Along comes IntenseDebate, one of the three most notable blog comment management systems (along with Disqus and SezWho). Once an independent outfit, ID was acquired a while back by Automattic, makers of WordPress, which powers this very blog. This meant that WP’s rather basic commenting feature would undergo a paradigm shift, transformed by ID’s crossblog capabilities. It was as though the answer to my comment management situation had come to me in a shiny box - or, rather, a shiny new plugin.

Waveflux now employs the IntenseDebate system for its comments. Anyone who has used ID elsewhere, or who has commented on blogs using one of the other big systems, will recognize certain basic features: user profiles, reputation points, uprating or downrating comments, all that good stuff. Threaded comments - the ability to respond directly to an earlier comment - is finally available here. Commenters’ words are now their own, part of their own profile, quite apart from any (rare, I hope) moderation by blogmaster me.

It’s a new arrangement, that of Intense Debate and WordPress, and also that of ID and Waveflux. As a result, there are quirks to be worked out and tweaks to be made. Some functionality previously enjoyed here - the ability to edit comments for a limited period, or to visually style comments - is unavailable…but not forever, I hope. The ID folks are working on ways to get their system and certain plugins to play nicely together. In the meantime, it’s still possible to style comments by using HTML tags. Yes, it’s primitive, I know, but with luck, things will evolve.

If there are any questions about IntenseDebate here at Waveflux, I’ll do my best to answer them. And if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find someone who does. In the meantime, feel free to play around with it.

• Waveflux of the near future = less spendy!
• Waveflux of the future = spendy!
• Comment is not free, exactly
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera
• Server migration planned

Well, I changed my mind. Not about the desire for a bespoke design for Waveflux; that’s still a cherished dream. It’s just that I’m still in the mood to shake things up a little, while holding true to the magazine website style that I like so much. Arun Kale’s great theme, The Morning After, has served me well, but I still found myself longing for a change.

Enter Brian Gardner, good-looking bald guy and noted WordPress designer, creator of the rather popular Revolution series of themes. I employed the original Revolution layout a while back for the revised LaVena Johnson site. It was not my intention then to recast this blog using his themes, but I changed my mind when Gardner changed his business plan to an open source model, moving from selling blog themes to providing them for free and selling support instead. Gardner set a date for the retirement of his original Revolution series - and knocked a few dollars off the price - while launching a new batch of themes under the Revolution Two brand. Those new themes are free, as I said, with paid support available - but nice as they are, I prefer the original batch of Revolution layouts. I selected the Revolution News theme, paid a modest fee, and began the work of adapting it to my needs here at Waveflux.

Hence the new hotness! Repeat visitors will find the navigation easy, as the arrangement of the blog remains largely the same. I am glad to have the “departments” - Consumed, Scribbled, and the like - more prominently displayed, as they had been once upon a while. Some tinkering remains to be done, but I trust the background noise of hammering and sawing won’t distract you. I think we’ll stay with this basic layout for a while, and I hope this satisfies my bloody-minded hankering for immediate change.

If you run into any problems - with readibility, comments, or anything else - please let me know. Thanks!

Note: Bettie’s here, with a winsome smile. Gort and Godzilla are on the way. The flying cars may take a while.

• Waveflux of the future = spendy!
• Somewhat more sociable
• Brief blog outage
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera
• Blog go boom!

It doesn’t help matters when you, said blogmaster, lust after superior designs seen elsewhere. I look at sites like Unstoppable Robot Ninja, Airbag Industries, Daring Fireball, The Morning News, and A List Apart - to note but a few examples - and sigh with with a combination of admiration and baffled resentment which I think is often referred to as envy. It’s not that these are all designs of a kind, as they vary considerably. It’s not (just) that they qualify as pretty. Rather, I envy these designs for the way they ineffably signify the individual identity of the blogmaster. When I think of John Gruber, say, I think immediately of the form and content of Daring Fireball, and vice versa. The website feels, to me, an extension of the person - which, of course, it is.

I’ve said all this before, of course, as I tend to repeat myself. Now, as then, the authenticity of the blog author’s voice made manifest in these designs is best expressed by this quote from Roger Zelazny’s scifi (or is that spec lit?) classic, Lord of Light:

Being a god is being able to recognize within one’s self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one’s ruling passions. Those who look upon gods then say, without even knowing their names, ‘He is Fire. She is Dance. He is Destruction. She is Love.’

