Tag Archives: wordpress

This Blog Is Now Connect’d

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Let me first promise that this is my last post with the annoy­ing ‘d in the title! ;-)

Two days ago I spent about 15 min­utes set­ting up Google Friend Con­nect on my blog — I just wish it was more than a bunch of wid­gets and prob­a­bly Google is already work­ing on that. The process was sim­ple and pleasant.

Yes­ter­day it took me about the same time to also enable Face­book Con­nect here using Adam Hupp’s plu­gin called WP-FBConnect, which is the offi­cial one for Word­Press. The two other plu­g­ins seemed either too inva­sive (Socia­ble!) or too early in devel­op­ment (Com­mu­nity Face­book Con­nect by Jessy Stay). There is an offi­cial Face­book Con­nect Plu­gin Direc­tory now and, which seems to be actively updated.

I had to make a few minor tweaks to WP-FBConnect — the first and last names of users were not get­ting pop­u­lated in the data­base and the CSS did not match my theme well, but in gen­eral it was also sim­ple and pleas­ant experience.

What I find sad is that Yahoo! has failed to max­i­mize the full poten­tial of their MyBlogLog ser­vice — they’ve got all build­ing blocks nec­es­sary to offer a com­bi­na­tion of both Face­book Con­nect and Google Friend Con­nect — iden­tity, wid­gets, lifestream­ing, friends, com­mu­ni­ties, fol­low­ing. Oh, well… again and again, Yahoo! is let­ting com­peti­tors eat its own pie.

Hello Blogosphere!

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I am proudly launch­ing Blog 3.0. Yes, this is the third start from scratch of my blog within 3 years and inter­est­ingly each time it was on a dif­fer­ent platform!

I launched Blog 1.0 in Jan­u­ary 2006. I chose Typo, but its first ver­sions were not quite sta­ble and often my blog was offline for hours and some­times even days. Often it took min­utes to load even though it was run­ning on a beefy ded­i­cated server. I’m still not sure if I have to “thank” lighttpd or Typo for the headaches, but it wasn’t a pleas­ant experience.

Then, after being offline for quite some time, I fell in love with Mephisto and I launched Blog 2.0 and it was a com­pletely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence! Mephisto was fast and sta­ble and my only prob­lem was that its devel­op­ment has been spo­radic and then it stalled. Even many have cloned it on GitHub already, the main line is still pro­gress­ing slowly and not ben­e­fit­ing from all that col­lab­o­ra­tive effort. Any­way, it worked OK for me.

Unfor­tu­nately, due to some prob­lems with Pay­Pal’s recur­ring billing, my host­ing com­pany vps­Farm can­celed my account and I lost my blog. Pathetic, I know, but I didn’t have a copy of my cus­tomized Mephisto and I lost every­thing! Argh!

There’s now a third plat­form built with Ruby on Rails — Chameleon, but its devel­op­ment also stalled after run­ning out of the ini­tial enthu­si­asm. Sim­i­larly to Mephisto, it’s using Liq­uid tem­plates. Typo is more active recently and has new leads, but I will it con­tinue at this pace? I don’t know…

I am a big and loyal fan of Ruby on Rails, but the blog­ging plat­forms built with it lack incen­tive to move for­ward and fast being over­shad­owed by Mov­able­Type and Word­Press. It makes the most sense those Ruby on Rails plat­forms to com­bine efforts into a sin­gle one, but I don’t kid myself that it will hap­pen soon if ever. So, I looked into Mov­able­Type and Word­Press for my Blog 3.0 and they are pretty much at par. Due to the fact that I know PHP and don’t know any Perl, I nat­u­rally chose Word­Press. I am also look­ing for­ward to Ver­sion 2.7 of the plat­form, which seems really great.