… 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:
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.
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…
… 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….
… the death of Tim Russert, one of the few political analysts and observers who publicly demonstrated authentic passion for his work and for the American political system, and from whom we could all learn something about the arts of communication, rhetoric, and conversational negotiation.
… and from Senator Joseph Lieberman, an observation about Russert that, to me, is one of the highest compliments one human being can pay another:
To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge … one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned … when confronted with evidence of what human beings are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood…. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.
Sontag’s essays in Regarding the Pain of Others and On Photography have always impressed me, for — among other reasons — the way she moves effortlessly from the public experience of photography to the way we experience it in our minds, and the connections she makes between the two. I was browsing through both books earlier this evening, in an attempt to better frame some comments on a Vogue Italia “photographic essay” described by Cooper in Is Rape In Vogue? You Tell Me.
The images in the essay are generating some discussion about — among other things — whether or not they are pornographic, whether or not they glorify rape, whether or not they glorify war, whether or not they have any aesthetic significance. I could probably pick any of these, choose either side, and make a compelling and passionate case for or against. What I cannot do, however, is rescue the photographs themselves from what they really represent: the exact sort of psychological immaturity, superficiality, and demonstration of ignorance that Sontag is referring to. The photographs — by virtue of their distance from anything that would actually cause us to consider the realities of war — become little more than the kind of cliche aptly illustrated by their worn out title, Make Love, Not War.
It’s not, of course, necessarily true that all photography of war reflect it’s subject realistically, and I wouldn’t make that claim about photography of any subject. But that doesn’t mean choice of subjects doesn’t matter; the photographs are all integrated under one title, showing obviously related themes that were the explicit choices of the artists involved. As with all art, it is the artists’ choices that are fair game for evaluation and critical assessment.
The photographs don’t strike me as being about war at all. If I pitched a tent in my back yard, donned some military fatigues, slapped some mud on my face, and brandished a squirt gun (even a really big squirt gun), you wouldn’t call me a soldier. You might think I was playing soldier, and question my sanity, but that’s about it. The “soldiers” in these photographs seem about as soldierly as me and my tent; in both the actual appearance of the photographs and the way the models are portrayed, they’re only playing soldier too; or not even playing soldier, just playing.
The images of the men, though, are at least not overtly offensive. The men are, in nearly all the photographs, shown as happy, alert, enjoying an experience in the moment. In the women, however, there’s something else, made even more apparent by contrast with the appearance of the men. In photo after photo, the faces of the women suggest one of two conditions: semi-consciousness or pain. From the America’s Top Model mannequin-like pose in image 3, to the distraught and unfocused or visibly pained eyes in almost every other image, the women are most definitely not being portrayed as living the experience in the same way as the men. Disheveled, dirty, confused, and in pain, the women are so succinctly reduced to objects for the amusement of the men that the conclusion that the images glorify rape is a reasonable one, if not a wholly accurate one. At least early-modern attempts to objectify women (as toys for men) usually showed them looking good. Vogue Italia – in treating us to a helping of soft-core, military-style, repetitious, dull, and vaguely annoying porn — can’t be bothered, and instead serves up images that include … yes, you guessed it, mud wrestling….
… it would seem if we truly used history correctly we would not repeat it so often….
Since then, I’ve been carrying that thought around in my head, considering different ways that I might respond. This is not my response.
She’s absolutely right, of course; it’s impossible to study history over any time period longer than twenty seconds, without noticing cycles in human actions and reactions that seem to generate essentially the same social and cultural conditions. Clothing and hairstyles change, and dialogue and postures shift a little, but the broader results often seem about the same. Keeping my generalist hat on for a moment, let me just leave it at this: history repeating itself is as much a cliche as it is an actual historical condition; and as both of those things, it deserves a healthy dose of skeptical analysis.
And that is actually my main point, about all I could explore in this tiny post. When we talk of history repeating itself, we can’t stop there. We can’t really start there, either…. instead, I think we would need to latch on to some specific element of the cycles we’re trying to unravel, and, starting there, pull all sorts of interdisciplinary tricks to search for common threads and relationships among history, science, art, literature, economics, politics, and technology. It’s these things, along with the philosophical ideas that mold them and drive them forward, that define historical cycles. I can’t think of any theoretical reason why history has to repeat itself, or why history, as cooper stated, has to dictate anything … yet it would seem it has and still does, in cycles that are getting shorter and shorter and shorter….
