A new release of WordPress — version 2.6.2 — was recently made available. This is primarily a security-related release with a few bug fixes. More info here:

WordPress 2.6.2

Release details describing the fixes are here:

WordPress Trac query for version 2.6.2

More information from Lorelle on WordPress:

WordPress 2.6.2 Mandatory Upgrade

and from Keith Dsouza:

WordPress 2.6.2 Released, Mandatory Update

Once again, I recommend Keith’s WordPress Automatic Upgrade, having just run it on both of my sites with complete success. I can’t read the upgrade instructions as fast as Keith’s plugin takes care of the upgrade for me….

Good luck upgrading!

So… I think I’ve finally gotten this site and afewgoodlenses pretty well situated, and it’s time to switch my focus back to the kind of content I’ve wanted to develop all along. As my regular readers might have guessed from the flurry of activity around here lately, I’m between classes. I won’t be starting up again until mid-October, so that has given me a few months to do all this, and hopefully crank up a regular level of writing (and photoblogging!) that I can maintain fairly well once classes resume. I’m not sure if it will actually work out that way; I find it pretty hard to keep the blog updated when I’m in a class, so let me just say I have a goal of trying to do that, and we’ll see what happens. Priorities, you know….

I had forgotten about one last plugin that I had already deployed on afewgoodlenses until this evening when I was reading some comments left on my most recent delicious links post by Cooper and Rod. The Get Recent Comments plugin by Krischan Jodies lets you embed code in your sidebars (or elsewhere on your site) that fetches and displays as many comments as you want from your posts. As with many of the great plugins I’ve written about so far, Get Recent Comments provides a comprehensive set of configuration options you can use to tailor the appearance of the comments. Among other things, you can configure the number of comments you want to appear, the maximum number of comments to display from any single post, and the number of characters to show per comment. You can also restrict comments to only those posts from certain categories and display Gravatars for folks that have an account there. You have complete control over the appearance of comments via several templates provided with the plugin that you can change as you wish or just use the defaults. In my implementation in the sidebar to the right of this article, I’ve used the default templates, and selected my favorite setup option — which groups the comments under the post title so that visitors can see the flow of comments on a particular article and get there very easily. This is definitely one of the top plugins in my opinion, especially because of the options it provides.

In the coming days, I’ll pick up up on a a couple of article series that I’ve not finished yet. I developed a number of articles (already posted here) from my research into Oakland Cemetery,and have one more that’s nearly complete and will appear here shortly. I doubt that this next one will be the last one, since my explorations extended out into my neighborhood and took me down several paths into Atlanta’s early history, and I doubt that that I can stop writing about it all any time soon.

I wrote an earlier article on the book No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life by Heather Menzies, which examines the relationship between time and technology, and discusses its effects on modern life, modern society, and culture. I finished the book a long time ago, and many of the author’s ideas still resonate for me. From about twenty notecards I accumulated while reading the book, I plan at least two more articles. There are some areas where I disagree with Menzies’ conclusions that I’d like to explore also, and I’ll be interested in any reactions my assessment of this book generates here. It will be fun to debate what Menzies has to say, since she puts forth some very compelling questions about how technology effects us that I believe should be explored. I also stumbled across a companion book along the same lines, but with a more personal focus, called The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity by Stefan Klein. I will play those books off each other, so to speak, and see where that takes me.

I also just finished reading Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos by Elizabeth Hanson — a really fine exploration of the genesis and history of zoos in the United States from the early American Victorian period through the end of the twentieth century. Zoo Atlanta gets several mentions in the book, as its history is very typical of zoos throughout the country. Discussion of zoos, American culture, American interest in animals and nature, and the rise of leisure time in the Victorian period are deftly woven into the story of zoological history, in this very unique book. I think I’ll attempt a traditional book review and post it here, just to see how that goes.

I’m also planning a series of articles that will contain reflections on my undergraduate history classes and the amazing learning experience that has turned out to be. The series will be called “Excerpts from My Education” — where, at least in part, I’ll use many of the forty or so papers I’ve written for the classes so far as starting points for articles. The first one, possibly two weeks down the road, will cover the class I just finished, Pacific Asia: Culture and History.

As always, thanks for stopping by, thanks for reading … and … stay tuned!

Continuing this series of articles…

Some Thoughts On WordPress 2.6 (and Plugins Galore) – Part Two
Some Thoughts On WordPress 2.6 (and Plugins Galore) – Part One
Site Updates!! WordPress 2.6

… I wanted to describe a few more plugins I’ve installed on this site and/or afewgoodlenses.

On Saturday, I installed Lightbox 2 from Rupert Morris on both of my sites. Lightbox 2 is one of several similar plugins that add real snap to the appearance of images on a site, and I especially like it on afewgoodlenses. When you click any single image from an article, the background fades to black (or gray, dark gray, or white, your choice) and your visitor can page through the full-sized versions of your images. I liked all the lightbox plugins a lot; this one turned out to be my favorite just because I liked the way the display looked and the color-changing options. I did notice one thing about the lighbox plugins (all of them that I tried) that I don’t understand: the images displayed in the sidebars by scripts like the Flickr badge or MyBlogLog recent viewers are not overlayed by the lightbox images. I’m sure that’s something about Javascript that I don’t understand, but I’m curious about it if anyone can explain it.

I also installed Postalicious by Pablo Gómez Basanta. This post was created by Postalicious, which mimics the delicious daily blog posting function, with much, much greater flexibility than what delicious provides. You can configure a comprehensive set of options for automatically posting delicious links to your blog, by setting such things as a minimum number of bookmarks, the timings between posts, a scheduled time for posting, and an hourly search for new bookmarks. You also have control over the appearance and content of the generated post, with the additional options of specifying a layout for the titles or bookmarks, as well as date and time formats. And, if that wasn’t enough, here are my two favorite features: you can instruct Postalicious to create all new posts as drafts for you to edit later; and you can collect recent bookmarks into a post on demand by simply pressing a button. Smashing! I turned off the delicious daily blog posting function as soon as I saw what Postalicious had to offer.

I am looking into a sporadic problem I’m having with afewgoodlenses, where the WordPress wp_options table is getting corrupted. It happened twice on the weekend (and when it happened, my heart almost stopped when I accessed my site and was prompted to install WordPress), but hasn’t happened since. In both cases, I lost my Internet connection while writing a post using Windows Live Writer, so that may be the root cause. In any case, the experience prompted me to install the WordPress Clean Options plugin — but, honestly, I need to spend a little more time learning about the things it told me about wp_options.

In one of the previous posts, I mentioned that I hadn’t explored the new media library capabilities of WordPress, because I’m using Windows Live Writer to post images and articles. I directed you to a short training video, Managing the WordPress Media Library, but also now wanted to point you to this fine article from Rodney Smith of Hippo Web Solutions:

Managing images with the WordPress media manager

Thanks, Rod! Thanks for stopping by and for taking time to write that article.