Yes, poetic crap, as one of Zelazy’s characters says a little later, but to me it captures the heart of superior blog design: every pixel contributing to one overriding effect. The same is often said of the importance of each word in an excelling piece of short fiction.

I ran across a fairly iconic blog entry and lengthy associated string of comments belonging to designer Chris Pearson. The topic, from 2006: “How Much Should a Web Design Cost?” See if the cognitive path he lays out doesn’t sound familiar.

People like surprises. Unfortunately, when those surprises include a hefty price tag, people hate them.

Here’s why professional web designs are the curveballs of the site construction process. Well, hey, let’s look at the process first:

1. Buy a domain name: $10
2. Buy a hosting package: $60/yr. with two years prepaid - $120
3. You set everything up, and then you realize you need a design because your site currently looks like 50,000 others out there. Whoops.

The problem here is that when setting up a new site, newbies often think, “$10 for a domain? Awesome, let’s get started!”

Next, they get hit with the reality of hosting fees, and while they’re a little bummed about having to pre-pay for two years in order to lock in that great price of $5.50/mo., they go ahead and kick down $100-$200 to set up their hosting.

Their tab is already up around $200, and now they’re beginning to wonder if this web stuff is all it’s cracked up to be.

Unfortunately, they get hit with a wicked case of design lust while browsing and getting acquainted with the blogosphere, and now they really want a hot design. “Shouldn’t cost too much, right? After all, look at all those cool designs out there!”

And then BAM! They get slapped with the reality that a wicked design is going to cost them $1500+, and they totally reject the idea, especially since the hosting fees were already a tough pill to swallow.

Talk about your curveballs. [...]

Professional blog designs are a luxury item. Look at it like this: plenty of businesses buy 60″ HD TV’s for their stores and displays, but only individual consumers who have money and really want a big, bad TV would ever actually kick down and buy one.

Sounds terribly familiar to me. To my credit, I came to this conclusion on my own and earlier, but it’s always nice to have confirmation. It should be noted that (one) Pearson likely low-balled himself at a $1500 floor on blog design charges, and (two) as that entry was written back in 2006, that entry-level estimate has probably been raised.

In any event, what I’d be looking for would involve a few more features than the entry level described by Pearson.

So: For a weblog with the aesthetic tailoring and state ‘o art features that I envision for Waveflux, I have pretty well resigned myself to the necessity of shelling out thousands of dollars…someday. That day is not today, and it won’t be tomorrow. Between now and then, I’ll push design out of my mind and devote myself to the non-flashy, unglamorous aspects of blogging - that is, actual content. But you, gentle reader, may expect to someday see annoying thermometer graphics in the sidebar - evidence of odious fundraising - and will read entries that amount to naked appeals for cash, all for the sake of a purer Waveflux experience. I imagine you can hardly wait!

• Waveflux of the near future = less spendy!
• Somewhat more sociable
• Hosting, migration, evolution
• Blog go boom!
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera

It allows really advanced conditional template displays based on any number of variables and executed by naming conventions and its structure. I think this could be the base for a whole new generation of themes and development.

Looking forward to seeing what Carrington can do, and what I can do with it.

As to the previous look and feel of Waveflux: As pleased as I was with TMA, which answered nearly all of my desires for a magazine-type layout, over time I realized that that kind of layout was, well, a lot of fucking work. If it was to be done right, that is. That, along with a certain bloody-mindedness, led me to make the switch. We’ll give the new arrangement a try.

Look for tinkerings in the days and weeks to come. Instead of making backstage changes first and only then shifting to Carrington, I decided to just pull the big lever now and fiddle with it later. Did I mention that I’ve been feeling a bit bloody-minded?

• “Magazine style”
• Waveflux of the near future = less spendy!
• New features added to Waveflux
• Somewhat more sociable
• Brief blog outage

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.

• Somewhat more sociable
• Waveflux of the near future = less spendy!
• Blog go boom!
• Brief blog outage
• Waveflux of the future = spendy!

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
• Vive la différence
• WordPress 2.6 engaged
• Waveflux of the near future = less spendy!

`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.

• Somewhat more sociable
• Teach your teachers well
• Comment upgrade, a popular post, etcetera
• Blogrolling
• Blog go boom!

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

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

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)