Acid Test

Acid Test

Update, June 30: One blogger I know who uses a number of widgets ran into difficulties with this upgrade method. Be careful, out there! Back up first! Always back up first!
First the good part: my blog runs on Wordpress, the software works, it’s easy to install, and easy to use. It has loads of advanced features as well as plugins that can expand those features further, nearly to the point of tap dancing and darning your socks. And the good people who developed it have made it open source and freely available. In short, a brilliant piece of work.

/*cue creeping sinister music*/

But Wordpress does have a dark side. It’s called “when things go wrong.” I have had zero success using their forums to find answers to simple or complicated questions, or anything in between. I must admit, I haven’t even tried in a year or so, because it was so uniformly useless. Maybe they’ve turned over a new leaf. When I did try it, the organization of the forums was hopeless, so other passing users weren’t likely to see or answer questions. The knowledgeable types, on the other hand, had nothing to say but RTFM. My questions made it rather plain that I’d done my best to read the effing manual, but the people who knew the answers couldn’t seem to be bothered to read the actual questions. Severely aggravating. The manual, called the Codex in Wordpress-talk, is indeed very complete, but again, organized so weirdly that finding anything was pretty much a matter of chance. Also aggravating, although it was easier not to take that personally.

This is all a long introduction to explain why I’d never upgraded my original, two year-old version of Wordpress. Not upgrading software, especially interactive stuff like blogging software, creates security holes and can cause all sorts of problems. But my blog was working, and I wasn’t about to to risk disturbing any part of that interlocking set of 75 megabytes worth of programs. Plus, Wordpress’s concept of upgrade methods was like their concept of user support. Totally dense. You were supposed to download, extract, ftp, back up, decompress MySQL databases, and god-knows-what-all. My eyes glazed over after about the fifteenth step. Forget it.

And then, at the end of March, Wordpress joined the 21st century and provided an automated upgrade. After the first whoop of joy, I turned cautious. Like the elderly oysters in The Walrus and The Carpenter, I’ve developed a suspicious mind. I googled to find out how things had worked for people. Had they, god forbid, had problems and needed help? The good old non-existent help of Wordpressdom?

There were some reports of mysterious glitches. The Wordpress site didn’t even talk about versions as old as mine. If I tried it, my fate would be in the Ceiling Cat’s paws, and I didn’t like that. But google really is your friend (so far, at least). In the course of searching, I found a site that said how to use an alternate upgrade script for Wordpress. Both sites sounded coherent and intelligent, and in the comments — oh, joy! — somebody mentioned having successfully gone straight from the paleolithic version I was using to the current one.

Time to make the leap.

So I did.

And everything worked.

I was boggled.

There was one heartstopping issue. The instructions said it would take a few minutes, but it took over an hour. I was drop dead sure that everything was stuffed. However, after an hour, suddenly the dear old blog went live again, stronger, faster, and better than before. I’d like my medical upgrades to work as well, please.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, blog, blogging, upgrade, 2.5

It is astonishing to me that people of good will find anything to argue about in the statement that hate speech is not on.

Hello?

Kathy Sierra received death threats and had her address published all over the net. In what sense, exactly, is free speech served by protecting that behavior? There’s Sierra’s speech, which has been shouted down, and a bunch of useless yapping that did the shouting. The argument seems to be about how limits on really bad yapping can avoid infringing on yapping.

Even that last issue is not difficult. There is no valid point of view that requires the expression of personal threats against other people. It’s that simple. It’s also illegal. It’s called hate speech. It’s not free for a very good reason. It needs to be enforced, by the police and by all of us on our individual blogs. It needs to be enforced when it’s misogynist just as much as it does when racist, anti-semitic, or homobigoted. Sometimes it seems that these days the point is debatable only when misogyny is in question.

So, let’s make a start, here in blogland, by rejecting all forms of threats against people. Yes, that includes completely harmless crude threats hurled between commenters in the livelier blogs. Throw them out. I don’t know anyone who would miss them, except the commenters themselves, and they’ll just have to deal with it like men, even if they are highschoolers (whatever their gender). Shutting them up is the price of hearing voices with something to say, voices like Sierra’s.