Finally, please take a few minutes to read this excellent piece on WordPress and the WordPress community by Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection:

Be Kind, Educate

Mark’s article means a lot to me because, as I spend all this time gradually building — and building up — my two sites, I sometimes get a little discouraged about the amount of actual admin or maintenance work it takes to keep things moving. And, of course — like everyone — I get frustrated when something doesn’t work and it’s a struggle to figure out what’s gone wrong and get it working again. To be fair, the problem is almost never WordPress or a WordPress plugin; more likely, it’s one of the many sites and services that are connected to the blogs that are hiccupping in one way or another.

As I have probably said somewhere here before, I’m not a PHP or MySQL programmer, though I have a smattering of HTML and some web design skill. What I do have, however, is a technical background in various platforms that goes back decades, a willingness to experiment, and a fairly high degree of tolerance for stuff that goes in the ditch. And, I think, I do a decent job of explaining how I do things, or how I fix things, or, sometimes, how I just get over things when the doing and the fixing doesn’t work. So, even though I never intended for either of my sites to have a technical orientation, I realized after reading what Mark had to say that part of being a member of this community means sharing those technical and personal experiences  that make the community what it is. Bravo, Mark, and this post is my answer to the questions you posed at the close of your article.

A bug-fix release of WordPress — version 2.6.1 — was made available today. More info here:

WordPress 2.6.1

Release details describing the 60+ fixes included here:

WordPress Trac query for version 2.6.1

Download here:

Download WordPress

I’ve run the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to upgrade both of my sites, and all’s well.

Recently I wrote a little bit about my experiences so far with WordPress version 2.6 and a few of the new plugins I’ve been able to use since upgrading from version 2.0.2. One of the first things I noticed about the upgrade — owing partly, I imagine, to the fact that I upgraded across several releases at once — was that the WordPress dashboard and everything I do there is much, much faster than it was with the earlier version. Aside from performance, though, the dashboard has a clean and well-organized new look, along with a lot of new and improved functionality. Here are a few things I’ve noticed that I’ve made use of so far; for a complete description of the new features in each version, check the Release Category on the WordPress development blog.

1. Pages can be assigned a page order. I think this capability existed in the earlier version, but I noticed that those template elements that display links to pages actually respect that order now … so if you want pages that are displayed in a drop down menu or in the template (depending on your template capabilities) to appear in a certain order, you can control that.
2. Categories are much easier to manage. Better yet, you can create new categories (and even assign a parent relationship) on the fly as you’re writing a new post. If you use Windows Live Writer, WL allows you to do the same thing, and updates the categories on your site accordingly.
3. I know tags have been added, though I think in a previous version. I haven’t explored their usage yet, but I do see you can have WordPress convert your categories to tags, so I may try that soon.
4. I also haven’t explored the new Media Library, since I upload any images via Windows Live Writer and I don’t know how, or even if, the two work together. However, there’s a nice video tutorial on the Media Library here: Managing the WordPress Media Library
5. The way plugins can now be managed may be my favorite new feature. When you first go you’re WordPress dashboard, you may see a bright red number above the "Plugins" link on the right side of the Admin panel — to let you know that one or more of your plugins has a new release available. On the plugins page itself, you can choose to download the update or install it automatically — both of which I’ve done several times, and it works well. You can also now delete a plugin from this page, rather than go to your web host to delete it. Recently active (but currently inactive) and inactive plugins are separated from the active plugins list, making the plugin page much better organized.
6. A few other miscellaneous features I like:
   - You can now see post word counts when writing posts (helps keep me from writing too much (yeah, right!!)).
   - You can drag the "Press this" bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, then use it to create a post from any web page.
   - Links to related dashboard pages are available from many more of the individual screens.
   - WordPress creates post revisions that you can see, use, and compare to the current version of an article.
   - WordPress now handles e-mail notifications that WP 2.0.2 couldn’t handle without additional plugins.

Now to the really fun stuff….

I’m using quite a few plugins now, many more than I was using on this site when it was at the previous WordPress version, so for this article I’ve separated them into three groups. Content Management Plugins are those I’m using to control what content is displayed on various pages, and how much. Comments Plugins include those that improve visitors’ experiences with respect to leaving, reading, or following comments. Miscellaneous Plugins include those that make site administration and management a little easier.

In the following, I’ve linked to the developer’s plugin home page, as provided on the WordPress plugins section of the Dashboard. I thought that you might find that more useful, as there is typically more information about the plugin, the developer, and reactions and other commentary from many users there that’s more detailed than in the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can download plugins from either place, though occasionally you may see a beta version or brand new release on the developer’s page that’s not yet released to the Directory.

Content Management Plugins

These are all new to me, and I found most of them while trying to decide how I wanted my photoblog to look. Advanced Category Excluder, for example, lets you decide what categories you want to hide from certain site sections or functions. You can selectively exclude categories from the archive pages (that is, the pages displayed when your visitor selects a single category or date), from the home page, from RSS feed posts or comments, or from searches. On this site, I’m only using this plugin (right now, anyway) to exclude the category internet clippings from the home page. I use this category solely for bookmarks I’ve saved on delicious that are posted back to this site by the delicious daily blog posting function. I felt like the delicious posts created here distracted from the flow of the main page articles, but I still wanted to include them and provided a separate link to those articles under "Navigation" in the sidebar.

Custom Query String Reloaded provides a way to control the amount of content that’s displayed in several sections of the blog. By default, the WordPress setting (on the Admin panel’s Reading tab) for "Blog pages show at most" defines the number of posts that appear on the main page and all category or archive pages. Custom Query String Reloaded lets you override that based on different criteria: archives, authors, categories,  search pages, RSS feeds, pages, and tags. On this site, I am overriding my setting of five posts on the main page with 20 posts for the category and monthly archive pages, and 40 posts for the category internet clippings. On afewgoodlenses, I have set the home page to display only two posts to draw attention to specific recent photographs, but set the various archive pages to show 20 posts, making the site function more like a gallery or a content management system. With Custom Query String Reloaded, you can also set the post order to ascending or descending date, whichever you prefer.

Last night I added the Last.fm RPS plugin to this site; you can see the results directly under "Listen to My Music" in the sidebar. The Last.fm RPS plugin displays album covers for music I’ve recently listened to on that site (or when using Windows Media Player on my computer). The Last.fm radio widget and the moving album cover images below that are available using scripts you can get from Last.fm.

Microkid’s Related Posts is one of my favorite plugins, and I will gradually deploy it all throughout the site, including archive articles. This plugin adds related post functionality to the WordPress Write pages, letting you search through your posts by keyword and include a list of related posts. I like this particular plugin because connecting posts is partly automated and partly manual, giving me control over the relationships I want to create. And, for more fun, if you are writing Post A and create a related entry to Post B, the plugin automatically updates Post B to contain the related post link back to Post A. Grrreeeaaatttt You can see an example of this plugin in action at the end of this article.

