Many of you posted questions in the comments, and having to keep checking back to see if anyone has posted a reply can be tedious and time-consuming. Instead, you can now subscribe to a comment thread when you post a reply; any subsequent comments will generate a notification that is e-mailed to you, keeping you up to date. The e-mail will also contain a link to where you can manage all the threads you are subscribed to and remove yourself from any subscriptions, so you have full control over what e-mails you receive. So don’t be afraid to use this feature!

The feature is disabled/unchecked by default until you enable it. This means it is purely an opt-in subscription, to prevent connotations of spam, which we all hate. I have tried it out and it appears to be working, but let me know if you have any problems.

Future changes

I had considered going with a third-party/centralized fully-featured commenting system like DISQUS or IntenseDebate, since they offered other nice things such as threading, replying and much more user control over things. Additionally, the idea of your comments on one blog being part of your overall “identity” on the web expands the discussion and appeals to many active participants. From what I’ve seen of DISQUS on other sites, it appears to be very appealing.

However, I wasn’t sure of what direction things would move in after moving to a third-party commenting system, or what would happen to comments stored there. Recently, IntenseDebate was acquired by Automattic, the startup behind WordPress.com and the open source WordPress project, which of course powers this blog.

Since then, IntenseDebate has become an invite-only service. (if only temporarily) One would expect tighter integration with WordPress.com and IntenseDebate, but I’m not sure how this will affect the standalone WordPress with respect to whether IntenseDebate will work “better” with it than DISQUS. I am going to wait a while to see how this all plays out before making a move, but I expect to move to one of these systems in the future

I finally decided to move to Feedburner for managing the RSS feed for this site. I had known about Feedburner for a while but didn’t really look into them a lot, until their acquisition by Google piqued my interest. After using their service for a while, I can see why Google would want to buy this company - their service, even the free version, simply rocks.

Feedburner, at its most fundamental level, allows a publisher to keep track of the readership statistics regarding their feed. This makes it easy to manage your feeds, and see how many people are reading them, and look at the overall trends in readership level over a time period. Seeing as how Google Analytics offers this sort of service, but instead for your website, it’s easy to see why Google would want to make Feedburner part of their list of services.

In many respects, the services are very similar, both in features and interface. Both offer tools related to monetization (either the Google AdSense program or Feedburner’s ad network), and both offer thoroughly detailed stats on your readership base. There is some overlap, however, as Feedburner can also be used to track site usage statistics like Google Analytics. I’m interested to see how this changes as Feedburner becomes part of the Google empire. Feedburner also offers some interesting options for enhancing your feed, allowing you to add links to each entry in your feed for such options as “Email this”, “Comments Count” or “Digg this”. These options are very nice for helping to increase your site’s popularity. Another nice benefit of using Feedburner is that since your feed is accessed from their site, they’ll have a cached copy in case your server goes down. They also use some fancy-detection to enable the feed’s contents to show up in XHTML when a browser (non-news reader app) clicks on the link.

If you have a site, especially a blog, there’s simply no reason not to use Feedburner. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

As expected, a lot of the plugins I was using needed to be upgraded, which was somewhat of a tedious process. Most of them now work, though for some of them I was unable to find updated versions. However, they all seem to be working. Please let me know if you see something that isn’t working.

So, with the seemingly troublesome upgrade, why did I bother go forward with it? Well, it wasn’t that bad. Besides, I like messing with stuff. But the real reason was that WordPress 2.1 adds some nifty new features, such as auto-saving of your post as you’re writing it, similar to how Gmail saves your messages as you’re composing them. Anything that makes computers easier to use, and less of a headache, is worth upgrading to. WordPress is already one of the easiest (if not the easiest) systems to use, and this only makes it even better.

As a last note, I’m looking to upgrade the “related posts” part of my blog, which is the part that displays similar entries to the current one at the end of a post. Currently, I’m using the related posts functionality of Category Tagging Plugin, but I think it just looks at posts that have the same category/tag. I’ll probably move over to using the Related Entries Plugin, which actually uses a full text index to do comparisons to find similar posts. It’ll probably be a little more accurate.

As far as I know, Zooomr doesn’t offer any neat “photostream” widgets like Flickr does, but they do provide an RSS feed of your photos, so naturally, it was only time before a Zooomr Wordpress Plugin came around that took advantage of that RSS feed to offer photostream-like capability to your blog. I decided to give it a try, and was quite impressed. It’s simple, but works well, as you can fully control the format in which your photos are displayed. It’s a nice workaround/solution until Zooomr decides to implement something themselves.

