I have to say that I find this kind of interesting or cool, although I can not currently think of any practical applications for using a screebot to create a scrolling typewriter effect.

So I’m just filing it away for future use on my blog.
http://wigflip.com/screedbot/

http://top10tech.com/web/

Mobile post sent by brettbum using Utterli.  Replies. ]]> http://www.top10tech.com/web/2008/12/03/video/screedbot-animated-typewriter-gif/feed/ http://www.top10tech.com/web/2008/11/29/blogging-tips/transitioning-from-blogger-to-wordpress-tip-preventing-your-readers-from-losing-touch-or-getting-lost/ http://www.top10tech.com/web/2008/11/29/blogging-tips/transitioning-from-blogger-to-wordpress-tip-preventing-your-readers-from-losing-touch-or-getting-lost/#comments Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:29:30 +0000 admin http://www.top10tech.com/web/2008/11/29/blogging-tips/transitioning-from-blogger-to-wordpress-tip-preventing-your-readers-from-losing-touch-or-getting-lost/ Back in 2006, I established a ‘junk’ blog.  It was supposed to be something that I would use primarily to practice creative writing or just to use to un-block writers block.

I initially kept the site anonymous because I didn’t really care about it, didn’t expect anyone to read or visit it and only wanted to use it for selfish reasons.

Almost 3 years later the site is  (by no credit to myself) weirdly popular.  I have no idea why. 

If I were to say that I care about the site today, well that could jinx the success it has had, so I will say that ‘I do not care about it at all!’

Running a popular blog from blogger however is a big pain in the but.  Comment management on blogger alone, flat out sucks!  I can never tell when I receive a comment on blogger, what article the comment is directed at.  Which makes it kind of hard to reply to that comment afterwards on a blog with over 1600 articles.

So for that reason and several others, I finally broke down and move it to its own domain and set it up on my long time friend WordPress. 

The blogger site is located at http://somethingaboutharry.blogspot.com and the NEW wordpress site is located at http://something-about-harry.com.  The look of the new theme of the site is intended to be similar, as I wanted my readers to feel comfortable in the new digs.

That said, I knew there were two areas that I might lose people. 

• The Feed
• The front page

I get a lot of subscribers, even though my subscriber count always seems to be woefully incorrect.  So I had to go into Feedburner where I manage the feed, and update it to grab the feed from http://somethin-about-harry.com/feed/ instead of the old blogger atom xml location.

Once I had that done, then I could also fix one of the problems with the front page on the old site, but first I should explain a problem with blogger blogs.  When you transition from a blogger blog there is no clean way to do a redirect.

You can’t do a 301. 

You could do a meta tag auto redirect, and have the page automatically change to the new location, but that makes a lot of visitors/readers uncomfortable.  I have too much traffic going to the old site to chance pissing (technical web term for aggravating and upsetting someone terribly) someone off like that.

So instead, I’m using a feedburner trick that I developed a long time ago (and have used here at top10tech on the home page).

I created a buzzboost section of code on feedburner for the new site.  I then pasted that code into my old blogger template, just above the content of the blog articles.  Now on the blogger site, those blog articles in blogger will never be updated again.  all the content is going to the new site.  But my readers that land on the homepage that have not learned that yet may not know.

The key to the code is adding this snippet of code after the generic code given by feedburner

<script src=’http: //feeds.feedburner.com/TheresSomethingAboutHarry?format= sigpro&amp;excerptFormat=full&amp;excerptLength=100 @amp;nItems=5‘ type=’text/javascript’/>

So they will now see the full html versions of the posts from the new site displayed on the old site.  The links are from a feed, so if anyone clicks on the title or something it will take them to the new site.

Plus, I’m putting to large disclaimers at the top of the site to help get them to the new location.

On top of all that maybe in 3-6 months when traffic dies down at the old site, then maybe I will do a meta tag redirect to the new site, but not till the traffic drops or I find an even better method.

After that, it won’t really matter what happens to the old site so much as long as people don’t get lost and can find their way out of the forest if they do.  Maybe I’ll even monetize the old site a bit with some affiliate ads or Fentraphen reviews or maybe just let the thing go dark.  Since I didn’t care to begin with and say that ‘I don’t care now’ maybe that will make it so! 

Matt Mullenweg does give a nice lecture and a bit of a demonstration in what will be coming in WordPress 2.7.  This is probably more of a way to wrap your mind around the ‘why’ of the upgrade than get some good visuals of the upgrade itself, but that should be helpful too!

So for all of you WordPress users that are hooked on an older version of WordPress, you might be in for another ride or at least a ride through WordPress 1.5 detox or something (they have detox for everything else from sex addictions, to drug and alcohol to Orovo detox, why not a WordPress 1.5 detox??????)

Personally, I’m looking forward to the future capability of editing a post inline.  I don’t think its going to make it into 2.7, but when that day comes, I think WordPress will make an evolutionary step in terms of collaboration both for publishers but even office workers looking to document knowledge with others on their teams and in their groups.

1. Just Open the message of the item, you want to delete, by clicking on the title.
2. Then click on Remove from ‘YOUR GROUP’S NAME’
3. Click OK to confirm you want to delete it and that’s all there is to it!

There you have it, easier than finding a person looking for jobs in Manhattan.  That said, its not completely obvious how to do this, until you ‘Click on the Title’ to expand the selection and see your additional moderation options for your Utterli group.