Snazzy Archives lets you create an image-based representation of your posts on any page you want. The plugin is very simple and straightforward to use and works great. Click here for Snazzy Archives on this site; or click here for Snazzy Archives on my photoblog — where it’s even more visually compelling (or will be, once I get more posts with photos out there). 

The last of the content management plugins — WP-Print — reformats the post for printing. I originally installed it because I wanted to be able to print previous posts when I was working on a series of articles like this one. I hope my readers occasionally benefit from it too.

Comments Plugins

Yay! I was finally able to deploy some decent plugins for comments on this site. So, you know, leave some comments — and tell all your friends to do the same!

Better Comments Manager adds excellent functionality to the WordPress Admin panel from which you can manage comments much more effectively. Among other improvements over the standard WordPress comments functions, you can reply to comments directly from the Admin panel rather than visiting your site. You can also edit, delete, approve or unapprove, view all comments on a post, and mark comments as spam.

Brian’s Threaded Comments lets visitors post comments by replying to others, and displays the relationships by indenting each comment after the first. I also just like the way it makes comments look on the site, much cleaner and easier to read. Better Comments Manager also integrates well with this plugin, allowing you to reply as a threaded comment when using the Better Comments Manager Admin panel enhancement.

Comment E-mail Responder is the only comments plugin I used on the old version of the site. I always liked the fact that it would allow me to reply to a specific comment (from the article itself) and it would shoot an e-mail to the respondent. I may use it less now, because I also installed Subscribe to Comments — which does exactly what it’s name says, lets visitors subscribe to e-mail notifications containing new comments. I figure if readers want the responses, they’ll subscribe, so will use Comment E-mail Responder judiciously.

These four comments plugins should help improve any visitor’s experience, and help kick start conversations and keep them going. I always liked sites that I saw that employed Brian’s Threaded Comments and Subscribe to Comments in particular, and I’m glad to now be able to include them here on mine.

Miscellaneous Plugins

I am of course using one of the standard WordPress plugins for managing spam — Akismet — on both of my sites. I’ve always been impressed with Akismet, and it seems that if the spam-catching capabilities in Microsoft Outlook or in my ISP’s spam filters were even half as good as Akismet, junk e-mail would be a thing of the past. I often check what Akismet marks as spam just to see how it’s doing, and in the nearly 15,000 spam-catches Akismet has made, I only noticed one legitimate comment show up. You can’t get much better than that….

WordPress 2.6 introduced revisioning and autosave functionality. A revision was created every time a post was saved, and autosave had some timer in it that automatically saved a post (and maybe saved it as a revision) at specified intervals. Since I use Windows Live Writer for almost all of my blog writing, the revision and autosave feature didn’t interest me that much. And, oddly, the revisions were not displayed on the Write page on this site (though they were on my other site), even though I could see them in my database. If you don’t like these features, you can install and activate Disable Revisions and Autosave as I have.

The No Self Pings plugin eliminates something about writing articles in WordPress that has always annoyed me  — the creation of a pingback (which would appear as a comment on a post) whenever I linked to my own site from inside an article. So, in effect, it makes it unnecessary to go back and clean up after your newly posted article pings your site.

Broken Link Checker scans all your articles and their internal links to verify that none of them are broken. I haven’t kept this plugin continuously active, though did check my entire site after upgrading and changing many of my categories, and, happily, there were no broken links.

I described Theme Test Drive in the previous article in this series. It’s a useful and excellent tool, allowing you to make and check out theme changes before committing them for your visitors to see.

Finally, and as I also mentioned in the previous article, WordPress Automatic Upgrade is nothing short of a miracle as far as I’m concerned. I almost look forward to the next version of WordPress, just so I can run it again.

That’s it for the plugin list. I know this has turned out to be a very long article, but I thought some folks might benefit from my experiences with them and from the reasons I’m using some of them. I’m looking into a few others, but haven’t installed them yet, including:

All-in-One SEO Pack, which I’ll activating and setting up soon;
Google XML Sitemaps, which I’ll install as soon as I understand why I need a sitemap; and
Tubepress, which will bring my selected YouTube content to the sidebars.

… so will have more to say about those after a while….

Thanks for reading!

… and it’s time to find a new stats tool….

I just spent three hours messing with my WordPress plugins and debugging the site modifications I put in recently, assuming I had done something to cause Internet Explorer (though not Firefox or Opera) to go in the ditch whenever this site was accessed. Block of code by block of code, I plodded through all my modifications, adding them back one little bit at a time … until I discovered it was the SiteMeter statistics script that was making Internet Explorer fail. Of course the SiteMeter script was in the last of the three sidebars, at the very end… because, well, that’s where most people put it!

Internet Explorer kept putting up an error that said "Internet Explorer can’t open the internet site http://www.afewgoodpens.com." It was only after I pulled out the SiteMeter script that I tried to go to their home page … and got the same error message, referencing their site. As of a few minutes ago, it was still happening.

More information here, including tips on removing the script and shortcuts to Google searches showing wide coverage of the problem:

Sitemeter Crashing Web Sites Using Internet Explorer on August 1, 2008

Google Search: sitemeter internet explorer

Google Blog Search: sitemeter internet explorer

As if keeping up with a blog or website wasn’t time-consuming enough….

Update:

On Saturday afternoon, SiteMeter posted an explanation and apology here:

SiteMeter IE Issues Resolved

I won’t be using SiteMeter on this site any longer. I’ve switched to Google Analytics.

Now that I’ve updated this site from WordPress 2.0.2 to version 2.6, and completed migrating my theme changes from the old theme, I thought I would devote an article or two to some of the things I learned during that process — and at the same time, relate my early impressions of the new version as well as some of the plugins I’ve installed, most for the first time. Since I made such a long version-leap, I don’t know that much about how and when some of the new features came about; to me, it’s all new to 2.6. And I’m not going to cover everything that’s new; instead, I’ll include those things that have caught my attention so far while maintaining this site, or maintaining the new one, my afewgoodlenses.com photoblog.

I installed version 2.5 on afewgoodlenses first, as a "from scratch" installation that I took on mainly because I had never loaded WordPress to a host myself, and wanted to learn how to do it. My older site, this one, had originally been a Yahoo! one-click install, and as a result I had no idea how the installation process worked. I’d been poking around for about six months, digging up whatever I could on what I might expect upgrading the Yahoo! install myself. While there’s a lot of information out there, the key to a successful Yahoo! install or upgrade is spelled out in this article on the WordPress Codex:

User:MichaelH/Installation Notes/Yahoo

The short version is simply that Yahoo! doesn’t set up a user’s MySql database with access rights that allow a WordPress install or upgrade to run successfully, and this article explains how to address that. For those who are squeamish about such things, I’ll just say that I’m a database novice in many ways; while I have plenty of database design experience and can poke around and write some SQL queries, I had no idea about the database that drives WordPress or about database administration utilities like "phpmyadmin." Nevertheless, by reading this article (several times!) and following it carefully, I was able to set the database rights correctly, install WordPress on afewgoodlenses, upgrade afewgoodlenses from version 2.5 to 2.6, and upgrade the original Yahoo! install of this site from 2.0.2 to 2.6.