So why do I not use Flickr? Well, it basically boils down to cost - Flickr’s only really good if you have a Pro account, which costs money. Being a cheap student, I have limited cash right now - but don’t get me wrong, I do think Flickr rocks. In fact, in terms of features, I do believe Flickr has Zooomr beat, despite my willingness to switch. With Flickr, it’s far easier to edit a bunch of photos, to change their tags, titles and other metadata using the drag & drop batch edit mode. Flickr also has more intuitive navigation within sets and some other small differences that make the user experience better. But that’s enough; I don’t intend for this to be a Flickr vs. Zooomr entry, as there are already posts about that available.

I do hope, however, that Zooomr continues to improve as it moves out of beta. (And possibly into gamma!)

However, this design constraint also imposes some problems on people with higher resolution screens who want the website to use more of the available space. (I personally run at 1280×1024, but prefer the smaller, fixed width as easier to read due to the smaller line lengths.) Well, taking a cue from some websites out there, I decided to implement a style sheet switcher that would allow users to pick which format they wanted. It’s now available - see that icon in the upper right corner that looks like this?

Simply click on it to toggle between a fixed a fluid-width layout, and view this site how you like it. At this time, I have no plans to add other different styles, as in my mind a simple switcher like this is all that’s needed. And, I don’t really feel like a re-design at this time; I think this current design is good at least for a few more months. (On a somewhat unrelated note, I’m currently working on a WordPress theme for public release though, stay tuned for more details.)

How’s it work?

The script I used was an older one, written by Paul Sowden for A List Apart. It’s almost five years old, but still works great with a few slight changes. What’s cool about it is that it saves your selected style in a cookie, so upon return, the website will know which format you prefer. So, while Firefox users have always had the ability to switch style sheets, this script adds to that by saving the user’s selection for future reference. The script also works fairly well across browsers; I’ve tested it in the latest versions of Firefox, IE and Opera.

I’ve also made it so that the script downgrades well - if for some reason, JavaScript is not enabled on a user’s browser, the style switcher icon will not be present. They will still be able to switch styles if their browser provides this functionality, though.

One hitch I ran into was with the use of this script with the IE7 fixes library by Dean Edwards. Using IE6, the style switcher doesn’t quite work; when clicked, the styles do not toggle, but the settings are saved via cookies. Thus, a reload of the page is needed to see the effect - not exactly ideal, and it makes it look completely broken. So, for the time being, I’ve disabled the IE7 fixes, and so far, nothing seems to be whacky with the layout of the site when viewed in IE6. (Dropping the IE7 scripts also will save about 24 KB in bandwidth per page viewed in IE as well.) There are other javascript style sheet switchers out there, so I may give them a try to see if they’re compatible, or if I have even more time, try to write my own. But the “problem” might be with the IE7 fixes.

Not that I mean to putdown the IE7 fixes - they’ve been a great asset at times when I’ve been too frustrated to figure out why IE was borking on some piece of CSS. I highly recommend IE7 if you’ve been pulling your hair out over some layout problem. I haven’t yet had a “real” problem with it, but as always, I try to use this sorts of fixes as a last resort - let’s see how long I can hold out for, and let me know if you notice any layout problems.

So, what do the effects look like? Well, take a look for yourself:

Click on any image, and the larger, linked original image will popup and overlay the page - from here you can even go back and forward through the image set, by clicking on the left or right side of the current image. What’s even more neat is that if for some reason JavaScript is not enabled in your browser, the links still work as normal - opening up the location to the original image. You can still open the image link a new window if you so desire.

The advent of useful and productive JavaScript libraries and/or frameworks has allowed developers to focus on adding functionality, rather than worry about nitty-gritty details such as browser incompatibilities or implementing low-level features. The Prototype JavaScript Framework is one of the most popular, having been integrated into the Ruby on Rails project, and also forming the foundation for other JavaScript effect libraries. New-comers like the Yahoo! User Interface Library also add to the lot, making things like implementing Ajax a lot easier.

One of the most impressive JavaScript effects libraries has been the Scriptaculous project. Based on Prototype, this slick library of effects isn’t your parents circa-1999 JavaScript, and instead focuses on implementing effects that enhance user experience, rather than assaulting them with a myriad of colour changes, popups and other “script-kiddie-like” JavaScript. Lightbox was one of the scripts written that used Scriptaculous to good effect, making links to images load in the same window with a nice effect, all while maintaining full backwards-compatibility, something sorely missed from “old-school” JavaScript.

