Somewhat more sociable

When last I looked at the concept of social media - in particular, the subject of blog comments, their ownership, the authority of the blogmaster versus that of the commenter - it was with a jaundiced eye and a determination to hold true to the one-way values of traditional media. My blog, my power of life and death of the words of others, my desire to be an island unto myself, so on and so forth. That post, and the earlier one on the whole social thing, were masterpieces of curmudgeonliness which I eventually came to regret. I don’t have many commenters here at Waveflux - two or three, perhaps - but would rather enhance than degrade their experience here at the blog. Once I admitted that to myself, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would have to give in to the “shared ownership” mode of comment management promoted hither and yon on the innertubes.

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.

“Change.gov”

“Change.gov”: The website of the office of the President-Elect, complete with job application form. Hop to it!

Waveflux of the near future = less spendy!

About a week and a half ago I wrote about my fond hopes for a graphic revolution here at the old weblog, and the stark financial realities facing anyone looking for a truly individualized blog layout. I said then that I’d put redesign out of my mind for the near term and wait until I’d saved enough quatloos to spend on such a vanity effort.

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.

The wonders of the innertubes

Hulu: You can watch the season premiere of 30 Rock a week early. Online. Right now.

Waveflux of the future = spendy!

Weblogs are like avaricious nestlings: always hungry, mouths perpetually open, always wanting more. More entries, more traffic, more subscribers. And features - my God, the features. Increased functionality for comments, snazzy drop down menus, video, audio, Flash, better design, better performance, better everything. We want our little weblogs to be happy, and so we forage and return to the nest and regurgitate plugins and images and themes and hastily edited stylesheets into their gaping yaws. And still they want more. What’s a blogmaster to do?

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!

Mail goggles?

ZDNet.com: Google wants you to email while sober. Thanks. I guess.

Who needs Google Chrome - besides Google?

Zeldman: A commenter said it best: Google Chrome is a solution looking for a problem.

40-15, WordPress

Lloyd Budd: The volleying between the WordPress and Movable Type camps is always amusing. Also informative.

Oddest web search ever

This may be the strangest web search that has ever brought anyone to my blog:

bring back the trans fat in krispy kremes

I didn’t know that the trans-fat had even been removed. Apparently, they are trans-fat free as of January 2008. Anyway, the search brought up this long-ago post.

This isn’t the most compelling subject in the world, despite the sheer oddity of it. If you hear later on the evening news about some grassroots movement to return trans-fatty goodness to Krispy Kremes, however, remember where you heard it first.

Actually, this post is just an excuse to re-post this image:

Awesome.

Improved RSS for St. Louis Beacon

The all-online St. Louis Beacon has greatly improved its feed offerings, as a glance at the output reveals. Previously hampered by the limitations of its Twitter feed to the usual 160 characters and content that was just a repetition of the headline, the new RSS news feed provides for complete headlines and fuller actual content (including images) from the given news article, as well as a “Read more” link. According to Beacon Presentation Editor Brent Jones, the new process also eliminates the need for manual updates, which sounds like an onerous task that the Beacon is well rid of.

The Beacon has provided a much-improved feature, one that its readers will doubtless appreciate. Update your feed readers with the new link: http://tinyurl.com/3kmwe7.

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