Tag - blogging

You may have noticed the snazzy new tag cloud adorning the right-hand side of this page.

(I’m trying to be trendy and web 2-ish, and possibly get acquired by Google or Yahoo for mad money.)

I noticed the Zoomclouds link at Guy Kawasaki’s blog – he just got a new tag cloud as well. I thought I’d give it a shot.

The good
First off, it’s dead simple. Give Zoomclouds your RSS feed, configure a few settings (or not), and paste some code into your source. Done. It’d be hard to make it simpler.

It’s also nicely configurable – and so I was able to get the colors to match up to my site colors very easily. (And if you know a little HTML and Javascript, you can customize it a little beyond the defaults.)

The not-so-good
It’s not a huge deal, but I don’t like the big Zoomclouds logo on my site. I’ll live with it to get the tag cloud, but I think that since you go to Zoomclouds’ site when you click a cloud item, and that Zoomclouds is putting Google Adwords on the results that you see there, that’s enough branding for them.

More importantly, the posts that feed the tag cloud only go back a few weeks in time. I’d like Zoomclouds to spider my site and present a tag cloud that reflects all the things I’ve written – not just the stuff since I added the cloud.

The kind of ugly
This is a mixed blessing/curse: tag selection. Zoomclouds is easy, so you don’t have to manually tag all your content. Excellent – I’m too lazy to go and tag all my previous 700 or so posts, even though I’d do it for stuff going forward.

However, this means that Zoomclouds makes a somewhat-arbitrary determination, based on parsing through your RSS feed, on what is a tag or not. This works, sometimes. Maybe even most of the time.

But it does mean that I have a tag on my site labeled poor bird. Umm … it’s unlikely I’d ever create a tag like that if I were doing it myself.

Hopefully, however, Zoomclouds incorporates some social intelligence into what should be a tag or not, based on all the sites using its service, and will get better over time.

(Looks like they’re working on this issue already.)

Suggestions

1. Zoomclouds should understand categories, and automatically accept them as tags (at least for the major blogging platforms).
2. Zoomclouds should allow for some form of manual tagging, if only as an option for geeks.
3. A ping service would be wonderful, so that you could just add Zoomclouds to the list of pings your blogging software sends out automatically for each post. Knowing that you’ve added content recently, Zoomclouds could then refresh your tag cloud based on the update.
4. A force update feature would be nice – something that you could click and force Zoomcloud to refresh its cache of your content and the tag cloud that it has created for you. (I’ve mentioned this one in a comment on Zoomcloud’s site.)
5. And, as mentioned, it’d be great if Zoomclouds spidered my blog and made the cloud relevant for all my posts, not just the past few.

Overall
The results are good enough right now that I’ll stick with the service for a bit, and see how it goes. I like the look of the tag cloud, and I like that way of organizing and navigating information, and I’m hoping the service will improve over time in the areas where it might be a little wanting.

I’m looking for a way to manage several blogs at once, so I’ve been investigating Drupal just a little.

I wouldn’t need to manage the blogs within Drupal, although that could be done, but I would like to aggregate their posts on one page, which would then become my home online.

Since my web host has a control panel thingamabob that can automatically install about a million different content management systems, stores, scripts, you name it, at the touch of a button, checking out Drupal was easy.

I only have first impressions to report, but I have to say my first impressions are not very impressive.

Drupal is light-years behind WordPress in terms of site administration and management.

Maybe the problem is that WordPress is just too easy, but I find Drupal disorganized, piecemeal, and confusing. By contrast, WordPress is clear, direct, and vastly more elegant:

My perception is that Drupal is powerful, and can do many things, but the reality I encountered is that even changing elements on a theme is 2 or 3 times harder than in WordPress. Understanding which modules are activated, and when their permissions are correct, and ensuring they show in a particular place on a particular page is a challenge.

I’m glad for the brief glimpse, but unless I see or hear something fairly different fairly quickly, Drupal will not be in my future web plans.

I use WordPress as my blogging software, and I recently upgraded to the new version 2.0.

The new version is excellent in most ways, wonderful for integrated comment spam blocking, it is driving me nuts with its silly image uploading problems.

I format my own images in Photoshop and (in the old version of WordPress) customized the image upload page’s handling so that it returned a bunch of HTML that incorporated image placement and bordering code.

Well, WP 2.0 has integrated image uploading right into the blog posting page. Good idea – it looks like this, right under the post entry form:

The problem comes in after you upload a file. You get a little preview, and when you click on it, a list of options:

All well and good – until you actually start to use them.

Using thumbnail, if you leave it, would suggest that WP would stick a thumbnail image into your post, which would be clickable if someone wanted to see it full-size. Nice feature – if you want it.

When you deselect it, like this:

You would think that the result would be a full-size image dumped into your page when you, immediately thereafter, click “Send to editor.” But you’d be wrong.

Instead, WordPress just sends a thumbnail version to your post … so if you save and publish, you’ll get this wonderful result:

Not cool. Not cool at all. While you’ve just told your software to use the original, it’s disobeying you and, instead, displaying a thumbnail version.

In fact, it’s doing precisely opposite what you asked it to do.

Of course, it’s not actually creating a thumbnail. That would require actually editing the image and rely on a variety of other software being installed on your server. Instead, WordPress is simply setting the height and width properties in the HTML to some fraction of the actual image height and width.

So it’s

1) disobeying your direct instructions
2) not saving you any bandwidth at all
3) making your blog look awful, or
4) forcing you to do more work to get it right

WordPress development people, Matt, whoever: please fix this!

. . .
. . .

Of course, a variety of people around the web have already found this out … and there’s a discussion about it on the WordPress support forums, as well as here, and Techcrunch has a few notes on it as well. Also see this post of a set of general gotchas with WordPress 2.0.

[ update Jan. 13 ]

I’ve hacked WordPress’s file inline-uploading.php to do what I want. I want it to upload files, to stick them in the editor, and not do any resizing.

(Oh, and btw, I want it to automatically center them, and apply my pic CSS styling to them, which gives them a little grey border. But that’s incidental.)

To accomplish what I did, grab a copy of inline-uploading.php out of the wp-admin directory. After making a backup copy, delete lines 236-247, and replace with this code:

<br /> $script .= “aa[{$ID}] = ”;<br /> ab[{$ID}] = ‘<a class=\"imagelink\" href=\"{$image['guid']}\" onclick=\"doPopup({$ID});return false;\" title=\"{$title}\">‘;<br /> imga[{$ID}] = ‘<img id=\"image{$ID}\" src=\"$src\" alt=\"{$title}\" $height_width />‘;<br /> imgb[{$ID}] = ‘<img id=\"image{$ID}\" src=\"{$image['guid']}\" alt=\"{$title}\" $height_width />‘;<br /> “;<br /> $html .= “</p> <div id='target{$ID}' class='attwrap left'> <div id='div{$ID}' class='imagewrap' onclick=\"doPopup({$ID});\"> <div align=\"center\"><img id=\"image{$ID}\" src=\"$src\" alt=\"{$title}\" class =\"pic\" $height_width /></div> </div> <p>{$noscript} </p></div> <p>“;<br />

(Then, if you wish, just strip out my custom additions. They are the “div align = center”, the closing div tag, and the “class = pic” chunk.)

C’ing My A
Use at your own risk, your mileage may vary, make a backup first, and note: this will kill the thumbnail generation …. which is exactly what I want it to do, but I’m not sure if that’s your desire as well!