Would that rule get rid of offensiveness on the web? No, not by a long shot. Bigotry isn’t excluded by that rule. Only bigotry directed specifically at individuals. You have to start somewhere.

And you have to stop somewhere. I’m not sure where, after hate speech is excluded, the line should be drawn. Bigotry expressed as an incitement to riot is already illegal, and should be. But I don’t see how one could make the expression of just plain honest bigotry, so to speak, illegal without at the same time destroying free speech itself.

The test has to be whether harm is threatened against specific people. If not, just turn it off and go pay attention to something else if you’re offended by the sentiments expressed. (Violent porn is an interesting hybrid area here. I would argue that since it does advocate harm against specific people, for entertainment no less, it falls squarely into the hate speech category.)

It gets murkier when one gets deeper into O’Reilly’s and Scoble’s Blogger Code of Conduct. (Intelligently, the Code is up for comment as of this writing, so make suggestions for improvement there.) They would like to excise “misrepresentation.” I agree. I’d like to excise it too. /*Falls into beautiful dream: no more Rush Limbaugh, no more Malkin, no more Coulter, no more Shrub . . . wakes up with a shock.*/ Anyway, yes, it would be nice. No, there is no way to do that short of including critical thinking in everyone’s education and making sure that everyone is educated.

O’Reilly & Co. are confusing the desirable with the essential, possibly because the worst aspects of this aren’t their problem. Women are exposed to 25 times the hate speech online that men are. Twenty five times. 2500% more. Yet, when it comes time to formulate a code of conduct, the names I see on the masthead are “Tim,” “Richard,” “David,” and so on. They adopted the outlines of the code from BlogHer, but then for some reason took the ball and ran with it. Possibly, it would have been easier to keep the priorities organized and to identify the worst abuses if the people who suffer the majority of them had been at the center of the project.

Whenever any limits are proposed on free speech, the shout against censorship goes up. The idea is that any censorship will lead to the end of free speech. This is obvious nonsense, as a simple thought experiment can show. If you’re in a room full of people, all shouting as loud as they can, does anyone have the freedom to speak?

Freedom of speech necessarily includes the freedom to be heard. (I’ve carried on about this before.) That’s why apartheid-era South Africa’s banning laws were a suppression of free speech. Talking to yourself in a room by yourself is meaningless. But an excess of noise works just as well as isolation to drown a message. The great danger to free speech now is not silence. The danger is that by not censoring noise, we’re going to lose the signal that freedom of speech was intended to preserve.

Deleting and silencing threats against people is not censorship. It is the essential volume knob that allows free speech to be heard.

Technorati tags: free speech, Code of Conduct, BlogHer, blogging, hate speech, trolls, censorship

My theme seems to be reasonably ready to go … except I haven’t checked it yet in Internet Explorer. I’m sure it will blow up badly, and I will fix that. Really, I will. But I’m so taken with it in Firefox (by the way, have I nagged you to get Firefox?), I can’t stand not to use it. Also, Opera and Safari users: I’m just an amateur and don’t have an easy way to check any of what I do in those browsers. I hope the results aren’t too hideous. (Update: Yup. IE banishes the sidebar to the nether regions again, doesn’t handle png transparencies correctly, and many other smaller problems scattered about. Please bear with me!)

Well, another update. Feb. 24. Still in a mess in IE6, but legible. I’m really sorry, but I’ve run out of time to try to fix it, so that’s as good as it’ll get for IE6. In Firefox and IE7, there are still some noticeable problems, but there too, that’s it for now.

Thanks for your patience!

I’m playing with themes again. Currently, I’m clobbering Summer Sun 1.0 by Tim Isenheim. A visit to freshlabs.de can show you what it’s supposed to look like. I didn’t like the greens and yellows, but I obviously haven’t improved things. Stay tuned, I hope. [Update: I've gone back to the previous for the time being.]