I did both upgrades using Keith Dsouza’s WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin, a heaven-sent plugin if there ever was one. I sat here at my desk one Friday evening deciding, finally, that if WPAU upgraded afewgoodlenses successfully, I was going to dive in and try it on this site. Both upgrades, obviously, were highly successful. I do mention a couple of quirky things that happened in the previous article — but they were minor and didn’t stop the show from going forward at all.

Since this site’s old theme worked quite well with WP 2.6, I spent a long time (days, in fact) trying out different themes until I found one I really liked. I had previously chosen a theme (called Munch) developed by miloIIIVII for afewgoodlenses, and found many of her themes right up my alley from a design perspective. I ended out choosing a second miloIIIVII theme for this site, the Garden theme. I couldn’t be more pleased with the appearance and functionality of both sites, and I certainly hope my visitors like them too.

While trying out different themes, I found the WordPress theme preview function (that runs automatically when you select a new theme) very useful. Once I started migrating changes from the old theme, however, I used a great plugin called Theme Test Drive by Vladimir Prelovac. Theme Test Drive lets you activate and use a new theme while you’re signed in at the admin panel, but visitors to your site see the original theme. With Theme Test Drive, you can make changes and apply them to your new theme, leaving the old one intact until you’re done. And unlike the WordPress theme preview, the theme as presented by Theme Test Drive is fully functional, so you can test as much as you want before committing your changes.

I had quite a few customizations to my old theme, more than I realized. I had about thirty distinct changes to move over, and it took a few hours but was really quite painless. I still have some tidying up to do on both sites, but both are fully functional. I don’t have any significant advice to give about migrating customizations, other than take your time and be patient … and, before you start, make sure you have a copy of the unmodified theme so you can, if necessary, easily replace a file. My fingers flutter all over the keyboard a lot, and you’d by surprised how easy it is to accidentally paste something over the entire contents of a theme file and hit save before you can stop yourself. The backup is good insurance, and it’s a good idea to do it again after you’ve migrated your changes and gotten the site running. Oh, and remember to indicate in the file itself where you’ve made changes, to make them easy to find if you need to change or remove them. Just keep in mind that any comments you key in may be visible to anyone who uses a function like "view page source" in Firefox when they access your site.

This is getting quite long (no surprise to any of my regular readers, I’m sure), so I’ll break here and pick up on the plugins in more detail tomorrow, along with more on WP 2.6. I ended out installing about a dozen plugins that I could never use before (either because of the database issue I described above, or because they weren’t compatible as far back as WP 2.0.2). All of them give me much more control of the site’s appearance, navigation, links, and functionality. I’m sure I’ll add more as time goes on, but the one’s I’ve got running so far have made it possible to do things with both sites that I had wanted to do all along with this one, but never could….

Stay tuned… and thanks, as always, for stopping by….

Ahhhh… finally! This afternoon I finished moving all the modifications I had done to this site’s previous theme, so here we are with the relaunch of afewgoodpens. I still have some tweaking I want to do with the site’s appearance, and I have not — so far — decided whether to move any of the Google or Amazon ads from the previous version of this site. I think I’ll take a little time to re-think the whole monetization thing … I might like to veer away from the standard approach a little and see who besides Amazon and Google have something to offer.

I’ll have a longer post up tomorrow about the experience of migrating the theme modifications, along with a few notes on the plugins I’ve been able to incorporate into this site now that it’s at the most recent release of WordPress … which, by the way, really ROCKS from what I’ve seen so far….

Stay tuned!

Hmmmmmmm….

Through a series of mis-steps this evening, I managed to quite effectively destroy my fledgling photoblog, afewgoodlenses. It wasn’t as hard as you might think, and I did it while trying to solve a "problem" that really didn’t need solving, after reading this article:

Giving WordPress its Own Directory While Leaving Your Blog in the Root Directory

There’s certainly nothing wrong with this article, or with the instructions. The change is appropriate to a situation where you’ve installed WordPress in a subfolder (such as "blog") but don’t want users to have to key in a URL that includes "blog" to get to your site. And following the instructions worked, but I didn’t like the fact that after I got it working, keying in the following URL…

http://www.afewgoodlenses.com/blog/

… exposed the directory structure for my site. So, I attempted to reverse the procedure, got it wonky somehow, and afewgoodlenses became inaccessible. I tried for an hour or so to twitch things around and get it functioning again, but finally gave up. Someone with more WordPress experience than I have would probably have been able to figure it out, but I couldn’t and decided to just reinstall WordPress and start over.

It occurred to me after I cleared my WordPress database that I probably could have backed it up and restored the contents to the freshly installed tables, but having not done that before probably would have gotten me in even deeper.

I had previously been using an HTML redirect to send users from www.afewgoodlenses.com to www.afewgoodlenses.com/blog … and have reverted to that approach now that the site is back up and running.

On the bright side, the theme modifications I made so far remained intact and the photos I had posted were still on my host, so it’s just a matter of setting up categories again and re-posting them — which I’ll do over the next couple of evenings. In the meantime, if you linked to any of the posts on afewgoodlenses, the link is now broken and will likely have a different URL when I repost the articles. My apologies for the inconvenience, but you may want to remove those links.

The experience does raise a couple of questions in my mind about backing up a WordPress installation, something I’ve never even looked into. Please post suggestions in the comment section if you have any experience with that; I’d be especially interested in hearing from any one who has actually restored a WordPress backup successfully.

Thanks for reading!

Last night I updated this site to the most recent version of WordPress. I ran the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin with great success, first using it on my still-under-construction photoblog — afewgoodlenses.com — then holding my breath and taking the plunge on this site. I had installed WordPress for the photoblog a couple of months ago to learn about setting up a site from scratch on my own (as opposed to using the automated install Yahoo! provides), and it was an update from version 2.5. I had no issues with that upgrade, with the minor exception of being unable to log in toward the end of the upgrade (when the tool attempted to reactivate plugins). Clearing private data in Firefox solved that problem.

Upgrading this site — which was at version 2.0.2 and was a Yahoo! install originally — also went quite well despite a couple of minor problems. The plugin wouldn’t activate at first, though I’ve experienced that on occasion with other plugins so I know it has nothing to do with the plugin itself. It’s either a Yahoo! hosting issue or a WordPress 2.0.2 issue, which, strangely, seems to happen more often when I access the plugin panel with Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. So even though Firefox is my default browser, switching to IE got the plugin activated and I was able to continue.

The upgrade plugin does two backups at the very start, and provides links to download the zip files it creates to your computer. The links didn’t work; Yahoo! kept returning a 404 page-not-found error, so I used FTP (FileZilla, an excellent FTP utility) to locate and download the zip files myself. After this, the remaining steps in the upgrade completed normally, in about five minutes.

