Cole W. Camplese

Mobile WP Blogging

I just downloaded the WordPress 2.0 iPhone app and am writing this post on it while I sit and watch the Penn State game. A couple of quick thoughts:

• The first thing I notice is that it seems like it is less about blogging and more about managing things. Comment modertion seems to be the big feature. They've added gravatar support to help identify people. They may have done this because blogging in long form on this might be tough.
• The other thing I am noticing is that they don't seem to want you to add pictures after you start writing. I can't for the life of me find a button to add a photo once I start a new post. That is less than ideal. As a matter of fact, I can't see where to do a photo post at all.

For quick posts it seems strong but the lack of photo integration seems odd. I must be missing something.

That was Easy

Last week WordPress 2.7.1 came out and my blog started telling me I needed to upgrade. I always put it off because I have bothering with it, but this time I decided to just do the auto upgrade option. I've never done it and was a little nervous, but after backing up my database I went ahead and just clicked the auto backup button. About 10 seconds later I saw the following ... that's the way things are supposed to be!

CommentPress in Action

About two months ago I was spending quite a bit of time talking with Brad Kozlek about how we might more fully explore CommentPress ... we had great conversations, but as the holiday approached it sort of slipped into the background. Much to my surprise I saw a great post by my friend Alan Levine that has gotten me excited once again ...

Leave it to CogDog to make amazing use of the CommentPress theme for WordPress -- and to do it in such an interesting and meaningful way. He worked with what looks like a couple of people to take WordPress MultiUser and integrate it with CommentPress to create a community based publishing engine ... at least that is what I'll call it. The paper is well worth a read, but the geek in me is fascinated by the implementation of the technology. With WPMU it is so easy to instantly create a new blog and by adding the CommentPress plugin it appears trivial to create a site that supports multiple documents that are easily organized and commented on. What is so interesting is that it automatically seperates each paragraph so comments are maintained within this small context. It appears to do an outstanding job of keeping everything in a very readable and structured model.

CommentPress is a WP theme dreamed up by the folks at the Future of the Book ... from their webstite:

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. This site is presented in "document" mode.

I can think of dozens of ways this could be used in education ... and now we have a killer example of it to show off. Anyone care to share some thoughts on this?

More on Moving MT to a New Location

Last night I wrote about exporting one blog out of the Blogs at Penn State platform and importing into a commercial (or self hosted) blog environment ... clearly it is really easy, but I didn't think of a couple of things. So today I did the same thing with my Spring 2007 Podcasting Update that I had done in the Blogs at Penn State about a year ago. You can see the whole thing here at this space now by using this link. This time I did three things while moving it:

1. Grabbed all the images it references from my PSU Personal space and uploaded them into my common directory here at this blog. I obviously preserved the names to make it easier. Another thing I do with all my blogs is organize all the media I reference in each post into a common location ... because of this I was able to take the export file and do an easy find and replace with the old path to the new path. Perfect! Now all my posts reference local media files.
2. Next thing I did was create a new category here at Learning & Innovation that I wanted all these posts to show up in -- I chose PSU Podcasting.
3. Again using TextWrangler I did a quick find and replace to set the Primary Category to PSU Podcasting. This brought all my posts in under a common category. I didn't do that on my iPhone blog import and it made me go through and update each by hand ... not too bad, because I only had 20 or so posts, but if it would have been a big blog it would have taken me some time.

I could easily create a script to do that here locally, or by working with someone smarter than myself we could come up with a simple little utility to do it all via the web. All told, it took me under 10 minutes to make it all happen. Seamless move!

Something Different

Growing up in Bloomsburg, PA we had this diner on Main Street that seemed to change its name every year or so -- Toddle House, The Bloom Diner, and (my favorite) Something Different. It was a lousy diner, not the kind you'd want to hang out in ... no that place was across the street, the Texas Lunch. It was the Texas from back in the day ... probably the 1930s or so. The Texas had the world famous egg burger, the hot dog special, and anything else that screamed of grease and goodness.

At any rate, that is a strange way to say that I am once again tweaking the look of this site. Just like the new-age diner with bad meals (you seeing the extended metaphor here?), I am once again trying to reinvent my lame content with a fresh look. I loved the old theme, but it was starting to perform poorly as WordPress continued to grow so today I spent an hour or so trolling the Internet for a good WP theme. I found what I found and it is what it is. I suspect most of you never see the actual look and feel of the blog and are stuck with just the same old content. At any rate, the blog has been changed so stop over and take a peek. Let me also say that I am not convinced I like it and may just blow the whole thing up once again -- they shoulda done that with the Something Different Diner a long time ago.

Update: Since I got the, "it looks like Vista" comment, I tried just swapping the banner image out. Still not sure.

