Many disgruntled readers have contacted me via email, IM, facsimile, phone and anonymous poison pen letters to ask ‘Hey Norman - whatever happened to the unified blogging day scheduled for Friday 18 April ?’ Apologies for the delay but before we get started, some random, meaningless statistics: Feedburner: 66 subscribers. Google Reader : ‘From your 189 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,807 items, starred 1 items, shared 325 items’....
A couple of Oracle bloggers (Laurent and Yas) are experimenting with Disqus on their blogs but Tim Hall has expressed some reservations about committing his blog comments to a hosted service outside of his control. Jake Mckee is also taken by Disqus but eloquently expresses similar concerns about ‘data ownership and presentation’. I understand (and used to vehemently share) both Tim and Jake’s reservations. It does seem perfectly natural to want all your blog content stored in your MySql database on your server....
Disqus lets you easily track all comments you have left scattered over the blogosphere. Disqus allows you to adminster comments on multiple blogs from a single dashboard. Disqus has built-in effective protection against comment spam. Disqus provides tight integration with Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, MT and Tumblr. Disqus provides Javascript code for every other CMS. Disqus supports threaded comments. Disqus allows you to fix that embarassing typo by editting comments. Disqus ‘eat their own dog food’....
Five months ago, I experimented with Disqus powered comments when this blog was running on WordPress. The trial was rather short-lived because I was disappointed that Disqus wasn’t able to fully integrate with all the existing blog comments. Importing comments still isn’t possible but Disqus says this feature is being worked on. However, I have decided to reinstate Disqus for the following reasons: Disqus recently added integration with FriendFeed so any contributions I make on Disqus powered blogs will also be visible in my FriendFeed stream....
It’s no good. I simply can’t go on. I can no longer summon up the enthusiasm for blogging. All the warnings from the blogging 101 courses over the years have proven to be very true. I foolishly dipped my toe into Twitter and then FriendFeed but it’s no good I simply can’t go on with this any longer. I can’t bear to miss my children growing up just because ‘Facebook is so last year, Dad....
The forthcoming release of WordPress 2.5 was one reason I was hesitant to move to Habari. However, having seen a demo of the revised dashboard in WordPress 2.5, all I can say is I am glad I made the move and didn’t wait. While I am merely an end user (not a UI designer), Michael Heilemann articulates many of my views on the deficiences and usability of the Wordpress dashboard in this detailed analysis....
‘Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it.’ The migration of this blog from WordPress to Habari is mostly complete. I had a few unexpected problems with a significant number of comments and a handful of posts that contained mismatched HTML tags and didn’t display the corresponding page at all. So I had to painstakingly review every single post with comments and correct the HTML by hand....
I simply couldn’t resist the temptation any longer so this blog is now running on Habari because: The Habari Administration screens look like they have been designed rather than evolved. The WordPress import utility works brilliantly. Michael C. Harris created a TinyMCE plugin for Habari - literally minutes after my initial enquiry. Most of the required functionality (Google Analytics, Feedburner, Akismet, Sitemap) is available as plugins for Habari. Michael Harris also helped me configure rewrite rules so my existing WordPress permalink structure is retained....
Adding support for OpenID to Wordpress using this plugin is quick and straightforward. Similarly, the latest version of Drupal includes a core module providing full support for OpenID integration. So, if you have an OpenID, you can now use it to comment on this blog.
Joomla! 1.5 has been released and installed over here. Drupal 6 hasn’t been released but that didn’t stop me upgrading this blog to 6 RC2. I never thought I would say this but I think I am starting to get Twitter. Blame Tim Hall. FTP - Siebel had an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Oracle has an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Unsurprisingly, Oracle are standardising on the latter....