Litebox merely improved upon this already great script, by reducing file size and hence bandwidth usage.

Update (2006-07-20)

There are also a few lightbox plugins for WordPress out there. Check them out if you’re interested.

The first bugs I noticed were WordPress adding backslashes (”\”) before some quotes in comments and link descriptions, either after they had been posted or edited. This appeared to be an improper call to the PHP addslashes() function, since it was translating phrases like “it’s” into “it\’s”, and is the common way to escape a string before input in to something like a SQL statement. However, it appears it was being called more than once.

I found no way to get rid of the backslashes, other than manually editing the table record, and furthermore, didn’t know how to fix this behaviour. I figured I’d just deal with it, since I don’t really blog that much, and surely a new version will be out soon.

But, while browsing one day, I found this post detailing another blogger’s experience with these bugs. Luckily, they had been more persistant than I, and had found a helpful link to a “tuneup” plugin that specifically fixed these problems introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. I just installed it, and everything appears to be back to normal. I’m not sure why the WordPress crew hasn’t decided to announce and link to this fix, as I think it’s quite essential for proper operation.

Recommended as a “must-have” plugin for WordPress 2.0.3.

Firstly, there are just so many tagging plugins out there, that I have a tough time deciding which ones are good, or even which ones have the features I want. (Or even what features I want!) Reading up on other people’s personal experiences, while useful, is also very time-consuming, but I’ve run into a few potential plugins.

Firstly, Ultimate Tag Warrior seems to be a feature-rich plugin that should have everything I’d ever need. Besides tagging support, it also offers support for weighted tag clouds, similar to what you have at del.icio.us. But, since it keeps tags separate from categories (not a bad thing), it uses its own table for tag storage, which could create problems when upgrading. But this is a minor problem, as I’m sure a writing a script for the upgrade conversion would be trivial. But, I’ve also heard some negativity about it, and from playing around with it for a bit, it seems to have almost too many features for me.

This category-tagging plugin also looks decent. In contrast to Ultimate Tag Warrior, it just uses the WordPress categories as tags, and thus shouldn’t have to rely on any other tables besides WordPress’ own. This plugin thus probably does the least modification, and this is good since less is often more. An additional benefit is that no more work would be required in order to display tags, since categories would become tags. It also includes nice functions such as a weighted tag cloud. Yet another plugin, Cat2Tag also seems to provide similar functionality to this one. These plugins would also probably be the best option in considering future versions of WordPress - I believe it’s likely that categories will be supplanted by tags in the next major version.

But maybe the main reason for my apprehension is my unnatural like of the structure of categories. You see, tags have become such a big thing because they are easy to use, and natural to most everyone. But for me, it seems to be the opposite. Despite not being able to deny the usefulness of tags, I would still like to have categories alongside them. For me, tags can be too open-ended, but perhaps this is just in the sematics of how tags are used - I suppose tags can be just as structured as categories. Perhaps a good compromise would be categories for the main subject and tagging for keywords; this would provide a good structure and still have the good metadata of tags. This would also eliminate the need for a nightmare hierarchy of categories and sub-categories. (Ultimate Tag Warrior could provide this functionality.)

But, maybe I’ll just have to learn to deal with a tags-only system if and when WordPress switches over to tags. In the meantime, I’ll probably be fence-sitting, undecided on what to do, and inevitably, stuck without tags.

Update

I’ve decided to go with the simple, but effective Category Tagging Plugin for WordPress, since it uses WordPress’ own categories as “tags”, and so integrates nicely while at the same time providing much-needed “Related Posts” and “Tag Cloud” functions. The fact that it doesn’t create another table for the tags makes it easy to switch out from using this plugin, should the need arise. Stay tuned for more details.

The current setup is running WordPress on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) setup hosted by Site5. I chose WordPress because firstly, it’s a great blogging platform, and secondly, it’s written in PHP, which I’m familiar with, so tinkering with it should be easier for me. Thus, customization, which I love to do, shouldn’t be all that hard, and I should get a good return on any investment in time I spend in tweaking WordPress. Building this site should be a fun learning experience, though I should probably also learn look more into Linux and Apache, which haven already been taken care of for me, but that’s for another day.

The current theme I’m using (and have designed) for WordPress is still undergoing changes as I tweak it to my liking, and as always, comments are appreciated. You may also notice changes as I slowly port relevant posts from my previous setup(s) to this new platform, so you may find a few backposts that pre-date this welcome. Do not be surprised.

Lastly, I hope you find something interesting here to read, and if not, it’s still a great place for me to collect my thoughts.