(There is no truth to the rumor that I have way too much time.)

I had issues with New Blogger. It was better, Google told us, but there was no way to try it out. Anyone who switched to the new one, couldn’t go back to the old. That made me itchy.

Then there was the broader issue that I had all my deathless prose on someone else’s system. If Google, like Yahoo a few years ago, decided that they owned everything ever published using their tools, I’d be done for. Not that Google had actually done anything that sleazy, but there was nothing to stop them since we no longer have a legal system that understands fair use or, for that matter, unfair use.

So, what with one thing and another, I decided I’d move while I could do it in my own time rather than in a mad rush when I was forced to by some odious rule change.

There seemed to me to be two main choices out there: Movable Type and Wordpress. Movable Type is still available as a free download to install on your own site (no support provided), but Typepad (the easy, hosted solution) costs $5 per month. Installing Movable Type looks non-trivial, and I must admit my eyes glazed over. Wordpress has a free hosted option on wordpress.com. However, since part of what I wanted to achieve was independence, I went the way of installing the free wordpress blogging software from wordpress.org on my own domain. (It’s essential to remember that wordpress.com is the hosted option, whereas wordpress.org is the site for downloads, information, and help for hosting-your-own. (Brief explanation of setting up your own site after “Read the rest….”)

Installing

Okay. So, Wordpress is downloaded. You’ll want the “zip” version if you run Windows. You’ll also need an ftp program to upload everything to your site. (There’s another box after “Read the rest…” for a brief intro to ftp.) Filezilla is a good and easy-to-use program for Windows. Alternatively, Firefox now has an ftp extension (fireftp which is independent of operating systems. There may well be something already available on your computer that came with the operating system.

Wordpress is said to be famous for its dead simple “5 minute install,” but I’m enough of a fink that I wanted my hand held for all five minutes. Luckily, Rachel Cunliffe has a video tutorial that does exactly that. It’s downloadable (73 MB) if you want. Follow along, pausing it as necessary to carry out the tasks. She makes it a downright pleasant experience.

At the conclusion, I tried my first post: “testing, 1, 2, 3″. What the post didn’t say was how amazed, bowled over, and just plain shocked I was that the whole thing had — apparently! — worked the very first time. Although it did take longer than five minutes. Half an hour, more like. Read more »

Since I rarely use Internet Explorer, it’s taken me this long to realize the formatting is hopeless in IE. There’s supposed to be a blog title and description. Really there is. The top two photos aren’t supposed to push everything else out of the header. There’s a sidebar. Honest. Only in IE it lives way at the bottom after everything else. Aargh.

I’ve just spent all day trying to fix this and gotten nowhere. NOTHING has worked. Microsoft and their miserable, non-compliant browsers should be taken out and … well, not shot, I suppose. Officially, I’m against the death penalty. Right now, though, I’m seriously thinking about putting an escape clause in that attitude.

Get Firefox!

Update: Still (obviously) working on a kludge. The header problems are, perhaps, something to do with IE not collapsing empty, container-type divs. I vaguely and suddenly remembered something like that. Will have to look into it. Right now I’m going to sleep — and hoping nothing blows up when I post this!

Update 2: This is a day or two later. I’m not sure which. It’s all a blur. Man, what a fight! The fix is horribly kludged with nasty little hanging pixels here and there, but to hell with them. The most annoying thing is that because of the fixes I had to use (it would help if I knew what I was doing!), I have no guarantee things will display correctly at resolutions other than 1024×768, 1280×1040, or 1400×1050. If the site looks broken on your system, please let me know in comments or via the contact form.

[posted approx. Dec 24, 2006] testing, 2, 3, 4

Update, Dec 26: Wow. The Wordpress function to import from my old Acid Test site on Blogger has worked for posts, and, I think??, comments. Now I’ll try to transfer the template…. You can watch my progress by how much of a mess this site looks as time goes by….

