I’m hosted

October 13, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

Now that I migrated my self-hosted blog to hosting at WordPress.com I have complaints.

Flea CircusWhen I was self-hosting I used the excellent Twitter Tools plug-in from Alex King for posting a weekly digest of my tweets to my blog. It is important to me that my blog be a journal for my kids and family. Twitter is part of this journal. My tweets commonly overlap with my blog posts. Missing twitter at my blog is missing, at least, half my journal. I’m bummed. Suggestions please?

When I was self-hosting I was running Google Analytics. I would refer to the WordPress analytics for my personal blog on occasion and the two were never identical. The WordPress stats were always higher. Why? I have no idea. Since moving to WordPress.com I’m unable to use Google Analytics. Why? I have no idea. We allow users of MindTouch Express to modify several HTML areas. With this users can run their own Google Analytics script. Why doesn’t WordPress.com allow this? Yes, there is additional overhead in loading the page, but I don’t care.

In my sidebars on my self-hosted blog I had a few widgets that were scripts or embeds. For some reason WordPress.com disallows this too. I most miss my FriendFeed widget. Again, you can do this at MindTouch Express. What’s the problem WordPress.com?

None of the comments that previously were threaded with replies in IntenseDebate migrated correctly.

Lastly, I’ll mention the fact that you are disallowed form using WordPress plugins. Ok, this one I understand. This is a big challenge. However, there are ways to achieve even this. Check out Ning.

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Migrating my personal blog

October 11, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

Yet Another GrAvatarLast night I migrated my blog from a self-hosted WordPress install at Dreamhost to one hosted at WordPress.com. I had hoped to move my blog to Google’s Blogger, but I could not find a way to import the WordPress WXR (WordPress archive file) Blogger.

Why? Well, to start with I wanted to use Blogger for the following reasons. It’s free. You can easily add Google Gadgets and there are many many gadgets. Google is clearly building a distributed social network framework that Blogger will surely add to nicely. I’m referring to profiles and other social networking features add-ons that are similar to what Ringside Networks was trying to achieve. This concept of a distributed social network I find very interesting. I was advocating this concept as far back as 2006 when Steve Bjorg and I were thinking and talking about the Open Web Initiative. I expect to see some very interesting things from Google in this space over the next two years. Alas, migrating to Blogger was painful and I couldn’t find a single tool that allowed me to do so without data loss.

Why did I move to WordPress.com? I’m tired of maintaining my own blog. Also, the server at Dreamhost my blog was running on is really slooooow. Lastly, I wanted a service that would continue to host my blog even after I’m dead. This statement could be received poorly by some. You may think it’s morbid. It is. You may think it’s arrogant. It’s not. I have kids. Enough said.

Yes, I know about Archive.org. This doesn’t do a sufficiently good job of archiving for me. Specifically, you can’t really navigate a site using Archive.org and I want a journal my kids, grandkids, etc… can browse and read after I’m gone.

I tried Squarespace. Deepak Singh just migrated his blog (http://mndoci.com) here. Sqaurespace must be the nicest blogging service online. Were it not so expensive ($14/month with a custom domain) I may have considered it. I would have paid as much as $8/month, but $14 is just too steep for blogging, no matter how good it is. Also, Squarespace failed my: “what if I die” test. If I stopped payment, which presumably I would after death, they would nuke my blog. They should just remove user access and leave the blog there.

You have likely noticed I change the domain from www.oblogn.com to AaronFulkerson.com. I have been blogging at O (b LOG N) since 2004. It has changed domains a couple times in this period. This blog started out as a friend blog with some fellows I went to UNC with. There are still many of their posts. However, when I performed the migration from my self-hosted WordPress to WordPress.com I mapped their author names on their posts to my author name. This was an oversight on my part.  I hope some of Konrad Rezka’s racier posts do not later get me into trouble. :-)

This became a personal blog sometime in 2005; so, I have been meaning to change the domain for a while now. I couldn’t get Fulkerson.com, which would be awesome because then I could host at aaron.fulkerson.com. Nor could I get Roebot.com. Hence the new domain: aaronfulkerson.com

Now, you may be asking: What the hell is O (b LOG N)? It’s a pun on the run time complexity of algorithms. O(logn)…get it? waka waka….

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WordPress 2.8

June 12, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

I just one-click upgraded the ‘ol blog here at oblogn.com to WordPress 2.8. Looking good. Most of all, it’s screaming fast. Good news.

Update: the new widgets controls in WP 2.8 seem to be unusable. I’m unable to expand both the left and right sidebars in the “Simple Balance 2.1″ theme I’m using. My guess is this is something specific to the theme. Bummer. I love this theme. I guess I’ll wait to see if there the point release of WP 2.8 corrects the problem or if there is a new theme release.

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Toot, Toot! Goes My Horn, Flickr in WordPress, Free AVI Player

January 28, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

Top Open Source Projects on Sourceforge.net

I know, I know. I’ll stop tooting our horn, but I checked in at Sourceforge to look at the MindTouch project rank tonight and I noticed MindTouch Deki currently bests even Azureus, arguably the most popular torrent client. You know what this means? MindTouch is more popular than porn and piracy. ;-)

It comes as no surprise to me that MindTouch is a topped rank open source project and a fast growing business. We have an amazing product. What is surprising to me how quickly we did this. In addition to the impressive expediency with which we’ve achieved our many impressive milestones it is also impressive how little resources that we’ve achieved this with. I look at the competitors we’ve surpassed, one in particular that has raised $16+ Million in tier one Venture Capital investment, had a three year head start on us, is stacked with weblebrities, is a darling of many A-list bloggers…and yet they don’t hold a candle to our community, our distribution and are likely barely beating us in revenue. I expect this year will change the last point. Anyway, I can’t help but smile and look to the next competitor to draft and surpass.

Next topic. I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer periodically to post to WordPress. Because I’ve consistently had problems with stability and buginess with Live Writer I’ve abandoned it. For the time being. Again. As such I needed a Flickr plugin. A Google search turned up “10 Amazing WordPress Plugins for Flickr“. I’ve installed a few of these. I can report the only plugin that’s worth installing is WordPress Flickr Manager. It works great. Makes embedding your Flickr photos a snap.

Need a free AVI player for Windows? I’ve plugged a couple players on the open source applications page here, and I finally got around to trying VLC Media Player. Superlative! I’m merrily watching ChiRunning.

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Zemanta

December 20, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

Image representing Zemanta as depicted in Crun...

I <3 Zemanta. I’ve been using the WordPress plugin here at my personal blog for months. I had it installed at the MindTouch blog. I use the Live Writer plugin. It’s great. Why? Automatic links, images, related articles and tags. Imagine an auto-search in your blog sidebar while you’re writing that provides contextually relevant information and images to enrich your content. You can even provide your Flickr account and pull content from this as well! Love it. I will point out that Zemanta does a very poor job of providing contextually relevant content about themselves.

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.7

December 11, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. Wow, this new dashboard is gorgeous.

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