I was surprised — though I’m not sure why — that the theme I’m currently using still worked. I hadn’t expected that, had chosen a new theme to replace it, and will probably still do so when I can spend a few hours (or days, which is more likely) customizing it.

I did run into two problems that required correction. First, I was unable to navigate the site using the “previous” link at the bottom of the page, which turned out to be a problem with the permalinks. I don’t know why this problem occurs, but I think it has to do with the way Yahoo! handles permalinks, which are structured as “friendly links” containing the day a post is created and the post title. Recreating them didn’t work, though setting them to the WordPress default style did work. Switching to the default permalink style, however, meant that all my internal linking was busted, and any external links to posts or pages on my site would no longer work. I found a solution to the problem here…

Updating Permalinks when moving to WordPress 2.5

… which consisted of installing and activating the plugin Tony Adam describes and recreating the original permalink structure. I have no idea what “canonical redirects” are, but the solution worked great!

The second problem, a strange one, was that none of my category descriptions came over from the old version of the site. The WordPress categories panel showed a couple dozen blank lines instead of the categories, and even displayed the number of posts in each (blank!) category. I wasn’t able to find a solution for that problem that I understood how to employ, so I ended out deleting all the blank categories, creating fresh ones, and reassigning categories to each of the posts. With about 90 articles on this site, it took me a couple of hours to get it done, which wasn’t too bad but certainly wouldn’t have been an appealing option if I had hundreds of posts.

So… overall I think the upgrade was a smashing success, and, with that (and quite a bit of non-blogging life-stuff that has kept me busy for the past few months) behind me, please stay tuned while I catch up on my networking activities and start churning out some new content.

Thanks, as always, for reading and for stopping by….

For the past couple of weeks, I had noticed that most of the Google ads appearing on the home page of my site were for credit card offers, credit repair services, credit-no-matter-how-much-your-credit-sucks offers, and so on … and I was puzzled about why ads of that type kept appearing. Since the ads are supposed to be contextual, it didn’t seem like any of my posts supported them — especially when I would look at other pages and the ads did seem to reflect my post content very accurately.

I was doing some general cleanup on the site on Friday evening, and ran the site through an RSS feed validator to see how it fared. That’s when I saw errors referencing hundreds of links that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t take me long to track the links to my WordPress header.php file, where I found this:

Click the picture to see it full-sized. It’s obvious to me now that Google was generating ads for my site based on this content. There were, in all, about 600 such links at the very end of header.php. I didn’t put them there, and I don’t know anything about the two sites you can see repeated throughout these links (nor did I try to find out). I removed the 600 lines of code from the header.php file, but on Saturday discovered that several hundred others had been added, referencing two different sites but similar content. In both cases, the blocks of code were surround by <font> tags that caused the text to be hidden.

If you want to see if this has happened to you, bring up your site and select View/Page Source if you’re using Firefox, or View/Source if you’re using Internet Explorer. In my case, the spam links always appeared at the end of the source listing, but you might want to page through the entire listing since I suppose they could appear anywhere.

After the second occurrence, I changed my WordPress admin password as well as my hosting login password. So far it hasn’t occurred again, but I can see that this is yet something I’ll have to keep an eye on. If I figure out how it actually happens, I’ll certainly share it here.

Leanne Wildermuth of Artist By Nature has written about the same thing, and it was from Leanne that I learned that the source of the problem was header.php:

Got Spam in YOUR Templates?

For now, I’ve also removed most of the ads from my site, except those for Amazon.com. I may not put them back….

Over the past week or so, I’ve been experimenting with the daily blog posting function provided by del.icio.us. It seems to work pretty well, automatically creating a new post on this blog containing the links I’ve tagged that day. If you have a del.icio.us account and want to try using it, go to your Settings page, then select "daily blog posting" to create a new posting job. You’ll be faced with providing the following parameters for the job:

job_name: This can be any name you want.

out_name: The name you use to log in to your blog.

out_pass: The password you use to log in to your blog.

out_url: Described as "full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog" which, for this WordPress blog, is http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/xmlrpc.php. I’m not sure what is is for the other supported blog software, but it’s likely that someone else has tried if for yours — so check the platform’s forums or other help pages. I found the correct URL for WordPress, for example, on the WordPress Codex. If you try to execute the URL, and get a message along the lines of "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only" — you’ve probably got the right one to use.

out_time: This is the time of day that you want posts to appear, in Greenwich Mean Time. For help with Greenwich Mean Time, go here. So far, it seems typical that the blog posts appear within 20-30 minutes of the specified hour (and, no, refreshing the page repeatedly won’t make them appear any faster).

out_blog_id: I’m not sure what this one’s actually for, but I entered "1" and it worked. I’m assuming that if you have more than one blog that you access with the same profile and password, this number might vary.

out_cat_id: The category you want the blog posting assigned to. Note that this is a category number, not the category itself. In WordPress, that translates to the id number associated with the category, which you can find by selecting Manage / Categories. In my case, the id number is 27, which is associated with the posting category "Internet Clippings."

That’s it! Easy!

Here’s a sample of one of my daily blog postings.

You’ll see that the entry was correctly categorized as Internet Clippings, and that the tags I assigned to the bookmark appear as del.icio.us tags at the end of each one. Clicking the tags takes you to all the bookmarks for the same tag associated with your del.icio.us profile. I might have preferred it to take you to everyone’s posts with that tag, since there are other ways to incorporate links to del.icio.us tags on a blog. Maybe an option to do that would be nice.

Any notes that you typed when you tagged the link also appear. There’s an unfortunate limitation of 255 characters for the notes, so what I try to do is clip a key sentence or two from the article that I think gets to its essential point. I’d like to include a comment or two of my own with each one, but I can barely take a breath that uses less than 255 characters, so I’ll have to wait until the next version of del.icio.us — which I think increases this limit to 1000 characters per bookmark — to do that. With 1000 characters, bookmarking and daily blog posting would become an excellent shortcut way to read and comment on articles and web pages, and simultaneously set them up to automatically post to your blog.

This is a very busy time of year for me, so tools like this that actually do save time but help me keep things like this blog moving are extremely useful. Too many time-saving technologies take on a life of their own, sucking up energy while giving only the appearance of activity and progress while you sit back and wonder why you don’t seem to be getting anything done. An effective technological tool is one that results in actual time compression, collapsing the time required to perform a series of tasks while achieving the same, or acceptably similar, results.

I’ve made a few site updates and learned some things in the process, so it seemed like a bit of sharing was in order.

First, you’ll now see "Print this" at the top of each article. The print capability is made possible by the WP-Print WordPress plugin developed by Lester Chan. It does a really nice job of formatting posts for printing, and has three configuration options that let you choose whether or not to include comments, images, and a list of all links referenced in the article. I looked at several other options before choosing this one, and I’m very satisfied with it. I use it personally when I’m writing a new article based on some previous content, since I find it easier to work from a printed version — especially in the case of some of my longer articles. If you’re a WordPress blogger and you want to provide your readers with print options, check out Chan’s plugin page  where there are several versions you can download.

