draconian.
I’m giving Ozh’s Auto-Moderate Comments plugin a try.
Auto-close comments
Here’s a WordPress plugin that closes comments on all posts older than 21 days: Auto-Close Comments.
It runs a query and update against the database when any one of the following occur:
A post is published (but not saved as a draft), edited or deleted;
A comments is posted, edited or deleted;
A trackback is posted; or
A template is [...]
Comment Moderation
Due to a sudden influx of spam not being caught by Akismet, I’ve (temporarily, I hope) enabled moderation for all comments. As always, I’m pleased when anyone (who isn’t selling penis enlargement) cares to comment.
Miscellaneous
I haven’t been keeping up with all the good stuff out there recently.
Here’s an article from the LA Times about landscape architects learning to think about access:
Stopping at a recently built third-story bridge between two buildings, O’Brien pointed out that most of the structure incorporated wide, flat steps. The wheelchair ramp was off to the [...]
Christiane in India/Blogging meme
Christiane is writing some terrific dispatches from her India trip (in German) - if you read German, definitely check them out!
She has also tagged me with a meme.
Warum bloggst Du?/Why do you blog?
Probably first and foremost as a venting mechanism - it’s hard to find people who are willing to sit around and listen to [...]
New on the Blogroll
Wheelchair Dancer
Disabilityblog.info
Parents with Disabilities
Claire Phipps
Blog links?
Have the blog links in the sidebar (under my del.icio.us) outlived their usefulness? I originally put links there so that I would have a handy list of the blogs I like to read. Now I use an RSS reader. Would anybody care if I removed them?
Still trying to grok del.icio.us
I’ve managed to figure out that I can subscribe to my del.icio.us bookmarks as an RSS feed. What I can’t figure out is whether I can use this to do my daily blog reading. Let’s say I’ve got a bunch of bookmarks tagged “blog”. What I want is not the list of blog links in [...]
WordPress 2.0 permalink pain
I’ve been struggling with permalinks in WordPress 2.0 (on another site) ALL DAY. I’m irritated. I’m clearly not the only one.
WordPress 2.0
I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Things look pretty happy. I’m still using Spam Karma on comments. Please let me know if you see anything wacky.
CAPTCHA is bad for accessibility
With the exponential rise in Blogger comment spam, a lot of folks have turned on comment verification, even though they know it makes it difficult for blind/low vision/dyslexic folks to post comments.
Roger Johansson provides an entry about the W3C’s analysis of the problems with CAPTCHA. Unfortunately the solutions are enterprise-oriented (individual bloggers, especially those using [...]
Gimpy Mumpy’s feed
Now that I have discovered the joy of feeds, it’s hard to keep track of the feedless blogs (Jody, I’m talking to you). Also, I am not very bright sometimes, so even though a blog may have a wonderful link like “Subscribe to this blog’s feed” right in the sidebar, I don’t notice it, because [...]
Fun with del.icio.us
As always, way behind the rest of the world.
I got frustrated maintaining bookmarks on multiple computers, and trying to keep track of my blogroll. del.icio.us to the rescue.
It also prodded me to finally incorporate my static pages into WordPress. I had been resisting because I really didn’t want to update the pages. A lot of [...]
Feed Me!
I’ve finally hopped on the aggregator bandwagon, and have subscribed to all the blogs I usually read (except the ones that don’t seem to have feeds :-(, see the little null signs in the sidebar).
I suspect I’m losing track of the comments part of the blogosphere, though. How does everyone else keep up with the [...]
Disability Blogroll
Christiane has posted an excellent Disability Blogroll. While her site is in German, the majority of the blogs listed are in English. Christiane is happy to take additional suggestions.
Worth Reading
Some recent (or not so recent) posts that I think are worth reading:
Kim Allen on the topological human
LaurieLou on why people keep asking what happened
Mark Siegel on the equality of women
Legitimate comment deletion
Apologies to Rayna, whose legitimate comment was deleted by Spam Karma. I’ve upgraded to version 1.20, which is supposed to save deleted comments in the database for undeleting if necessary.
Admin fieldset fix for Opera
Here’s the fix for the goofy looking WordPress 1.5 admin interface in Opera.
Upgrade
Upgraded to WordPress 1.5 and Spam Karma 1.19a. We’ll see if anything weird happens.
Good Spam Karma
Without any intervention from me (that I recall), Spam Karma has figured out how to send digests (1 email per 10 spam comments) rather than 2 emails per comment. It’s working beautifully now.
I still have the same low-level migraine (what, 2 weeks now?). Maybe it’s the new glasses.
Woohoo!
Spam Karma just knocked 57 nasties out of the park!
On the other hand, it sent me 113 emails to tell me that.
Hmmm.
