Yesterday, I added a nifty feature to the commenting here at the old blog - a visual editor, courtesy of the MCEComments plugin for WordPress by Thomas Au. The plugin uses the TinyMCE editor that is bundled with WordPress itself, and the functionality should be familiar to most. You can apply basic styles such as bold and italic, and - best of all, IMO - turn text into hyperlinks, eliminating the need to post lengthy URLs.

I had hoped to further enhance commenting with an additional plugin which would allow commenters to reply to or quote specific messages - a useful feature when you want to respond to one person in a lengthy comment thread. Regrettably, that plugin and MCEComments did not play well together; the Reply/Quote function in the former plugin doesn’t work when the latter plugin is active. The plugin author knows why this is happening, but has said that supplying a fix is “low on the priority list.” Well, if he can’t be bothered, I’m certainly not waiting around for him…

Might be (barely) possible to effect a fix myself. We’ll see.

In other news, it appears that my recent post on easy work week recipes is fairly popular. I am glad of that, and somewhat loathe to remove the post from the front page, though that will have to happen in the natural course of things. More recipes to come as I stumble my way around the kitchen.

• Blog go boom!
• Server migration planned
• New features added to Waveflux
• Upgrade fever, kind of
• WordPress 2.6 engaged

It came to me recently that a dedicated contact page would serve blog readers (and me) much better than a simple mailto link. Contact pages are clear and terribly professional-looking, or so I’m told. Replacing a mail link also provides me with a bit of security; one less place where harvesters can scrape up my email address (even though I’d pretty well munged my address, it’s better to remove it altogether). After trying a couple of options, I decided on the richly-featured cforms II plugin from Oliver Siedel. Works well in testing. Access this page by clicking the Contact link at the top right of each page.

I finally got around to implementing a couple of features that came bundled with The Morning After, the excellent layout theme in use here: legible printing of posts is now available here, as is convenient emailing of same. These features may be accessed via the print and email icons located in the byline of each individual post. Thanks to Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan for the great plugins.

A brief word about accessibility: I chose the cforms contact page plugin in part because it allows for a text-based, question-and-answer challenge to weed out bot spammers, as opposed to an image verification challenge. This allows sight-impaired visitors to use the feature. Lester’s email plugin, quite fine in all other respects, uses image verification, which is obviously a barrier to the sight-impaired. I will ask Lester if it’s all possible to implement a text-based alternative.

I also added the traditional “previous” and “next” (think of them as “adjacent,” as I do) links to the end of each post.

And…I created a second slot under Highlighted on the home page so that the two most recent posts in the Highlighted subcategories - Consumed, Fluxed, Perused, Scribbled, and Viewed - would appear. One slot seemed like not enough; more than two seemed too many. So, ah, two.

Anything else? Some boring security stuff which wouldn’t interest you in the least, I’m sure.

I’ll close this with a brief public service announcement guised as irritating brag and boast: I upgrade WordPress each time a new version is made available. I perform the manual upgrade, which really isn’t hard at all. And I back up this weblog every day. These are habits that all bloggers should adopt, unless they really don’t like their blogs. Just sayin’.

• Upgrade fever, kind of
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera
• Blog go boom!
• Server migration planned
• WordPress 2.6 engaged

A brief quote to set the frame:

`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’

In the wake of dealing with a troll in the Waveflux comment garden - my very first persistent troll, a landmark of sorts - I ran into a serendipitous topic being discussed on the interwebs: who owns comments left on blogs? The question of commenters’ rights and related notions of authority is under considerable discussion just now, with some thoughtful viewpoints being offered. The post at Intense Debate opened with three provisional options for framing comment policy at that site:

Blog Publisher Ownership - Comments made on a blog belong to the blog owner, giving them the ability to edit the comments as they see fit (deleting and editing comments).

Commenter Ownership - Comments cannot be edited by blog publishers. Comments can still be deleted by blog publishers - blog owners must be able to remove spam and inflammatory comments.

Shared Ownership - This is where it gets complicated and we try to reach a compromise. We’re proposing that blog publishers should have the ability to edit and delete comments as long as the original comment is accessible both on the edited comment and in the commenter’s comment history.

Leaning toward the third option - that of shared ownership - Intense Debate maintains that while it hosts comments, it does not own them, and that the debate is the beginning of hashing out just what that means. At Scripting News, the estimable Dave Winer shares that notion, calling it “a mutual thing,” stressing the we-ness, the collaboration, inherent in commenting.

In the brave new world of social media, this is bound to be the chosen stance of many blog owners. It won’t be mine.

Traditional media comes in for a lot criticism from this quarter, but I still take a lot of cues from the old days of what’s thought of now as one-way publishing. Control - especially over a personal voice, which Waveflux is - is rather important to me, and the idea of allowing that authority to be abridged leaves me cold. That, and the fact that I’m a rather asocial guy, causes me to look askance at this whole “shared” business.