Second, I’ve changed content in the far right side for my Flickr photos, so that you can now choose to view the photographs as slideshows like you could before, or can also view the related Flickr page as a complete collection. It occurred to me that some folks might not care for the slideshows, so this was a good way to link to the photo pages by collection rather than always defaulting to slideshows.

Finally, as my friend Audee notes in her comment on my article about Zoo Atlanta, I’m now sending my site through FeedBurner and have incorporated various "feed flares" at the bottom of each article. You can also now subscribe to my feed by e-mail, and subscribe to posts and comments. I’m still experimenting with some of the flares as well as the advertising, so different elements may come and go as I check out some of the sites I’m now encouraging people to submit my articles to.

I did discover, unfortunately, that there is a known issue using FeedBurner with Yahoo! web hosting. Attempts to use my old feed URL, which was:

http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/feed

should automatically redirect to the new FeedBurner URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/afewgoodpens

but it doesn’t, and displays a "document has moved" error which points to the old feed URL (going nowhere, therefore). As you can see from the description of the problem on the FeedBurner forum, there is no solution available yet. I found that this meant two things for my site.

First, if anyone was subscribing to my feed with the original URL, it would no longer work. If you’re one of my subscribers, and that happened to you … my apologies. Had I realized this was happening, I would have posted something announcing the change first.

Second, my account on services like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog needed to be updated. MyBlogLog uses the feed URL to fetch new posts to display on its site, so I had to update my account to point to the FeedBurner URL. Easy.

Blogcatalog, however, uses RSS autodiscovery to locate a site’s feed, and that was a bit of a problem since autodiscovery tried to use the old feed URL — which should have redirected to FeedBurner but did not. I don’t really understand how all this works, but I’ve concluded that the WordPress code normally handles the redirect, yet something about Yahoo’s hosting prevents that from working normally. I ended out adapting the RSS autodiscovery tips  and modifying WordPress’s header.php file with the FeedBurner URL hardcoded. Hardcoding like this is never the best solution, but it will hold me up until a permanent fix becomes available.  In any case, it appears to have worked; my account page on Blogcatalog was reporting an error finding my feed, but has since updated to show a successful discovery and also shows the FeedBurner URL as the feed URL.

Got a headache yet? I do … this stuff never seems to just fall into place quite right, does it?

I’m a little disappointed that this is another quirk I’ve run into that’s specific to Yahoo! web hosting and their WordPress implementation. While I have to be fair and say that I’ve never had a problem with my site or its availability at Yahoo!, site performance and availability is but a minimum requirement for a web host these days. In my opinion, Yahoo! oversold their hosting service to newbie WordPress bloggers like myself by making it so easily available, by implying that they would update the WordPress installation but never doing it, and by nearly running from the room screaming if you call their  support line and even use "WordPress" in a sentence. They could have a kick-ass blog hosting service, if they’d just make an effort to actually support WordPress users — something that might even make then unique in the industry. Are you listening, Yahoo!? Call me, let’s talk about it….

Oh, well, enough about that … the weekend’s here and Atlanta weather is supposed to be sunny with temperatures in the 60s … what could be better than that?

I was planning to pick a few of my internet clippings off del.icio.us this evening and spin out an article or two about them, but then came across this piece by Jason Kaneshiro at Webomatica:

What I Do When Not Blogging or Working

Toward the end of the article, Jason writes:

I nearly burned myself out late last year with too much work, which was thankfully balanced out with a holiday vacation to another state where I spent a fair amount of time doing absolutely nothing.

The possibility that we’re collectively losing our ability to do nothing — to detach ourselves from all forms of work and recharge by reveling in the moment, whatever type of moment recharges us — is one of the topics Heather Menzies discusses in her book No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life. I started this book a couple of weeks ago, and I’m about half way through it, having decided to read it slowly and take notes on the ideas Menzies presents. Over the past year or so, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the technology we’re becoming so immersed in begs us to ask some questions about how it’s affecting each of us and our lives — yet we barely ask those questions, or, perhaps, we don’t yet know how to ask them. We’re so linked in, always on, wired up and plugged up that even when we do try to detach, as Menzies notes, we’re seldom successful; or worse, we are successful but riddled with guilt over that success. That we might detach enough to reflect on technology’s effects is very nearly inconceivable.

Menzies was spurred to the idea of writing this book as she looked at her own life, and saw how for her — like many of her contemporaries — the connections among people that technology seemed to promise were actually creating disconnections instead. It is, I think, one of those crucial questions about technology that social scientists and historians together would do well to explore, particularly as our distance from the experience of every day reality seems to increase with the growing use of technology: to what extent are we withdrawing from human interaction as technology becomes embedded in our lives, and what is the significance of that withdrawal? My understanding is that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community also takes on this subject, perhaps with even more to say about the relationship between technology and human interaction. Bowling Alone is the next book on my reading list.

Reading Menzies prompted me to search the web for the phrase "fragmentation of every day life" where I found that in the book Social Perspectives On Mobility, one of the authors writes about the effects of technology on family activities:

Instead of slowing down and gaining more time from new, faster technologies, the family crams more activities into everyday life. Having time on your hands becomes an important signal [about] which kind of everyday life the individual has. The traffic jam for the car driver becomes a time thief that does not comply with the signal of freedom the car driver wishes to send….

I remember that when I read  "having time on your hands" how it sounded like a completely foreign concept: it jolted me to realize that I had to stop for a second and think about what it even meant. I was equally jolted by Menzies’ discussion of dreamless sleep, how researchers are finding that more and more people are sleeping not just less but differently than they used to, reporting that they never remember enough of their dreams to know if they’re even having any, their brains never "idling" enough to enter the state where dreams take place. I’ll come back to that later; it’s one of the most interesting parts of Menzies’ book so far — personally interesting, I think, because I can’t remember the last time I had a dream or recall having a dream, and I’ve even wondered now and then why that’s been happening. Dreams, it seems, are something of an organizing activity for the mind, something that helps commit our waking or mental experiences to different segments of our memory for use later; and while I always thought that dreams served a purpose like that, until reading what Menzies has to say about them, it never occurred to me that it was significant that I could no longer remember any.

To be continued…..

From Brad Feld’s blog Feld Thoughts comes word that Newsgator is now making all of their feedreader software products available free of charge.  Feld explains Newsgator’s reasoning in this article, and provides several links to related articles by Newsgator employees as well as links you can use to download the products or get more information.