Comment Spam
Comment spam’s got me down. I was using Nick Momrik’s Recent Comments hack, but it also displays comments awaiting moderation. Sometime I’ll get ambitious and hack it to only show approved comments, but for now I’ve removed recent comments from the sidebar.
Time to go hunting for some better comment spam killing tools.
Listing all entries for editing in Movable Type
I’m using Movable Type 2.6 as a CMS to manage a couple of non-blog websites. Each entry is a page. When I choose “Edit Entries” in the MT interface, I want to see all the entries, not just the last 20. Here’s how to change the default from 20 to all entries.
In your MT directory, [...]
Politics of Linking
Just in case anybody cares, I use my blogroll (the list of links under “PEOPLE”) as a bookmarks list. I visit each of those links every day. If a site is rarely updated, I’ll probably remove it. It has nothing to do with whether I like the person. If the bulk of the entries are [...]
Time flies …
I’d always planned to re-do the RMVR website using PHP or something one of these days, maybe add a search function. Then the administrative address and phone number changed (it’s on every page! sometimes twice!), and I got a couple of complaints about finding things, and lo, the time was right.
I spent a couple of [...]
Ms. Wheelchair Florida 2005
Everybody rush over to Becky’s journal right now to congratulate her on being named Ms. Wheelchair Florida 2005! Just goes to show that even three hurricanes cannot keep a good woman down.
Blogging by email
The blog entry sent by email has added line breaks, which screwed up an anchor tag. It was posted by site-admin, which I don’t like very much, and you have to actively run wp-mail.php to get WordPress to check for mail and post it.
Since I rarely use a cellphone and don’t do email that way, [...]
Testing blogging by email
Wordpress allows you to blog via
email, so I’m trying it out. I’m not sure about the instruction that
says: The “content” of the email will be the content of the post in
the web log. A string of three underscores in a row like thus : ___.
Celebrating the Underblog - 2004
Via Jennifer, this looks like fun: Celebrating the Underblog - 2004.
No comments?
I’m starting to see more blogs that don’t have any kind of commenting enabled, which I find frustrating. I hit two or three of them just today.
Is it that bugaboo of the late twentieth century, low self esteem? “Nobody will even read my blog, much less want to comment.”
Or is it paranoia? “If I let [...]
Mastering mod_rewrite
Via DenkZEIT, URL Rewriting Guide.
How to Help Someone with MS
I came across Erik’s MS Blog via mdmhvonpa (someday I’m going to have to figure out what that stands for so that I can remember how to spell it - all I’ve got so far is that I think “pa” = Pennsylvania).
Erik’s postings reveal how very consuming an MS diagnosis, the symptoms, and the treatments [...]
Re-working the WordPress admin interface for Opera
DenkZEIT :: Umgebautes admin-Interface für Wordpress (Rebuilt administrative interface for WordPress)
Steffan has provided most of the workaround for the messy appearance of the default admin interface for Wordpress.
The problem is that the posting interface uses fieldset to position the page elements, and Opera won’t position fieldsets, just stacks them up one after the other. Steffan’s [...]
Learning in public, for everyone to see
Learning in public can be embarrassing. I now know that having pingback enabled and sending a trackback is pretty darn redundant.
Sorry about that.
Is it blogging, or programming?
I’m tending to think that you do have to be a programmer to use WordPress effectively - which is not to say it isn’t fun. At this point (early days yet), I’d use Movable Type to set up a site for anyone else.
Smart quote fix
This is a test of my smart-quote fix.
There’s an apostrophe in this sentence.
“This sentence is surrounded by double quotes.”
‘This sentence is surrounded by single quotes.’
Here’s how I fixed it:
Create a file in wp-content/plugins called my-hacks.php. Put the following in the file:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: my-hacks
Plugin URI: #
Description: Resting place for a variety of changes. Presently includes removing
[...]
Manual Trackback
Trackbacks seem to be unnecessarily confusing. A trackback is a reference on one website (usually a blog) to another website (ditto). MovableType supports trackbacks fairly intuitively, but a lot of blogging tools don’t.
Simpletracks allows either party to create a manual trackback. To do this, you need to know two things: the permanent URI of the [...]
Movable Type redirects
I figured out how redirect from Movable Type to WordPress. It was a three step process:
Get WordPress to make URLs for individual entries that make sense.
In WordPress, choose Options | Permalinks. I used the /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ permalink structure. After I clicked on “Update Permalink Structure”, WordPress returned the list of mod_rewrite rules I needed.
Create a [...]
MT redirects
Arghh! Can’t figure out how to do redirects on the MT entries.
The solutions I’ve found all seem to assume that you’ve archived in a archive/YEAR/MONTH/DAY directory structure.
Or that post_ids in MT equal the post_ids in WordPress.
WordPress Quicktags and Opera
Quicktags don’t work quite right in Opera. Tags will only be inserted at the end of the current text.