Different strokes for different sites and purposes, of course. I agree with Jeff Chandler at Weblog Tools Collection when he decries the need for a “one size for all” approach:

I don’t believe a commenting bill of rights needs to be created in which all blogs should follow. However, I do think that each blogger should create and make publicly accessible a commenting policy. This policy should clearly explain what you as the blog author will do with comments posted on your site, who retains ownership of those comments and explain circumstances which would require you to edit an end user’s comment.

Even before reading Chandler’s remark, I had taken steps along the lines he suggests. The comment policy in effect here at Waveflux is posted under the Submit button of the comment form. It’s mercifully brief and rather readable as such statements go, but I provided a plainer-English version on the About page:

I may quote your comment in whole or part and attribute your words to you at any point in the future.
I may edit or delete your comment if it seems necessary.
It is your responsibility to make and keep a copy of your comment if you want it to live forever and unedited.

Along with a gentle reminder:

Commenters should strive for courtesy or risk mockery.

Which has been the case 99.95% of the time with comments left here. The policy is in place for the unregenerate remainder, those behavioral outliers (trolls) who may chance by. They have been warned.

As for the great debate over comment ownership, we may well see a tiered approach adopted as a wide standard, something similar to Creative Commons licensing. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Creative Commons itself didn’t offer up such a framework.

• Teach your teachers well
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera
• Blogrolling
• Blog go boom!
• Server migration planned

The teaser on the home page pretty much tells the story, but for the completists among you:

In telling the story earlier of how I had established a feed-powered, randomized, partial linked list feature (titled “Randomized”) at the bottom of the home page, I mentioned that I would get around to creating a page that listed all of the sites on the blogroll. This has been done, as you can see by looking over at the right-hand nav bar (between the “Categorized” and “Commented” sections).

Rather than waste time reinventing the wheel, I used Rajiv Pant’s Blogroll Links plugin, and it seems to work just fine. The list is minimally formatted - just a list of live links, no bells or whistles because none are needed. I do have the option of providing a description of each blog or website, but that calls for a lot of wearisome typing. If you want to know what a given site is like, just click on over.

• Blogrolling
• Not a real blog post
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera
• New features added to Waveflux
• The four faces of Waveflux

As a relatively new WordPress user, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that when I determine a need for the blog - some bit of functionality or useful feature that I can envision but am hardly capable of coding on my own - I discover that the answer is out there, usually in convenient plugin form, quietly awaiting my attention. This has happened every time, without fail. Sometimes it has taken quite a bit of searching, but I have yet to return from any quest empty-handed. This must be that open source magic that Matt Mullenweg talks about now and again. Kudos to the vast WP community.

So. What have we done here lately?

Implemented (and recently upgraded) the ability of commenters to edit their messages via Ronald Huereca’s WP Ajax Edit Comments.

Allowed commenters to subscribe to comments via, uh, Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith.

A randomized RSS blogroll has been added, featuring the latest postings at linked sites. It took quite a bit of searching, but it happened thanks to Sarah G.’s What Others Are Saying plugin. (Only recently did I learn of a preexisting WP RSS widget, but I’m not a big fan of widgets, so…)

Most notably, the featured post teasers here now appear one after another in a rather elegant fade rotation. This is not the work of a plugin, but a bit of coding we like to call a Dynamic Crossfading Image Display of Recent Posts, devised by Epic Alex and based on the way-cool JavaScript/CSS Crossfader from Brand Spanking New. Only people whose browsers enable JavaScript get to enjoy the fady, rotatey goodness of the featured posts display. The five percent of you (yep, it’s right about five percent) who disable JavaScript due to security concerns or other reasons will instead see teasers for all of the most recent featured posts displayed at once. The approach degrades nicely, I think.

That’s enough meta for today. More next week, I’m sure.

• WordPress 2.5 goes gold
• WordPress 2.6 engaged
• WordPress 2.5, still pending
• Weeding in the blog garden
• Tough love in Techville

Maintenance day activities here at Waveflux:

Casual browsing at Airbag Industries directed me to a Coding Horror screed protesting the lack of built-in caching in WordPress. For those of you in a hurry, the highlights from the diplomatic Jeff Atwood:

… incredibly scary… completely unacceptable… appalling… absolutely irresponsible … naive… brainlessly stupid…

Stately, measured prose! Reminds me of the last office meeting I attended. Good times.

Having already experimented with WP-Super Cache last week and found that no matter which URL visitors clicked, they were always delivered to the front page of the blog, I opted today for the older WP-Cache instead. Things seem to be running smoothly. We’ll see what happens the next time I get actual traffic. In the past, this blog has been Deadspun, Wonketted, MichaelMoored, TalkingPointsMemoed, and DailyKosed, but never tested by an extinction-level event (Digg or Slashdot). It’ll happen, though.

So Atwood’s ravings did me good - got me off my duff and addressing the caching lack. Thank you, sir. Now about that temper of yours…

It should be noted that WP is indeed ( and at last) bringing its official attention to the caching thing this year. The challenges of providing a solution that works for the many different kinds of WP users may be daunting, but until this is solved, WordPress will always have a glaring perceived weakness compared to some other platforms. Conversely: once this is solved, the competitors will be robbed of a major talking point.