I’ve used both Newsgator Online (which has been free all along) as well as FeedDemon (which used to cost 30 bucks annually) for over a year now, having switched to the Newsgator products from Bloglines. I’ve never regretted the switch at all, and both the online and installed versions of their readers are fast, full of useful functions and navigation capabilities, and just fun to use.  And they synchronize with each other, so you can keep up with your reading from any computer anywhere, and either tool will always know how you handled your feeds with the other.

I also use Newsgator Online to build and maintain the My Blogroll and My News pages for this site. You can read more about how to do that in these two articles:

Creating a Semi-Automatic Newsgator Blogroll on Your WordPress Blog

Spreading the News

Check out Feld’s article, poke at the links a little, and give Newsgator a try. You can even subscribe to afewgoodpens just to see how things work!

Update: I just wanted to add a link to this post by Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon, highlighting some of the differences between using a desktop and a web-based feedreader. As Bradbury points out, one of the great strengths of FeedDemon is the way it functions as a full-featured browser, allowing you to switch from reading feeds to visiting web sites instantly within the same session and windows. I originally used the online version more than the desktop version, but have recently switched, preferring the speed and flexibility of the desktop version when I’m on my computer at home, and typically using the online version only when I’m on a computer where I can’t install the software locally.

This week is turning into a very busy one for me, and even though I haven’t had time to respond properly, I did want to acknowledge a few folks that have left comments on my site or sent me e-mails. Most of my evenings this week will go toward working on a research proposal for my Exploring Place: History class, for which I’ve decided to study the history of and community that has developed around Oakland Cemetery, which is near my home. I spent most of Sunday afternoon on a guided tour of the cemetery, then went back as evening set in to take some (like, 150) pictures. I hope to wade through the pictures also over the next few days and get them out on Flickr. Anyway, I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was ignoring them or disregarding the time they spent contacting me, so here are my shout-outs and link-backs:

Chef Tom: Thanks for the Le-Le-Lemon Cheesecake recipe. I picked up the ingredients tonight and will be making it tomorrow night, to serve at a dessert-party for my best friend’s 50th birthday on Friday. I think it’s going to be excellent!

Karen: Thanks for the e-mail; I’m glad you joined BlogCatalog and I look forward to neighorhooding with you. I also wanted to mentioned that I read your article Peter the Great…Right Brained Learner? — and I think it’s great.

Morgan: Thanks for you interest in my writing and my studies; as well as for your e-mail reply and kind offer to help. I’m sure I’ll take you up on it, and please do keep an eye on my site and comment any time.

Cooper: Thanks for the provocation… heh heh heh … and your comments on War as a Spectator Sport (Part One). There will be a Part Two, down the road a short spell (next week, probably) and we can continue the conversation.

Jon: Thanks for your comments on War as a Spectator Sport also. It’s interesting how differently we see the photographs, and I’m sure I’ll write about that in the second part of the article. Subjectively, of course. Great site you have, and I really like your writing. Between the waking and the dream was pure pleasure to read. Oh, and thanks for the book recommendations; I will look for “The Psychology of Music” but may pass on Bloom since I’ve read parts of it and may not care to invest any more time in it … ya know what I mean? 

Kukuh: I got your e-mail and the draft article and took a quick look at it. Fascinating stuff; will be glad to help if our schedules mesh okay. I’ve sent you a message on BlogCatalog.

Bye for now!

… well, not programming exactly;  we (meaning: I) have spent way too much time on that today as it is. However, I have gotten the load time on the home page of this site way, way down … from about 16-18 seconds to a pretty consistent four or five. Considering that there’s still a lot of content here, that’s pretty good. I might as well confess that the main thing that motivated me to do this was that I was getting annoyed accessing my own site, which is a pretty strong indicator that my visitors might have felt that way too.

So navigating here is a little different now. The Newsgator blogroll and news headlines are each on their own separate pages: My Blogroll and My News, and there are navigation links from the header and from both sidebars — plenty of places for you to click to get there and take a look at the work of some very fine bloggers. My Blogroll links will take you directly to site home pages; My News shows excerpts from some of the most recent articles in each category, all with links you can click to read more. If you’re interested in links or news only from a particular category, see the “My Blogroll” and “My News” listings in the sidebar, from which you can go directly to that category.  You can use your browser’s back button or click the category heading to return to the home page.

More on this later perhaps, but I should mention that belonging to the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog communities is introducing me to a whole lot of new and extremely good blogs and fascinating people that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise — but I’ve not yet added them all to my Newsgator feeds so they don’t show up on the new pages. I think I’m still trying to figure out the best way to pull all these resources together in one place (or a few tied-together places); or at least, trying to figure out the best way to spend my time between newsreaders, blogging communities, social networks, stumblingupons, diggs, twitters, and a few other things. Still, I’m comfortable with the idea of just jumping into all these activities and sorting out the priorities as I go along. If you’re reading this, and you’re a blogger, and you haven’t joined BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog, please do so, and let’s connect.

A couple of lessons I learned from this last set of tweaks:

(1) if you’re an Amazon associate and are including Amazon links in your site like I am, watch out for the “Product Reviews” script. The script is new (I think) and provides a small window with product and review information when you mouse over an Amazon text link. It’s very nice, actually, I liked the way it looked and the images and info it provided — but I removed it from my site after numerous tests showed it was adding as much as three or four seconds to the page’s load time. Your experience may certainly vary, but I would experiment with that script before using it.

(2) If you’re modifying your WordPress templates …well,  don’t even think about changing anything until you’ve made a copy of the files you’re planning to change. I’ve always been obsessive about saving work-in-progress with tools like word processing and spreadsheet software, but for some reason haven’t been doing that with files like sidebar.php. Believe me, ignore this advice and just one time accidentally paste something on top of thirty lines of code and realize it just as it’s too late to stop yourself from pressing the save button … and you’ll wish you had that copy! It’s great to have nice, clean home pages … but not so great when they’re nice and clean because most of the content isn’t showing… yipes!

I’ve made an additional update to this site, adding headlines from my Newsgator Online feeds to the sidebar at the far right. Adding headlines is quite easy, and builds on the procedure I described in my article Creating a Semi-Automatic Newsgator Blogroll on Your WordPress Blog.

Instead of selecting the “Blogroll” function for the locations you have created in Newsgator Online, you select “Headlines.” On the Headline settings screen, you activate the headlines script with a click for “Check here to enable Headlines settings for this location.” You can then specify the number of posts to be displayed by the headline script and the maximum number of characters for each headline. I currently have mine set for 7 headlines per location, with 50 characters each, which I may tweak a little for appearance or clarity. Note that you can also alter the layout of the headlines by removing or rearranging individual elements, such as the date and time.

This will probably be the last significant change to the layout of my site for a while, since — as I mentioned here – my classes begin again in a few days, and I’ll want to shift my focus to writing content related to that experience rather than spending time on technical changes. But I did want to send out a little credit and thanks, once again, to Lorelle VanFossen: the idea of adding options for readers to leave my site while still following my interests came from a comment she made on Dawud Miracle’s article Why You Want To Link To Other Blogs. Lorelle wrote:

I love the fact that blogging is the only industry in which you get more readers by sending them away from your business…. If they like what they find when you send them away, they come back for more, and bring their friends.