Twitter Updater Plugin

Thanks to D'Arcy for sending me the link and for CogDog for pushing me over the edge on theTwitter plugin for WordPress. This is a handy little plugin that I can see making life much easier -- especially over at the ETS Blog and the associated ETS Talk Twitter account. Now in one motion I can post to the blog, update Twitter, and send everyone a link to the new post. Nice.

BTW, I just noticed this is post number 600 here. Not all those posts made it or are visible to the outside world, but kinda cool.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

I am trying out Wordpress.com as an alternative for hosting the Learning and Innovation blog. I am just flat out tired of dealing with my wordpress problems on my host and I may just find life easier with a hosted solution (did I mention it is free). Check out how it looks and works for me.
The thing I need to know is what are pros and cons of this move? Anyone have insight for me?

A WordPress/Host Plea for Help

I keep coming to my blog seeing the following error (I changed the username myself):

WordPress database error: [User 'username' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 50000)]

I know my host, StartLogic restricts the number of MySQL calls in an hour to 50,000 ... can I actually be hitting that limit or are there other causes? The other blogs and tools I have installed here at the camplesegroup.com domain continue to run even when this blog goes down. My host tells me I need to go to a dedicated server package, but I really don't get that much traffic -- during the last 8 months, according google analytics, my highest traffic month was November with around 5,000 unique visits ... that is when this problem started BTW. Can anyone help me with decoding this? If I do need to change plans/hosts does anyone have a recommendation? If it doesn't seem like I should need to, does anyone have any advice for me?

New Look

I spent the better part of today working on a couple of things ... the first was my garage. I can now not only get a car in there, but we can still make it to the fridge, Madeline's bike, my bike, the tools, the winter supply of fire wood, and everything else we need.

The other thing is a new look and feel. I started with the idea that I was going to switch to MovableType, but I couldn't get it to work on my host. After fighting with their tech support people via their live chat service I simply gave up -- there is a blog post about that interaction for the future. You see the blog has blown up with MySQL errors twice this week so I was hoping to try out something else. After wasting too much time on that project I switched gears trying to get my database and my WP up to date and stable. It pushed me to make a bunch of changes under the hood. I also decided it was time to make a move away from the K2 world.

I'd love to know what you all think of the new theme ... there are still a few issues to work out, but it is time to spend some time with the family. Please let me know what you think!

Local WordPress on Mac OSX with MAMP

After years of foolishly working on my live blog for all types of changes I decided to take a leap of faith and install WordPress 2.x on my G5 at home to use as a development environment. I will probably do the same thing on my work MacBook Pro and abandon my local copy of MovableType since I am a WP guy. When I did the MT thing on my MBP I found some directions and ended up in the Terminal doing all sorts of things ... made me uncomfortable.

I have to give a tip of the hat to my friend and colleague, Chris Millet for introducing me to MAMP ... MAMP is this nice little app that gets MySQL, Apache, PHP, and the associated admin apps you need running on your Mac in no time -- as a matter of fact at the click of a mouse. Just download the thing, drop it in your Applications folder, double click the MAMP app (or fire up the included widget for use under 10.4) and you are but a click away from having Apache and MySQL Server fully installed and running on your machine. From there, installing WP was a dream. Here are the basic steps I used to get it running:

1. Download MAMP


2. Install MAMP by dropping the whole folder into my Applications directory


3. Double click the widget in the MAMP directory (under 10.4.x) and it auto installed


4. Flipped the widget over and set the radio button to PHP 4 -- this is done by running the mouse over the bottom of the widget to expose the little i button. Clicked Done and it flipped back over.


5. Clicked "Start Servers" and the little lights glowed green.


6. I then tried to click the "Open Start Page" button on the widget, but nothing happened ... if this happens go to the next step.


7. Back in my Applications/MAMP directory, I double clicked the MAMP application and it opened.


8. In there, I clicked the "Open Start Page" button and it opened a web page for me.

At this point MAMP is running and you are ready to install WordPress. To get WordPress running you do the following:

1. Download WordPress


2. While WordPress is downloading, go back to the start page MAMP opened for you and click the link at the top for phpMyAdmin.


3. This is where you will set up a mySQL database to run WP on.


4. In the phpMyAdmin page, under the Create new database box, type in a database name ... for this you can call it anything you want ... I named mine local_wp ... again, it can be anything.





5. Take your WordPress files and place them inside the Applications/MAMP/htdocs directory.


6. Open the wp-config-sample.php file and update it with the following (given you named your database local_wp) ... the thing that threw me for the first 20 minutes or so was adding that :8889 to the DB_HOST section.
   
   
   
   


7. Rename the wp-config-sample.php to just wp-config.php and save it back in your Applications/MAMP/htdocs directory.

At this point you just need to point your browser to http://localhost:8888/wp-admin/install.php and finish out the process ... from here it is as easy as can be.  So this should get you going in a few minutes with your own development environment on your machine.  Talk about a killer personal content management system! At this point, you could install all sorts of other open source PHP based stuff in the MAMP directory to try out and tweak.  I hope this helps!