They say the next big thing is here,
That the revolution’s near.
But to me it seems quite clear
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
The newspapers shout:
A new style is growing.
But it doesn’t know
If it’s coming or going.
There is fashion, there is fad.
Some is good, some is bad.
And the joke is rather sad,
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
From the Project for Excellence in Journalism comes a study describing differences between the kinds of news stories featured on the web sites of traditional media outlets, and those featured on user-driven sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, Digg, and Yahoo! News. The authors of the study describe it as providing some initial answers to the question: “What would a world in which citizens set the news agenda rather than editors look like?”
The study is certainly worth examining in detail; one of the things I noticed immediately was this:
The three top categories for news stories presented by the media outlets the study examined were: foreign news stories, disasters and accidents, and U.S. foreign affairs. The three top categories among the first three user-driven sites listed above were technology and science, lifestyle, and government.
I might have liked to see technology and science separated for the purposes of the study, though I can understand the difficulties in making that separation. I would expect, however, that the technology-orientation of user-selected stories was stronger than that of science. Regardless, it’s not at all surprising to me that stories tagged on sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, and Digg are heavily weighted toward technology: I think the simple fact that the technology is still new to so many people is reflected in a sometimes restless and nearly frantic gathering around stories that help us all understand it and use it better. I know I’m abstracting from personal experience here, possibly a little too much, but when I look at at my own stories on del.icio.us, I see a pattern that very closely mirrors the results of the study. Why? Well, because like so many people I’m trying to understand how to use the technologies, trying to find the best ways to use them, and I’m still asking myself questions like “What the hell is StumbleUpon for anyway?”
As is the case with all emerging technologies, though, this discovery phase is only temporary (good luck defining “temporary”); and if the authors conduct the study again in a few years, I would be very surprised if the categories of user-tagged stories don’t start to shift. While it may still not necessarily reflect the selections being made by traditional media, I’ll bet you’ll see a convergence between the two. The study lays some excellent groundwork for the future research; and that may even be more valuable even than it’s current conclusion:
For now, the percentage of Americans who rely exclusively on news from user-driven sites is just a fraction of what it is for mainstream news sites. And in this increasingly fragmented era, many who visit Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit may also be reading the online versions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But whether or not we see further divergence between user-driven sites and mainstream media over the next few years will surely remain a key question for researchers, journalists and of course, citizens.
A few days after I posted this brief rant about television, I saw this Computerworld article, Survey: Internet on the verge of surpassing TV as ‘essential medium’. The article describes a survey done by Edison Media Research, that ranks changes in consumer perceptions about different types of media and how those perceptions have changed in the past five years. You can find the company’s press release and summary of the survey findings here.
Overall, the Internet is closing in on television as the essential source for information and entertainment. This certainly echoes my own experience; like the respondents to the survey, I’m much more likely to turn to the Internet first for news stories and information. For me, that is entertainment. And I’m certainly not surprised that others are finding a growing amount of information and pure entertainment all over the net.
If trends highlighted by the survey continue, the Internet will expand as not only an alternative to television, but as a challenge to it. Whether that challenge improves the quality of television programming, from news to “reality shows” to your favorite cop shows, is a huge unknown right now … but I do hope television executives are paying attention. I was a little surprised to see the survey result that respondents thought television quality had improved over the past five years; I wouldn’t have expected that result for the major networks at least, though I might have come to that conclusion about some of the more popular cable channels.
It would be fascinating, I think, if a survey of this type was conducted with a more detailed comparison of actual uses of the different types of media. A hierarchy seems to be emerging where television and the Internet are competing for the top spot, with radio trailing behind both in its own niche, and newspapers falling quite a bit behind. The newspaper, as many of us have grown up knowing it, is probably close to dead, though wrapping itself in technology may make it useful to us in different forms. Whether or not The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal present themselves as primarily digital content or on paper isn’t critical; their cultural role is the same regardless of the form they take. But they will need to adapt well to the new forms, or they’ll make themselves obsolete.
I have this uninformed opinion that all forms of media constantly create their own buzz, and that interest in moronic “celebrities” like Paris Hilton is completely fabricated. And, once fabricated, the buzz simply takes on a life of its own … fueled not nearly as much by the general public, but by media itself and the money machine that goes with it.
