Andux

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.

Talking of beta, I recently tried to get Habari going. One of the reasons it didn’t work was: Habari requires PHP 5; PHP 5 here at A Small Orange means 5.2; and 5.2 breaks WordPress.

I’ve just updated WordPress to the first beta of 2.3. I had some trouble with cPanel, which still seems rather unintuitive to me, but seem to have arrived in 2.3 territory. The main attraction of 2.3 for me is tags, so I’ll apply some of them to this post.

Update: the post is tagged with beta and tag, but how do the tags show up? I guess that a tag-aware theme would help, and that I’m not using one.

My route to a theme for this blog was as follows:

• Scott’s post on minimalist WordPress themes.
• Azeem’s White as Milk, which I use on my WPMU blog (which I have neglected of late).
• Thortz’ Skimmed Milk, which is based on WaM.

I downloaded the freshly-skimmed V1.1 of the theme, followed the Codex instructions for adding a theme using cPanel, and voila. I’ll think I’ll tinker with the theme a little; for example, I’d like the sidebar to be a little wider.

I’m here because I want to:

• Run a blog that’ll keep me in touch with old-school WordPress, even though my main blog is hosted by WordPress.com.
• Try Habari.
• Try a hosting service without spending too much money: A Small Orange seems to fit the bill, especially if you sign up for it using the affiliate link I just provided.