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Finally the time has come. Although I wanted to do this from a long time, only now did I found the time and the technical knowledge to do it:
I divided the blog.
I divided all the Italian posts from the English ones. I created a new blog at http://it.pietrosperoni.it, and my italian posts will, from now on, be posted over there. And only over there. Most of the people (3) who read me (5) either read Italian or English posts. And I am sure it must have been very confusing to scroll through a page and find some posts in English and some in Italian. Plus I always had the sensation that I could not write too much in one language, or possible readers of the other language will just assume the blog contains no information at all for them, and dismiss it. This in time made me slow down posting, as I could not always follow particular threads, that would have involved to post many times, in one language.
But now all this has come to an end.
Of course if you want to read entries from both blogs you should add the rss from the italian blog too. Some topic will remain confined to this blog (like tags, for example), others will remain there (like italian politics), while other will span through both medium (like diet, which already is present in both). The wiki in this case should act like a glue, creating a space where entries from both are aggregated. Plus, being a wiki, I (and whoever wants to come and play) will use it to keep notes, aggregate extra content, and generally make some pages stand out while others will only show the blogs entries, the bookmarks, and the context (i.e. the links from delicious popular page, and from technorati).
Generally it is not a smart idea to to come here every time to see if I have written something. I tend to write when I have something to say, so many days might pass before I say something, then for some days I might make one or more post a day. The solution is to add my rss feeds to your feed reader. Bloglines is a good one. I am sure there are better ones. Feel free to suggest them (as I am always looking for ways to improve).
Now let’s get a bit more technical: making this change also meant getting my hands dirty with MySql Continue reading The Italian blog is born: reasons and technicalities
I think it’s the time to present what have I been doing in the last days. A number of improvement have beed added to this web site. In short I have upgraded to wordpress 2.0. I also moved to the next version of wikka. Some of you might remember that I offered some money to whoever could write some code to get the tag plugin to generate an rss list. I didn’t, at the time, explained why. I will now.
WordPress 2.0 gives the possibility to start categories on the fly. Just adding them, by listing them. Essentially this makes the category in wordpress work like tags (or keywords, for academics). But categories in wordpress also have an rss feed connected to them. Albeit with some bugs, like linking to the whole blog and not to the particular category. So I passed most of the first of January adding to the entries the relative tags as categories. So now I have no need of an rss feed for the tag page, as the tag page has been substituted with the category pages.
You also will rememer that I installed Wikka. The wiki engine. Now wikka is not only open source but also easy source. It is so simple that even I could hack the code. That is very simple! So I changed the code and inserted the possibility to have default pages. In short if before if you were to look for the url http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage and there is no page in the wiki called “someunexistingpage” the result would be that the wiki would ask you to edit the page, and you would be redirected to http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage/edit.
Now he would create on the fly the page someunexistingpage with the default content. And the default content I chose was the 4 rss feeds:
- the feed from my blog from the category: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my technorati from the tag: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my delicious bookmarks from the tag…
- and the feed from the popular pages in delicious, always from that tag
So for each tag I now have a wiki page with the most relevant rss appearing there. But being a wiki page I also can add other rss feeds, write definitions, comments, todo lists. In short modify it as I see fit.
Still it is not perfect. As it writes the page the first time, from that moment the page is set. I can delete it, but I cannot, for example, change the default content for all the pages that only contain the default content. I tried to write a plugin to do that, but I failed when I confronted the fact that I needed to write a plugin {{defaultpage}} who should have activated other plugins:{{rrs}}, for example. Something that I ignored how to do.
Also having the same string to work for delicious (as tag), wordpress (as category name) and wikka (as pagename) puts some heavy constraints on what the string might contain. For example I am already running ashore for all the tags that contain a dot inside (aaargh, del.icio.us!) or an accented letter (aargh, dear italian).
If you want to see how the pages look like just see the idea page. But any link from the right column (provided they have no dots inside or accents) will work fine.
In those last days the blog has been up and down, on and off, all the time. It was my fault. I was trying to perfection something that was already ok. I was trying to use the mathml plugin. It is a pretty plugin, and provided that you only post math formulas, one formula per line, and nothing else; provided that everybody looks at them with your font unabled firefox last generation; provided that no one ever, under any circumstance (I’nt not kidding folks !) opens the blog with an I.E. … then it does pretty graphic which seem very very similar to the professional formula in professionist texts. Albeit generally less correct.