The television networks, as far as I can tell, have all but given up on creating anything of any artistic, dramatic, or cultural value. Whatever pops the ratings at any given time and snags a few advertisers is good enough, and the frenetic pace with which the latest pops appear and disappear keeps them all thinking they’re actually a success. But if you look a little more closely, you’ll see that the dominant programming trend is one of delusion and self-deprecation; the media spends a tremendous amount of its energy creating caricatures of itself. As its race to irrelevance accelerates, NBC — which, until a decade or so ago, remained moderately respectable and relatively independent — takes its most recent step off the cliff:
We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery.
I’m putting together resources for a research paper on the cultural and social impact of photography. McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is one of my sources, but I also picked up The Medium is the Massage, because it looked interesting (and, for a change, SHORT). I’ll have more to say about both books in the upcoming weeks, but I liked this quote about learning and thought I’d share it.
McLuhan’s books are full of gems like this. I just started browsing through them and didn’t know what to expect when I started; but nearly every page strikes me in some way or another. This particular quote leads a short piece that expresses admiration for the potential of technology, but simultaneously contains the warning that we aren’t good at grasping the effects of technological transitions. We lock ourselves in psychological and intellectual straightjackets, McLuhan suggests, because “the interplay between the old and the new … creates many problems and confusions.” McLuhan’s remedy:
The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of … new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view….
The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration….
For my Science and Technology in Western Culture class, I’m reading Society and Technological Change by Rudi Volti. One of the assignments for the current module was to read Volti’s chapter on the development of printing technologies. Volti has a short discussion in this chapter on the psychological effects of printing; that is, on psychological changes that might have occurred as print technology improved and publishing began to flourish.
Volti briefly writes about Marshall McLuhan, and about some of McLuhan’s ideas on the fundamental social changes that occurred in conjunction with the expansion of print publishing and other media. Says Volti:
Some fascinating possibilities … have been suggested by Marshall McLuhan, for whom media such as print and television had consequences that far outweigh the overt messages they carry. Printed books fundamentally changed civilization not because of the information they transmitted; the greatest consequence of printing lay in the different modes of thought and perception that it fostered. In McLuhan’s analysis, each medium engenders a distinctive way of looking at the world; as his famous aphorism has it, “the medium is the message.” The reading of the printed word makes readers think in sequence, just as a sentence is sequentially read from left to right. – pg. 190
I’ve never read McLuhan, so I don’t really know how well this represents his views. But this is perhaps what Tim Lacy is asking about, in his post What is Linear Thinking? from earlier this week. It would seem reasonable that McLuhan – or at least Volti in his interpretation of McLuhan – is highlighting a significant change in the technology of thought that came about in conjunction with the increased availability of the printed word. While I think there’s much to be said for this dramatic change in thought processes, I’m not convinced that linear thinking of this type adequately encompasses what happens in our minds when we read.
Obviously, we tend to read sequentially, at least in the sense that we typically read both books and other materials from beginning to end, and, further, we expect some logical relationship between the ideas presented at the beginning and those presented at the end. So the activity of reading does strike me as a linear process. However, reading and learning from what we read are two different things entirely. For sure, I can read something from the first page to the last page, absorbing what I read in the sequential order the author provides – but that isn’t necessarily how I learn from it. If the reading offers me anything at all, then the linear process combines with a variety of other mental process where I make associations, form concepts, increase prior knowledge, absorb and relate details to others I’m already aware of, and (hopefully!) emerge from the reading with either a more solid understanding of something I already know or at least a beginning understanding of something entirely new. Reading – at least reading to learn – is a much more iterative and hierarchical process than it is a sequential process. If this might be described as “non-linear thinking” (and I suppose it might), I would think that non-linear thinking is not the same as illogical thinking – since illogical thinking suggests an inability to build on prior knowledge when attempting to learn something new (or to think about anything else, for that matter).