The thing is almost all of these services (like YouTube btw) screw with the compression of your video.  Ergo, you can create a perfectly good looking video on your computer, upload it to their site and they will recompress it in a different format.  What this means is that your video will often be distorted when you use any of these services.

Its kind of like if you take silly puddy and roll it out like cookie dough on a newspaper photograph of the Main Street USA.  The image of the photograph will be captured on the silly puddy.  Then you take the silly puddy and hand it to a three year old, who proceeds to stretch the picture into some new frame size and before you know it you are looking at a pixelated las vegas strip in puddy.

That’s kind of like what these services do as they attempt to fit videos that you load up of dimension A with shape B, into Shape C with dimension D.

Here are a few examples of the unfortunate results that I found with these services:

Yahoo!

MySpace

Google Video

In the Google example, if you embed the video its going to be significantly different than if you view it on the actual site. 

AOL

So here’s a tip, quadruple check your spellings!

ShopandConfess and eBillme started a year long contest last February that seems to be in a sweet spot going into the holidays today.

Considering that many people are seeing their credit card credit lines dropped, halved and squeezed the eBillme model now makes a lot more sense, but regardless the chance to win $1,500 (in November or December) or the Grand Prize of $15,000 is looking a lot sweeter too!

If you place an entry into the contest, please consider referring our site (top10tech.com)  :)  We’d like to see you win, and know that we helped make Christmas a little easier on your finances.

For those of you looking into ways to use video to get your message across the web or kick of a great campaign, this is a terrific example of how to do it right, and also how to plant that seed early (feb 2008) and be at the right place at the right time never hurts either! 

Here’s that contest link one more time.

Just a reminder this program runs on your desktop and enables you to update WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more blogging platforms from one location, managing multiple blogs.

One of the weird new features is the picture tilt option, and for some reason the reflective image option (creates that web2.0 looking reflection below an image is now missing) but all in all the new version is pretty damn good. 

Image and video publishing enhancements

• Insert videos from Soapbox and YouTube
• Upload videos to Soapbox and YouTube
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles for images (such as reflection and rounded corners)
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Blog authoring enhancements

• Spell Checking in more languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian-Cyrillic, Serbian-Latin, Spanish, and Swedish
• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

Experience improvements

New toolbar makes more commands – like Font formatting - readily available

Tabs for view switching

Improved category control with search and type-down filtering

New look and feel

Writer Zone: Releases

They have made a number of wholesale changes to the look and feel of the program, especially when you switch between views which are now labeled as lower tabs of ‘edit’, ‘Preview’, and ‘Source’.

No complaints here other than it is still a little tricky to find the latest version on their site which also gets plagued with comment spam and I’d really like to see that reflective image thing come back along with rounded corners!

This Revver activity chart kind of shows the days they went dark, but I think the drop off in mid October might actually have signaled some of the first problems(slow loading videos, pages not found etc)

Well, just when all was looking darkest, the site lit back up again and the python errors seemed to disappear. The site is still running slow as a dial up connection, but up is better than down. Who knows, maybe all those videos will not be dropped from Google’s index even.

Whether Revver will stay up, pay anyone or go back down again is still anyone’s guess.

Here’s my recommendations:

• If you have videos on Revver, make sure you have them backed up.
• Download them from Revver if you don’t, and upload them to a more reliable video server.
• Don’t delete your videos from Revver. That will just waist time and possibly make things more unstable. A little retribution might feel good temporarily, but its not going to do anyone, including yourself any good.
• Let us know if you actually get paid(and we’ll share too). Getting paid is always one of the best ways to gauge whether or not a business is going to stay alive or not. If they can’t pay you, odds are they can’t pay anyone including employees and hosts.

That’s all I’ve got for now, will share more as I find it.  Guess I picked the wrong month to try and run a viral cooking show under the concept of will it fry (like will it blend) but using a paella pan instead.  That’s the breaks. 

The comment text is populated by about 17 characters of what appears to be random text.  In fact the email address populated in the comment also appears to be randomly populated.

The IP address appears to be the only item that remains the same.  This then becomes the easiest thing to block via WordPress or at a CPanel level.

To block using WordPress, simply login to WordPress and go to Settings>Discussion and scroll to the bottom to the Comment Blacklist section. 

Some older versions of WordPress locate the Discussion tab under Options.

Once you are there, in addition to actual words that you want to blacklist, you can also individually on separate lines list IP addresses.

I’d recommend adding this IP range right away:

94.102.60.151
94.102.60.153
94.102.60.152
94.102.60.150

This new application like many others hopes to enable people to leverage Facebook to virally spread their content amongst the people they know on Facebook.  A good example of a company that gets it, AC continues to grow, and might just one day eclipse some old world media companies if they can keep riding this wave…

In response to Content Producers seeking more ways to promote their content and engage their friends, Associated Content launched the AC Portal application for Facebook this week.

This new application allows you to easily discover and share content with your Facebook friends, promote your content to your entire social network, invite others to join the AC community and stay on top of the latest Calls for Content and Performance Bonus updates.

To get started using the AC Portal, follow this link to add it to your Facebook account: http://apps.facebook.com/ac_portal
Once you’ve added the application, be sure to read our Getting Started Guide.