The fact is that this bloody plugin transform your html page into an xml page. So anything which is not ok, any little fart of any other plugin, any error you might have done 15 monts ago, any “com’on who bothers now”, “who will notice”, will come back and hunt you.
In my case I had to go through all the posts to clean them. Clean the <p> and the </p>; clean the <div> and the … yes you got it, the </div> clean the *gasp* <em> opened in one paragraph, and closed in another! All this just to make sure that I could read the 3 forumula (three) that I wrote in 15 months of blogging in a pretty format. Then today, as I was chatting with a friend bragging about my new found closeness with maths symbols, I discovered in horror that not only they were not rendered correctly on his machine (…of course, the ignorant did not have the pretty fonts), but no automatic message was telling him where to get the font, and IE was committing suicide upon sight of my page. That was too much, I inserted back the errors, undo my previous changes, and now I am going to disinstall mathml. I might make a pic of the formula and insert that instead, or make a small php popup page. But no Math Ml for this blog.
Sorry folks!
Thank you Math Ml,
it was nice until it lasted.
Pietro
I suddenly relised I don’t have the time to do all the things I was interested in (and keep what remains of my mental sanity). So out of need I decided to make the following offer.
The technorati tag plug in gives the possibility to have technorati tags, and for each tag a different page. What instead it does not offer is the possibility to have also an rss feed for each tag. So I offer 20 € for whoever makes the necessary changes to the plugin so that side by side to the tag page (here available at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/tag/… ) I can have an rss feed of the entries in my blog with each tag (possibly at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/rsstag/…).
The changes will have to be open source, so that they can then join the mainstream wp program. And be on that plugin. I know 20€ is not a lot, but I reason that for the right person this is a simple hack that might take half an hour. For me it would take ages (mainly because I need to understand how wp is working, and it’s not that trivial).
Oh, yes, I can pay via paypal. Or buy you something via Amazon, LJ, Flickr. Whatever.
And now to comment the above:
It’s interesting how the spreading of open source software also means the opening of a whole new market of people helping each other. I could never have made the above offer if I was using blogger, or lj.
Addendum: Since the new release of wordpress 2.0 includes the possibility to use categories as tags, the above offer is no longer valid. Sorry.
As I posted the previous entry, I went to technorati to check if it was being pulled. And what I discovered was that technorati was only pulling the first tag in the list.
I make quite an effort to add all the tags that I think might be relevant. This both to improve visibility, and to better categorise the content. I like to make a copy of the same tags in my p.s.blog delicious account. And then see the whole thing as a mindmap. But for the mindmap to really work it is necessary to that if two entries share some content they should also shar at least a tag. So I use many tags. And the mindmap comes out really nice.
Not only this, but I feel that each post belongs to multiple tags, and should be present in multiple pages. For example this entry belongs to both the tag ‘technorati’, and the tag ‘mindmap’, ‘delicious’ etc.
Investigating a bit further I discovered this post, where a similar problem was presented. In that case technorati was pulling the information from the list of categories in the rss feed. Now the problem is that, in wordpress (other tag!), the list of categories is defined before, while the tags are defined after. And although this might seem like a minor problem, it actually means that often we don’t add all the categories that we need. In a sense it should be possible to just ask that wordpress uses tags as categories.
And then post the tags as:
<category>firsttagname</category>
<category>secondtagname</category>
So the end result of this is:
my posts are not appearing in the technorati page where they should: tag, technorati…;
my posts are appeariung in the technorati page where the shouldn’t :General, English…;
And I haven’t got a clue how to fix it.
Pietro
UPDATE:
I did send a mail to teachnorati, and I got this answer:
Hi Pietro,
Your tags must occur within the boundaries of a post, a div of class of storycontent in your case. Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.
SECOND UPDATE:
After various tests, I realized that technorati does not parse the html, and I usderstood what the mail meant with Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.. Since the author of the plugin explained that for a couple of more month he is not going to be able to fix it, in the meantime I downloaded another plugin: Technotag. That gives me the possibility to add <tag>tagname</teg> And that’s makes a tag automagically. Let’s hope that this works!
THIRD UPDATE: it works. And as I keep on making small hacks to the plugins that I use, I slowly learn how they work
FOURTH UPDATE:correction, it only worked for the first tag. But I hacked a bit the code and now it works fine on all. I shall send an email to the author, to pass him the change.
Before it would make a tag on every <tag>tagname</teg>, but all the tags would all point to the same address: The one generated by the first tag. Corrected. The new code is available here.
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