Continuing the quotation above, Volti goes on to say:
Reading also produces an egocentric view of the world, for the reader’s involvement with the printed word is solitary and private. – pg. 190
This was actually the part that made me suspicious of the “linear thinking” statements about reading. While it is undoubtedly true that reading is a solitary and private activity, I don’t think that adequately describes the personal, cultural, or social significance of reading (or of writing, for that matter). As Benedict Anderson describes so well in Imagined Communities (I swear, I’ll be referring to that book for the rest of my life), one of the true revolutions that occurred through the explosion of printing was a new awareness among human beings of the simultaneous existence of other human beings. At minimum, my reading of a book implies an awareness of one other person – the book’s author – and in all likelihood embraces some sense that other people have read – have experienced – the book in ways similar to mine. If I spun that theory out to one other logical conclusion, I might even say that the reason so many people write, and so many more want to write, is that the sense of existing in a world simultaneously with other people has become an endemic part of the way modern men and women perceive (the significance of?) their existence.
beth: you are my favorite photographer… I just love it when Tim tells me that you have some new shots on your website… BEAUTIFUL as always! have a gret day, Beth
Dawn LaPlante Recore: Hi Dale. Was searching Saranac alumni, and quite indirectly, I ended up at your blog. It’s fascinating. Good for you! Although it was a sad time when I saw you in September, it was never-the-less, good to see you. By...
Mary Holm: You’re doing exactly what I long to do–go back to school and get a history degree. I’ve always loved history but my degree’s in Radio/TV. I can’t think of anything better than having an excuse like that to...
Ron Coryer: Dale, I was sorry to hear of your father’s passing. I would like to express my condolences to you and you family. As I read your post on your website, I couldn’t help thinking back to the time I lost my dad and I had the...
Gary Coryer: Dale, So sorry to hear of the loss of your Dad. He was always nice to us as kids. Next time I am in Cadyville I will drop in to see your mom and express my condolences. Hope she is doing okay. I will send a note to my brother Ron with...
A u d e e: A deepest condolence to you Dale. Losing a parent is never easy. May Your Father rest in peace.
A u d e e: Hi Dale, It’s been a while since my last visit . I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...
Daniel J. Pritchett: The Touch is great for surfing from the couch and while walking around indoors. Using mine quickly gave me an appreciation for mobile-optimized web sites. I use and recommend the “MobilePress” plugin for WordPress....
***Dave: The inability / unwillingness to back up external USB drives is what’s kept me from a few other very good products out there (Carbonite, Moby). I am definitely going to try Backblaze.
cooper: I am bad about this and have lost a lot of files, everything on my last computer as it conked out all of a sudden in February and tool most files with it as the only things I backed up were academic files. I’m going to check this out.
Jagad Guru Chris Butler: Hello Dale, thanks a lot for the info. I actually just ordered an external hard drive the other day for back up…but I’ll look into Backblaze as well as Synctoy and see if they’ll work for my needs.
Billy: Cool, Dale! Let us know if you have any more questions.
Dale: Billy, Just letting you know that I tried the restore several times again this evening, and it worked fine — the download had the correct extension. I’ve updated the post to remove references to the error. Thanks! Dale
Dale: Ann, Thank you very much; I’m glad my article was helpful. The new version of WordPress is so much better than 2.0.2 — and once you get beyond that first Yahoo! upgrade, subsequent upgrades go much more smoothly. It would have...
ann wood: Thank you- I needed to upgrade from 2.0.2 on yahoo as well and was terrified of the auto upgrade plugin but your info was great and I did it this morning with little difficulty.
Rod: No problem. That’s the downside of using plugins, I guess – they can interact in unforeseen ways. I don’t really have a take on the security angle at this point – it’s not something I’ve looked into....
Category: 
, Susan Sontag writes:
have always impressed me, for — among other reasons — the way she moves effortlessly from the public experience of photography to the way we experience it in our minds, and the connections she makes between the two. I was browsing through both books earlier this evening, in an attempt to better frame some comments on a Vogue Italia “photographic essay” described by 
:
is one of my sources, but I also picked up 
by Rudi Volti. One of the assignments for the current module was to read Volti’s chapter on the development of printing technologies. Volti has a short discussion in this chapter on the psychological effects of printing; that is, on psychological changes that might have occurred as print technology improved and publishing began to flourish. 
(I swear, I’ll be referring to that book for the rest of my life), one of the true revolutions that occurred through the explosion of printing was a new awareness among human beings of the simultaneous existence of other human beings. At minimum, my reading of a book implies an awareness of one other person – the book’s author – and in all likelihood embraces some sense that other people have read – have experienced – the book in ways similar to mine. If I spun that theory out to one other logical conclusion, I might even say that the reason so many people write, and so many more want to write, is that the sense of existing in a world simultaneously with other people has become an endemic part of the way modern men and women perceive (the significance of?) their existence. 
. I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...