Incredible. We’re changing the whole concept of marketing.

This observation has stuck with me since I read it, especially because I’m so fascinated by the ways in which blogging, social networking, and technological change in general are affecting individuals and their lives, opening up significant opportunities to pursue their passions in ways that were not available a few short decades ago. In addition to changing the whole concept of marketing, every time a blog writer posts a new article or opens another part of their life to their readers, they’re contributing to the radical cultural and social changes we’re all living in right now … and adding this new out-links to my site is my way of going along for the ride.

I’ve updated the blogroll on this site to display home pages from my Newsgator Online feeds, instead of using the blogroll link functions available with WordPress. Nearly all of the websites or blogs I visit regularly have RSS feeds, so they make good candidates for my blogroll. I originally thought I could just embed the OPML file Newsgator can create in one of my sidebars to include the feeds; but that method doesn’t provide any folder organization or structure: it simply displays every feed in alphabetical order. It also makes excluding feeds a little complicated, because they have to be manually removed from the OPML file. And adding new feeds means recreating the OPML file and updating the sidebar — something I wanted to avoid, since I’m a bit (!!) of a feed junkie.

The method I came up with takes advantage of the ability to create custom feed “locations” in Newsgator. Individual feeds can be associated with any (and multiple) locations, and Newsgator provides a script that, once embedded in a WordPress file, displays all the links associated with that location.

Here’s how my feeds are organized in Newsgator. As you can see, I have numerous folders, each with multiple feeds.

I created a separate Newsgator location for each folder, then associated that folder’s feeds with the location. It may sound a little complicated, but it’s really not, and offers several conveniences for maintaining the blogroll that make it worth setting up.

Below are the steps you can follow to do the same thing. In this example, I’m creating a blogroll for the feeds listed in the “Science and Nature” Newsgator folder.

1. Select “Settings” on the Newsgator Online menu bar.

2. Select the “Edit Locations” tab.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the display and enter the name you want to assign to this location in the “Create location” box. (I use “Blogroll” plus the folder names for the location names; but since there is no technical relationship between the folder and location names, you can call them anything you want.) After typing in a name, press “Add.”

4. Scroll down to the location you just created. On the left of the screen, you will see “New subscriptions will be automatically added to this location. Click to change.” Click the underlined text then scroll back down to the location if necessary. You will now see “New subscriptions will NOT be automatically added to this location.” Changing this option ensures that feeds aren’t associated with the blogroll whenever you subscribe to a new one.

5. Select “Feeds” and then select “Uncheck all” on the Edit Location display. Then scroll around and select the feeds you want to associate with this location. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the display and select “Update”.

6. When Edit Locations reappears, scroll to your new location again, and select “Blogroll”. Click the check box to the left of “Click here to enable Blogroll settings for this location.”

7. In the box toward the bottom of the screen, you will see this:

   <a href=”$xmlurl$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   “$xmlrul$” directs the script to the RSS link for the feeds. Change it to “$link$” so that the generated links point to the feeds’ websites (home pages) rather than the RSS links. It should look like this after you make your changes:

   <a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   You can also format the links by making changes to this line of code. By default, a single blank line (<br/>) will be inserted after the link when it appears on your blogroll. In my case, it was more appropriate to format the links as list elements, with the <li> and </li> tags, like this:

   <li><a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a></li>

   Once you’ve made the changes you want, scroll down and select “Save Changes.” Scroll back to the location, once again select “Blogroll” and leave the window or tab open for now.

8. In a new browser window or tab, log on to your WordPress blog, select the Presentation tab, then the Theme Editor tab. Select the theme file where you will want the blogroll to appear from the files on the right; in my case, I updated sidebar.php so the blogroll appears in the column next to my posts.

9. Scroll to the area where you will want the blogroll to be displayed, and insert the following four lines of code (line three is a blank line):

   <h2><?php_ e(‘Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
   <ul>

   </ul>

   “Science and Nature” will be formatted with the heading level 2 style because of the <h2> and </h2> tags.

10. Return to the Newsgator tab or window you left open earlier, and copy the script to the blank link in the code above.  The result will look like this:

    <h2><?php_ e(‘Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
    <ul>
    <script src=http://services.newsgator.com/
    ngws/Blogroll.aspx?uid=nnnnnn&mid=##></script>
    </ul>

    (Note that “nnnnnn” will contain your Newsgator subscriber number, and “##” will contain a number associated with the location.)

    Select “Update File” to update your WordPress file.

Display your site, and the feeds associated with the location you created in Newsgator will now show under the heading you specified above (in my case, “Science and Nature”). All of the headings and links in my blogroll were created by following this procedure.

Any time you unsubscribe from a Newsgator feed, the link will no longer appear in your blogroll. If you move a feed to another folder and want that reflected in your blogroll, you will need to clear the check box for the feed in the old location and check it in the new location (which is still less work than updating links in WordPress). Similarly, to add a new feed to your blogroll (since you deselected automatic addition of new subscriptions), follow the same procedure: access the location where you want it to appear, and click the checkbox.

I spent an hour or so this evening browsing around on Blogcatalog, where I recently set up an account. I’m still getting used to using sites like Blogcatalog and MyBlogLog, so I haven’t done that much with them yet. But I do like being able to look for interesting blogs by zooming through their categories, or by noting what blogs are associated with folks who have interests similar to mine. Tonight I paged through Blogcatalog’s history category, and ended out adding four history-related blogs to my Newsgator feeds and to this site’s blogroll. The blogs, and the things that got my attention from each one, are briefly described below.

From Civil War Memory, an article on the tension over memorializing individuals — in this case, a potential plan to create a monument to recently deceased black civil rights attorney Oliver Hill — when the very act of memorializing seems to conflict with dominant political or social leadership and their influence. While I’ve studied quite a bit about the Civil War, my ongoing interest in Civil War history tends to revolve more around issues of this kind, and the difficult challenge of handling historical memories … whether related to the Civil War or other key (especially controversial) historical events.

From Clio and Me, an article asking questions about a pair of dramatically different stereo images from the First World War. The meaning of imagery like this and how we relate to it in terms of historical memory and contemporary culture is, to me, something we would do well to understand more about, as more and more of our world is represented to us in pictures and video, rather than text.

From Ponder and Dream, wonderful original historical illustrations that just make you think. See for example, this one, which is prefaced by a Longfellow poem.  Or just start with sites home page and look at as many as you can.

From The Victorian Peeper, an image and article about a Victorian “dinosaur theme park,” originally intended to demonstrate themes in evolution. I’m pretty much fascinated by all things Victorian — European and American — and by the connections between Victorian England, Victorian America, and our contemporary culture. Such connections are much more compelling than our stereotypical view of the Victorian period tends to encompass, a topic that I hope to cover in future articles.