What else? Oh, yes, WP 2.5.1 was released today. Unlike a lot of coddled whiners who complain how haaaarrrd it is to follow the five-minute install instructions, I remember what it was like to walk ten miles in the snow, going uphill both ways upgrade Movable Type. Upgrading with WordPress is, on the whole, a more straight-forward matter even without going the push-button Fantastico route.

I upgraded three blogs; the one your reading now breezed through the procedure, but I ran into a problem upgrading the two subdirectory blogs. Files were all correctly installed, but trying to run the upgrade script or to access the admin or even the blog itself produced error messages with such unappealing phrases as “Fatal error: Call to undefined function.” I misdiagnosed the problem, thinking that an incomplete or otherwise faulty FTP upload was to blame, and so spent time repeating the upload a time or two. The true roadblock became apparent when I compared the wp-config.php files of the blog that worked with those of the blogs that didn’t: somehow the text of the later config files had all moved to one line, which mucked up how the code would be read. I restored the original arrangement of the file, then followed these instructions to solve a subsequent “headers already sent” error.

And then…things were just fine. In the words of your favorite pirate and his: complications arose, ensued, were overcome.

As for the program itself, WordPress 2.5.1: All I’ve had time to notice thus far is that when you create a link using the visual editor on the Write page, the “http://” is pre-selected just like it oughta be. That may sound like a tiny change, but when you’re linking all damned day, you really appreciate it. More to come, I’m sure.

• First upgrade on the new frontier
• WordPress 2.5, pending
• WordPress 2.5 goes gold
• WordPress 2.5, still pending
• If (lastStraw) then (WordPress)

Just as George Bush and his cronies never stop thinking of ways to do America harm, the editorial we of Waveflux always ponders new ways to improve this weblog. To that end, we stepped up some weeks ago to the latest version of WordPress. With that infrastructure upgrade in place - resulting in benefits that you can’t really see, but trust us, they’re there - we moved to install the new edition of the theme or layout for this blog, The Morning After by Arun Kale. As the theme worked so well for Waveflux before the upgrade, it was to be hoped that the upgrade would not be terribly noticeable. That seemed to work out.

The latest change here took place over the past few hours, as departments have been created here for the handful of audio-slash-visual projects connected with this blog. Introducing Waveflux FM and Waveflux TV, catchy and catch-all concepts for the media stuff that’s been happening here. Links to those portal pages can be found at the top of the right sidebar on each page, just above Categories. I hope to add to the store of episodes for each podcast as time goes by.

• New features added to Waveflux
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera
• WordPress 2.5 goes gold
• First upgrade on the new frontier
• Blog go boom!

If you read this weblog at all frequently - or you visit seldom but have a pixel-perfect memory - you’ll have noted that Waveflux has undergone yet another seismic shift in appearance and functionality, the second such alteration since the change in platform from Movable Type to WordPress. Indeed, it’s the adoption of WordPress that has made such layout changes possible easy. Back in the MT days - and I’m talking about MT 3.x, which was easier for me to use than the subsequent version - changing the blog’s layout seemed…well, if not a daunting task, then at least one not undertaken lightly. Consequently, the layout here didn’t change very often. You sort of learned to live with what you had until you finally screwed up enough courage/energy to have another go at it.

Now, with the ease of theme changing afforded by WordPress, I very nearly have the opposite problem: changing layouts is almost too easy. Not a bad problem to have, though.

As for the specific changes here: I had been using a slight variant of Thad Allender’s fine Gridline Magazine theme, but something just wasn’t sitting right with the layout. As I’ve already confessed to not being a designer, you’ll not be surprised to hear that I lack the vocabulary to express how I felt in anything but the vaguest of terms. The feeling itself was keen, though, and prompted me to review the “magazine-like” WP themes that are sprouting like dandelions all over the web. I tried out a handful of themes - astonishingly easy to switch back and forth; it’s like trying on jackets at the men’s store - and kept coming back to Arun Kale’s clean, grid-based, and interestingly-named The Morning After. Again, words fail me here: I can’t explain why I liked it so much, but knew that I did. I played around with a test installation, tweaking the code to accommodate my needs, then rather impulsively discarding the old arrangement and applying the new. Hence, the new digs.

As is usual after any move to a new place, not every room is ready for inspection and some painting remains to be done. We have time for that, though. After all, we’re all moved in now and hardly working against the clock.

• If (lastStraw) then (WordPress)
• Upgrade fever, kind of
• The new Waveflux
• Tough love in Techville
• Had I known this, I wouldn’t have bothered

…hence this brand-new layout for Waveflux. I’d say more about it now, but I need to get some sleep. More later on the changes to the blog. And, uh, more changes as well.

Yes, there’s tinkering to do here and there. Yes, I know the logo needs to be jacked up a pixel or two. You’re awfully exacting tonight.

• Upgrade fever, kind of
• New features and tools at the old blog
• If (lastStraw) then (WordPress)
• WordPress 2.5, still pending
• WordPress 2.6 engaged