Disqus is a web comment system that can be incorporated into WordPress blogs using a plugin. The recent major update convinced me that it was time to try Disqus at this blog.

There are a few small, early bumps in the road toward using the plugin (V2.01 by the way). Activating it involved signing on to my Disqus account (fair enough) and at one point seemed as though it would require editing theme files (not so fair enough). But then I decided, apparently correctly, that I don’t need the code snippets it showed me.

Then I looked at the blog. It seemed that the existing comments had disappeared. It turned out that they hadn’t, but that it was an “Advanced Option” in plugin setup to import them into Disqus. The import seemed to work for comments. I believe that trackback import is in the works.

Then I looked at a post page. The Disqus stuff starts displaying in the sidebar, rather than right below the post. I suspect that this is theme-specific, and that it won’t go away when I move up to the new version of Tarski (2.3).

Finally, I left a comment. I commented on the previous post, indicating that I’ve disabled my spam cop plugin, since Disqus brings its own spam cop.

Of all the antispam plugins for WordPress, the I’m most interested in the plugins that are clients for spamfighting services. I’m aware of four such plugins/services, and I recently compared them on at Changing Way. Now it’s time to try them here.

Or at least, it’s time to try three of them here. I don’t feel a need to try Akismet, since it’s built in to WordPress.com, and hence into Changing Way.

I already had the Defensio plugin here, so it was just a matter of activating it. Last night, it picked up a few spam comments, and let through the sole real comment that it should have done. You might gather that this blog is not a test site for high-volume spam fighting.

TypePad AntiSpam V1.02 also presented no problems, although the TPAS site currently mentions WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 as the supported versions. The plugin claims that it is “By Matt Mullenweg, Six Apart,” a claim I don’t entirely believe. I let TPAS run for a while.

Then I activated Mollom. No problems to report with any of the plugins I’ve used, but then again, this blog is obscure enough to be spared extensive spam commenting.

I’m still using the Yahoo Media Player. All I have to do is include a link to an MP3 file, and you can click to play it. For example, here’s Barenaked Ladies: Crazy ABCs. If you play it and like it, you can hit the Buy button on the player, and it’ll fire up an Amazon search using the link text and my Amazon affiliate id. The Yahoo Media Player folks think that purchase flow should be an integral part of posting music to the web.

The track in question is a favorite from Snacktime, the CD of which has been in our car player for a couple of weeks now. To link to the album, I used a more conventional means of helping you to Amazon (and helping myself at the same time). It was rather more laborious for me. There are yet other means, such as plugins, but I won’t go into them here.

The track is hosted at Dropbox. In case you’re wondering, yes I did have invites, but no I don’t have any left. Sorry.

I’ve switched themes to Tarski, not because I was having any theme problems, but because I felt like a change of scenery round here, and I thought that this photo from my recent week at the beach would make a good custom header background. I cropped it, and added text to it, with Picnik. The font in header is Ariel, which while not ideal was the most suitable of the fonts available in the basic version of Picnik.

Reasons for choosing Tarski (from among the thousands of themes available for WordPress these days) include: it’s clean; it’s well documented; it’s kept up to date, and indeed the version I’m using was released a couple of days ago for compatibility with WordPress 2.6; it has all the features I was looking for, such as widgets; it’s available at WordPress.com, so if I get to like it enough I could switch my main blog to it.

There are a few ways in which I think that Tarski could be even better. For example, I don’t like the way it displays tags separate from other post metadata. I’m not sure that I like the navbar, but I don’t see a way to disable it; on the other hand, maybe it’s such a basic feature of the theme that if you don’t like it, you should find another theme, or be willing to do your own Tarski-hacking. Oh yes, and there was some widget-related weirdness when I switched to Tarski. But I’m glad that I did switch.

I’ve upgraded this test blog to the recently-released WordPress 2.6. I went from 2.3.something. What happened to 2.4 and 2.5? WordPress skipped the first of these, in that they went right to 2.5, and I skipped the second, in that I never installed 2.5.

The upgrade to 2.6 went smoothly. If there were problems, I’ve yet to find them. I’ve already tried some of the new features, in that they are already at WordPress.com, where my main blog lives.

So now, it’s time to mess around with themes, plugins, etc.

I just upgraded this test blog to the current version of WordPress: 2.3.2.

At the same time I attempted to upgrade my Habari test blog to 0.3.3, with rather less success. After doing what I thought was the upgrade, trying to access the blog gave me: “Controller Object ( [base_url] => /cheza/ [stub:private] => [action:private] => [handler:private] => ) Unmatched rule: 1″. I’m probably missing something very simple, but don’t have time to chase it now.

The new Yahoo Music Player seemed to make playlists as simple as they could be. So I thought I’d try it out, at the same time getting some of my favorite tracks from an out-of-print CD up on to the web. See my main blog for more details.

• Bad Reputation, by Freedy Johnston.
• Bad, by Kirsty MacColl.
• Broken Bottle, by Alejandro Escovedo.
• Fall at Your Feet, by Crowded House.

One of my favorite albums of the 1980s is Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen (called Two Wheels Good in the USA). It was reissued this year, with the original 11 tracks remastered by the original producer, Thomas Dolby, and acoustic versions of 8 of those tracks by Paddy McAloon last year.

It’s incredible stuff. The two-song playlist below features the band playing “Desire As” followed by Paddy doing “Bonny.” But you should stream or buy the album so that you can hear Paddy’s acoustic version of “Desire As” and both versions of “When Love Breaks Down” and…

SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

—————-
Now playing: Prefab Sprout - Desire As (Acoustic Version)
via FoxyTunes

I was just playing around with Mixaloo…

Following some recent Seeqpodding, I wanted to check out the embedding. I can’t do that at my main blog, since WordPress.com does not allow embedding. So, let’s try it here, on the wild frontier of self-hosted WordPress.