Update, Dec 28: After much aggro caused by major foolishness on my part, my photos are appearing. They’re appearing in the wrong places, but, hey, one thing at a time. ;-}

Update, Jan 1, 2007. New year, new template, new everything. Frustrating in spots, but mainly fun. It would have been a lot less fun … as a matter of fact I would have probably got nowhere … without some magnificent help:

• Rachel Cunliffe’s incomparable video tutorial about installing Wordpress on your own site.
• Wordpress’s problem-free, no-fuss-no-muss import utility that allowed me to transfer all posts and comments from blogspot.com to my site.
• Alessandro Fulciniti’s javascript, Nifty Corners, for creating rounded corners that complemented Wordpress’s default header graphic, which I’ve used with some changes. I’ve always liked the rounded corners look, but in the good old days (say, two years ago) it took a separate graphic for each corner. I’m too lazy for that. (Update, Jan 6: I must be doing something wrong. The corners on blockquotes after the first one aren’t being rounded. There must be some way to tell niftycorners not to give up after the first instance. Hmph.

My remaining difficult problem is how to redirect archived Blogger posts to the equivalent ones here. There are javascripts that seem to work for other people, but they won’t cooperate with me. The other problem is the name Blogger uses to refer to posts is subtly different from Wordpress, so dead links crop up like bodies in a bestselling murder mystery. It would be tedious, but simple, to just hardcode each redirect on each page, but I don’t have access to individual page headers on blogspot. And so it goes. I’m going to have to learn enough php to do this. Don’t hold your breath. (And if you have a solution, for God’s sake, tell me!)

And then there’s the remaining simple but tedious task of checking the links, the formatting on individual posts, and all that good stuff. No wonder people get paid big bucks to do this….

Another update some minutes later: as soon as I posted this, something about the entry blew my formatting up. Great. The take home message is probably not to use the wysiwyg text editor. Meanwhile, please bear with me.

Update Jan 5: The explosion in my template formatting was so spectacular, and was followed by major access slowdowns, so I’m thinking it was actually a server crash somewhere between me and my hosting service that was unkind enough to happen right when I was saving changes. Anyway, mostly better now. What a fight. To-do: sort out the blogroll, and those pesky redirects.

 (This is me, trying out the “blogthis” button on Google’s Picasa .

For those who care about this sort of thing: the “img src” points to the file on my actual computer. Seems a bit braindead, since personal computers get turned off. What were they thinking?)

update after posting: no, the photo is on blogger.com. Not sure if I’m happy about Google uploading it without telling me first where it plans to put it. What if they changed their copyright policies and I wanted to remove it? Hmph. Grump.

Update after transferring to wordpress: The photo on blogger seems to have vaporized. So much for that. Instead, enjoy the tawny frogmouth chick by Morgana on Barbelith.

You knew it.

Now (April 18) The Guardian has figured it out:

“Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ - the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles.”

Via the BBC, I just heard about 360 Degrees of Sky - Life in Rural Zambia. It’s written by a woman who does publicity for a British NGO in Zambia. She can write. She can see, hear,smell, and touch. Go read.

Quotes:
360 Online Breaking News

…Roger the Dodger – local bicycle repair man – made an attempt to secure the mantle of Unabomber, when he threatened Chief with “blowing your brains out”. Witnesses were unanimous in their belief that he was unlikely to achieve this with an inner tube and an old candle.

Residents have been advised to stay indoors and watch out for anything suspicious. Unfortunately this advice has had to be ignored, on account of no lights for watching anything, and the danger of using a paraffin stove indoors with no ventilation. We await further updates.

Brandishing Pens

…people undoubtedly have tough lives, [but] they are not limpid beggars with their hands outstretched. They have pride, dignity, laughter. Their children go to school, even if it is under a tree. They work their farms, hard, every day. The women sit and twist each other’s hair into elaborate styles and gossip about their neighbours. The men sit and gossip about the women. The rhythm of life is the same here as it is the world over. And yet it is not the laughter or the gossip which sells, but the hardship and the illness.