Sunday, October 26, 2008
Trying a few things
New blog. I’ve been changing blogs like John McCain changes his strategy, but I haven’t worried about preserving my brand since Google shrank the pagerank on my OPML blog from 6 to 0. (Long story.) I figured, like Sarah Palin, what do I have to lose. So, when the OPML Editor didn’t play well with my new desktop running Vista, I moved from the OPML blog to the blog at learnandteachonline.com that I abandoned three years ago. But it’s made with Drupal, which I just never took to, so I never went deep into it. Every time I upgraded or wanted to change something, answers on the support forums were circular and haughty. I dreaded working on it.
So I’m making this with Expression Engine (EE), the LAMP CMS I use at work. It feels like an old shoe. I’ll just start fresh, and not worry about trying to migrate old content. Lijit search is in the sidebar and is supposed to include the old blogs, though at the moment it doesn’t seem to be finding everything.
Trying Friendfeed for comments. I’ve been following the developments at Friendfeed on the Gillmor Gang and NewsGang Live. On a recent show someone, probably Steve, mentioned using the service for blog comments, and it reminded me I’d thought of trying an FF room for that purpose shortly after the rooms concept was introduced.
You can see the widget for the almost real-time Amylooo room in the sidebar here. I’ve also sort of integrated it traveling the other way. The comments link at the bottom of each post is a link to the Friendfeed entry. It’s not completely automatic; I have to publish the post, then go to Friendfeed to fetch the link, and enter it in a custom field in the EE blog post form.
Entry link naming at Friendfeed is quite complicated, probably because each comment in each thread has its own URI, and maybe for some security purpose? That’s a good thing, but it’s too random, not predictable enough, to integrate it the way I can with some services. It would be nice if each entry in my room started with the same string so it could be appended with the post title here to save the manual work. For example, for a sidebar item in an email newsletter I do at work in EE, I can pop up a page for a poll at Survey Monkey that only requires an ID number added to an address that always starts out the same.
Maybe there’s something in the API that would facilitate that. I haven’t studied it.