Installing WordPress
Created a database for WordPress at Dreamhost. Wombat Nation’s cheat sheet came in handy, if only to confirm that I hadn’t screwed it up.
I exported my MT blog to a text file, then ran wp-admin/import-mt.php to import the entries. The first clue that something was wrong was that import-mp thought there were a dozen authors [...]
Waiting for the world to update itself
The trouble with lying around sick in bed all day surfing the web is that nobody is doing hourly updates to their stuff.
Random things I’ve discovered today:
WhoIs Ultra - a very nifty whois application, much more fun than trying to get info out of Network Solutions.
FlyerTalk.com - a frequent flyer website, includes some good forums.
More [...]
Ouch! bloglist
I’m thrilled to be listed in Crippled Monkey’s Pick of the Blogs at Ouch!
I’ve mentioned Ouch! before, lots of good stuff !
Censorship
My employer, in its wisdom, has decided that the domain livejournal.com is a Malicious Website. So I added little LJ notes to my bloglist to remind myself not to click on those links while using my employer’s computer.
Edited on 2004.03.02 to add: Hmm, now it’s not blocked. Wonder if someone complained?
Rolling Rains
I’m so pleased to see Rolling Rains online - navegar ? preciso.
Praise
Thanks to Patricia #2 for this very kind mention. Her work is well worth checking out!
Books on the Shelves Meme
From Fazia:
“Remove the authors who aren’t on your shelves and replace them with authors who are, keeping the list at ten.”
Her list:
Laurie R. King
Jane Austen
Madeleine L’Engle
Tess Gerristen
Diane Duane
Sheri S. Tepper
Ursula K. Le Guin
Stephen King
James A. Michener
Emily Bronte
My list:
Bernard Cornwell
PD James
Madeleine L’Engle
Lois McMaster Bujold
Marilyn French
Tracy Chevalier
Ursula K. Le Guin
Richard Russo
James A. Michener
Rumer Godden
Feed Me
On the one hand, I’ve been really busy and haven’t been posting much - a situation which is unlikely to improve for at least a couple of weeks since I’m doing the single mom thing temporarily.
On the other hand, nobody else seems to be updating much either - has there been a collective attack of [...]
Blogs for everything
I’ve always had trouble keeping track of stuff at work - stuff I need to do, and stuff I already did. I’ve tried using MS Outlooks task list, but can’t seem to grok how to make it work for me.
Since I’m enjoying this whole blogging thing so much, I decided to created a private, me-only [...]
Searches, again
Yesterday’s searches (what happened on May 9th?):
#reqs: search term
2: ultralight wheelchair
2: geburtsanzeige
2: antonio vivaldo
1: berthold brecht
1: billy jack
1: hitlerjugend
1: using a cane
1: 28 inch doors
1: occurrences on may 9th
1: cross platform fonts
1: how to push a wheelchair on a airplane
1: multiple sclerosis wheelchairs
1: fit half bath
1: moravian music
1: hitlerjugend fahne
1: weimarer republik/ sturz der monarchie
1: [...]
More on comment spam
Using google against us
Blacklisting comment spam
New style comments spam
Comment spam
Spam in comments
I got spammed in my comments, by someone from IP 61.181.5.155 (CHINANET Tianjin province network, administrative contact Dongmei Kou). I’m not quite sure what to do about it - I’ve banned the IP, but that’s not going to help. It was very explicit - not the “nice article, keep up the good work. lookup zip [...]
Keeping track of comments
How do you keep track of comments you’ve posted to other people’s blogs? I’ll comment on something, forget to check back for a couple of days, then find out that there was actually a discussion going on I would have liked to have been a part of if I had known it was happening.
Blog comments [...]
Where’s Janis?
It’s been, like, a week. Where’s Janis?
The Daily Blog
My good friend Jan has started reading this blog (hi, Jan!). She tells me she’s switched from the New York Times and coffee in the morning to brokenclay and coffee in the morning. This is her first blog.
This is a huge compliment and a heavy responsibility. Even though I know there are other people who [...]
Search Queries
I’m not very bright yet about what all the statistics mean for the website, but I always enjoy the Search Query report, which shows what phrase people were searching for when they found this site. The top two search phrases are “Geburtsanzeige” (which means “birth announcement” in German) and “low ceilings”. In general, all the [...]
Thank you, Dorothea
Dorothea Salo’s blog Caveat Lector is not just very engaging in itself, it’s a gateway to so much useful and interesting material. Today’s browse got me the slant hack (some aspect of which brought Opera down), the RNIB’s inaccessible redesign, more tips on good web design, information on how Googlebot works, and some food [...]
Don’t Read My Weblog?
I noticed this Blogger’s Disclaimer, and I’m stunned. How can you publish your thoughts and words to the most public forum possible, and then ask people not to read or comment on them?
If you don’t want anyone to read your blog, then keep it on your own hard drive (or get a paper journal and [...]
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